[tsimionescu]

The story is more complex than that.

On the one hand you are right, there are military money and people involved in essentially every high-tech firm and university project in the USA.

On the other hand, a lot of the time this is done as an easy way of subsidizing a potentially useful civil technology without going into the weeds of Congress and public discussions about how to allocate grants and so on. The military budget acts partly as a discretionary fund that the US government can use to fund (civil) R&D as it sees fit without as much red tape.

Noam Chomsky wrote about this from his experience at MIT. Especially in the 70s and 80s, MIT was getting lots of grant money from defense spending, and every professor could access it by simply putting some fictitious "possible military applications" on their research into shortest-path algorithms or what have you.

Of course, this plays it both ways, because providing the money, even as a thinly veiled subsidy, also allows you to come back later and assert some control if it does turn out it could be beneficial for "defense" purposes.