It would be nice if the research could be just for the general public good instead of having to have an explicit use for the military to get the money.
Imagine how much better it would’ve been if not for the military involvement. Imagine how many things developed purely to enhance the efficiency of destroying other humans could have been developed instead to enhance and improve lives instead. So many trillions wasted on imaginary borders and in service of imaginary friends over the last… ever.
How do you explain scientific advancement in less armed nations? Some of the most advanced research in the world happens in states with incredibly small forces.
Perhaps you've confused the economic advantage of a militaristic state with a connection between military science and progress.
For example, the space program basically died when the Cold War ended and it took a long time for it to restart and we still have yet to achieve things in the commercial space that the government could do in the 60s like reach our nearest satellite. Same goes for the cancellation of the SSC which could have achieved what the LHC discovered but 10 years earlier. Saying that other states are making discoveries is ignoring the fact that it takes them longer to achieve those goals than with the military or other emergency situation propelling them forward.
Certainly all of the rapid progress of the 20th century was because of military funding. The Cold War made it quite clear how when you drastically changed priorities how quickly various programs started getting canceled and our achievements started falling away (eg beating Soviets to space killed any desire of either party to continue, the Cold War ending killed the SSC, etc). You have WW2 to thank for nuclear technology, lasers, rapid advancements in aircraft, modern cryptography and directly leading to the space race. Even QM takes on military funding to take it from niche curiosity to applied research and real world impact. It’s all indelibly linked.
I’m not sure why you’re having such a reaction to a pretty mundane observation that military funding on technology gets further and faster than the civilians can. Heck go look at how far military is in the math behind cryptography consistently comparing discoveries civilians make and when we learn the military had that tech once it’s declassified decades later.
> I’m not sure why you’re having such a reaction to a pretty mundane observation that military funding on technology gets further and faster than the civilians can
Because it is just plain wrong. And it glorifies military spending and war. Just because the military complex has so much money that their spare change dwarfs many other sources of research funding doesn't mean it is money that couldn't have been used much more efficiently if it was spent wisely from the start.
And about the plain wrong part:
> You have WW2 to thank for nuclear technology,
The fundamental research was done before the war by the international scientific community, and in particular people from Germany and Italy. The hard part done during the Manhattan project was to develop the industrial processes to produce enough fissile material to make the bombs, but making the bombs from that was fairly trivial.
> lasers
Were first created in 1961.
> the space race.
It has been argued that the reason we stopped going to the moon and beyond is that the rush during the Cold War made it too expensive to continue. A more paced development would have been sustainable and would have gone much further.
> Even QM takes on military funding to take it from niche curiosity to applied research and real world impact.
Why do you think so?
In the end, imagine a world where even a fraction of all the money spent on military was spent on research directly instead.