My rule of thumb to explain things is "follow the money". Several industries have handsomly profited over this situation, but don't believe anybody else gained from that: not us Americans as a whole, certainly not those who had to deal with war in their own place.
Engineering Departments get large portions of their revenues through Defense programs. MIT's Lincoln Laboratory made 27% of their revenue (roughly a billion dollars) in 2016. That's one research center.
Do you have an engineering degree? Were your facilities nice? Might want to follow the money with that.
NASA (really NACA) wouldn’t exist today if the Soviets hadn’t launched Sputnik. Competition and fear spur quite a bit of innovation and public reason for funding research projects.
Convincing large amounts of people to give you money without reason doesn’t usually work. War is easy to sell, people can conceptualize the risk easily. I’d argue you’d see more funding and research for preventing climate change if it were as easy to conceptualize risk wise for the general public.
There was plenty of stupid political infighting, but nothing like the division caused by the invasion of Iraq.
Thank God there's none of that happening.
There is plenty of patriotism drummed up buts it’s all shallow. Support the troops has more to do with letting your government send them to die wherever they want and less about concern for them.