For those who believe governments only serve to stifle innovation, please take heed to this counter example(before the Silicon Valley PR machine recasts the research as a work of its own genius).
The military has long history of both doing their own research (logistics & management, and cryptography being good examples), running research institutes with civilian employees (as it seems to be in this case), and contracting out R&D to run-of-the-mill civilian institutions (half of the SV on a good day).
It's worth remembering that the military in typical country is set up with certain similarities to free market economy: it negotiates budget with the "customer" (government), it has several major branches that fiercely compete with each other (typically air force, army, navy; US also rolls with marines as a separate branch), and there are vertical & lateral transfers of employees at times. Lastly, there's always the competing militaris abroad ;-)
Heck, one of common view of the Cold War is that of NATO bankrupting the Soviet block via military arms race.
But is it ethical to use military-developed innovations?
To the bigger point:
> But is it ethical to use military-developed innovations?
That's complicated in the real world. Many good, moral things have been created or encouraged by immoral organizations, and vice versa. The US Government has sponsored the development of many different good, useful technologies over the years.
The reverse is true as well, though perhaps to a lesser extent.
Wars aside, the military is a place where practical problems are encountered daily, and the solutions battle-tested at scale. It's reasonably safety-minded and cost-aware (spicy anecdotes aside).
Moreover, it's helps a lot when the research isn't walled off by stringent IP regulations.
In this world your existence is "unethical", in regards to a question like that, unless you want to live on a mountain peak above the messiness of ordinary human moral calculation and compromise.
You're going to deprive yourself of using it just because of who found it? That makes it pretty easy to deprive you of tools, if someone else using them will stop you from doing so.
> Tor is another good example of innovation ran by the (US) Navy.
The US Government funded Tor development; Tor was certainly not 'run' by the Navy or any other government department.
So are other governmental organisations in lot's of cases. Is the military special here?
> The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was an early packet-switching network and the first network to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was initially founded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
"Where Wizards Stay Up Late" by Katie Hafner is an entertaining chronicle of its creation.
surely that breakthrough is the genius of Elon Musk and Silicon Valley free market entrepreneurship not military funded....
oh.[1]
Wasn’t it the government who gave us the internet and the computer too? Early self-driving cars too.
The trillions of dollars spent, could be argued, is better spent in the private sector on innovation.