[RecycledEle]

> If Mil technology is too cheap then US advantage is much lower.

Very true. I played with submitting grants for DARPA funding in the late 1990's. C4I and Network-Centric Warfare were big things. I predicted (almost) everything I've seen being used in Ukraine. I stopped when I realized they only wanted things that gave them a competitive advantage with a moat. (That's they way we phrase it in 2024, not what I would have said at the time.) They wanted things that were extremely expensive to make that would be impossible of extremely difficult for our adversaries to counter or replicate. My designs for cheap weapons anyone could build with parts from eBay and hobby stores were not anything they wanted anyone building.

[Quarrel]

I had DARPA funding for my Phd in the 90s.

While I knew people getting funding for submarine detection and other similar military specific techs, I was funded for pure networking research. They fund a lot of areas, often very much in the pure science (particularly computer science) end of the spectrum.