While I cannot argue on any point of your post, I distinctly remember that sometime ago on HN there was a post how essentially Stanford and MIT "live" on military grants. The story was about Stanfrod being US-Army stronghold, while the Navy "sponsors" MIT (Just searched: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1416348.)

I have no data, but I think that those DARPA grants are at least substantial, some concrete figures would be nice though.