...the Obama administration announced, in early 2014, that the NSA must disclose flaws in common software so they can be patched (unless there is "a clear national security or law enforcement" use)...
Obviously any valuable zero-day flaw has clear national security use to a national security agency that's tasked with breaking into "enemy" systems.
But it's good to make the public more aware that this, indeed, is happening, it's not just something out of a Dan Brown paperback.
Of course they do. Of course there is military research. Of course there is spying research. It's just the way it works.
"Enemy" is a weird word ("adversary" is probably better), but however you slice it: NSA's mission includes real ones.
Stated as vaguely as you have, that's a hard argument to rebut. I tend to agree: the world would be a safer place if everything was publicly disclosed immediately. But even NSA's opponents tend not to support that as a policy objective.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/08/nsa-tapped-g...