America’s entire research and academic industry is rooted in military.
On the one hand you are right, there are military money and people involved in essentially every high-tech firm and university project in the USA.
On the other hand, a lot of the time this is done as an easy way of subsidizing a potentially useful civil technology without going into the weeds of Congress and public discussions about how to allocate grants and so on. The military budget acts partly as a discretionary fund that the US government can use to fund (civil) R&D as it sees fit without as much red tape.
Noam Chomsky wrote about this from his experience at MIT. Especially in the 70s and 80s, MIT was getting lots of grant money from defense spending, and every professor could access it by simply putting some fictitious "possible military applications" on their research into shortest-path algorithms or what have you.
Of course, this plays it both ways, because providing the money, even as a thinly veiled subsidy, also allows you to come back later and assert some control if it does turn out it could be beneficial for "defense" purposes.
Most of the money goes to stuff you wouldn't even think of as "military equipment." Stuff like medical devices, security, communications, networking, search-and-rescue, and so on. Morally neutral-to-good things that the military needs, but so does everyone else.
As a business, the difference between the DoD and the rest of the market is that the DoD is a single institution with the budget and willingness to bankroll your R&D. Sometimes it's the only feasible way to fund development of a genuine, morally good product.
How do you mean?
> In 1985, the wreck was finally located by a joint French–American expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel of IFREMER and Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, originally on a mission to find two nuclear Cold War submarines.
the secret history of silicon valley, by steve blank. I think there is both an article and a video.
i found it interesting too.
I had an uncle, an electrical engineer, who went there for higher studies, to stanford, got his PhD (typical common route for many talented Indians, at least up to MS, doctorate is less common), was mentioned in who's who in electrical engineering, worked there, married an American woman, and became a US citizen, and a hardware entrepreneur, in Sunnyvale, California, but I didn't hear about this from him, i just read it on the net.
cheers.