Most of the tech we have is in some way due to military spending
Because even radar was first developed for the civilian setting before the military boosted its development tremendously to solve their WW2 related needs.
I think a much better theory of technological development is that the military mainly funds engineering development of existing technology and doesn't stumble into truly new inventions faster than anyone else.
A corollary to this is that most tech is not related to military spending because most spending is not military spending.
Its was only in the late 1970s that wallstreet got their money into silicon valley. Given the channel I did not do any fact checking and just assume the presentation is historically correct.
Turing machine was from WWII to crack Enigma
NASA advances (including CPU chips) were from the Cold War
I love private development such as SpaceX, but we'd be nowhere w/o developments we gained from warfare. Turns out you can really put your mind to something if it's life or death.
Even more fundamentally: the military picked up Turing after the war started, so they had a good idea of what he could so because of work he'd done for others than them.
Granted, without the military we wouldn't have had the specific computers the military built, but in this context that is about as interesting as saying that without the military we wouldn't have had the innovation of the 150 mm high explosive shell.
Likewise, Tsiolkovsky did his theoretical work in a log cabin because he wanted to reason about space travel. Robert H. Goddard invented the liquid fuelled rocket in the interwar years working largely alone and in any case without any military support. Again the military shows up after stuff is very clearly moving.
Like, how is it surprising that an organisation that needs to pay for guns and the training of the people to use them would mostly invest in already existing prototypes?
https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2020/02/us-defense-rd-...