Cultural Anthropology is a good field, but it is a qualitative field, and not a quantitative one.
While there are quantitative Cultural Anthropologists (UChicago, UC Berkeley, Columbia, MIT, Harvard, and Stanford have good researchers working on this), Roberto González is not one of those.
Furthermore, the truly interesting things to dig into w/ regards to the MIC are more Economics, Finance, or Commercial Law driven - namely digging into how fair or unfair RFCs are, analyzing changes in procurement regulations, actually testing whether anti-competitive measures in the Defense industry have a positive or negative impact on efficacy, differentiating between different types of budget spend (Cloud/Infra Security research vs foundational ML research vs simulations reasearch), etc.
These are questions that need a quantitative background in Business, Law, Politics, and Technology.
Also, not naming Nvidia is a MASSIVE red flag, as they are balls deep in the Defense R&D space (that was the only reason they were able to survive the dot com bust).
Finally, how STEM Innovation works in the Military/Defense space is entirely different from how it works in much less regulated spaces, due to the limited set of buyers and the massive impact that asymmetry can potentially have.
> you can disagree without immediately dismissing someone
I agree! There are a lot things to disagree about w/ regards to the MIC, but the questions and problems González surfaces aren't new nor unique to the Tech industry. This feels less like a research paper and more like a surface level op-ed.
He brings up very good points about the impact CNAS (and more specifically Eric Schmidt) and other peer think tanks (imo CSIS is not that hawkish) is having on the vision of innovation R&D on the Hill, but that is an entirely separate investigation (and something that absolutely needs to be done), and the larger paper seems to ignore that.