Kind of weird that these wastes of money are never in the news, not even during Brexit.
Most people won't have heard about most the successful companies that resulted from the combination of military spending and research grants, much less the many failures on the way.
If we knew how to pick the successes ahead of time, there's be no point in gov funding, or in venture capital firms, because they'd be able to go into any mainstream bank and loan finance their entire business with regular business loans.
Government research funding almost inherently should have a high failure rate, because they offer the most value where they enable research that is so high risk they can't get funding elsewhere both because of the occasional big win, but also because of the side effects of creating eco systems.
That's not to say that doesn't also lead to lots of stupid projects getting funded, and lots of mismanaged funding programs that deserve scrutiny. But it's also always easier to recognize the stupidity after the fact...
It's not so clear cut ;) "Research at CERN in Switzerland by the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989–90 resulted in the World Wide Web, linking hypertext documents into an information system, accessible from any node on the network."
Once there now is one hub, you should expect trying to create a competitor to be vastly more expensive because you have to counter the draw of SV.
E.g. every effort to bolster the tech scene in London has sort-of worked, except a portion of the most promising companies then leave for Silicon Valley. This is repeated all over Europe.
Similarly, within the UK, I worked for a VC for whom part of the goal was to bolster investment in the regions, and we faced the constant struggle that because founders (rightly) assumed that most UK VC's preferred companies in London, a lot of the most promising companies moved to London before we got to them.
For that matter, I live in London because of this situation. I moved to London with my startup at the time because after getting funding in Oslo our VCs advised us there just wasn't enough capital for tech startups in Norway at the time, and so we moved to London for better funding opportunities.
Pouring funding in lifts all of these ecosystems, but it also hastens the departure of the ones who get the most benefit unless you do so well that you remove that incentive. Or attach strings to your funding. Fixing that will require you to provide so much capital that more startups start seeing staying in Europe as making their funding situation easier.
That means plugging the vast gap in later-stage VC funding between Silicon Valley and Europe, not just some R&D grants here and there.
That's not to say I think the European R&D funding efforts have been good enough, but it'll take many times as much funding, and a lot of extra effort, before you should even begin to hope to get the same outcome.
And yes, often you can easily tell if an idea is a non-starter. It isn't the case that "you never know".