Well could you point to the downside of this? From teflon to internet and countless other things you use every day that came out of DARPA and other def. research, what would have changed if it was funded via different model?
The problem is privileging technologies that have defence capabilities. There are likely countless ideas that could have similar success to DARPA projects if they had similar access to capital and state support.
However, unless it can show off some military capability its funding can't be justified using the current model, leaving a gigantic subsections of technologies that could have similar innovative impact underserved by this level of support.
Without defense, the others cannot exist. Without defense, you cannot have a space within which you can securely do other work. So it cannot be a matter of competition but prioritization.
Of course, we can criticize the massive amount of funding that goes to military contractors and the like (Eisenhower did). That's where the devil is: the military-industrial complex.
DARPA does lots of good things — I have in fact worked on a DARPA project and enjoyed it. It's well run.
But each of those things has to be contorted to have a military purpose, even if the main benefit we get in the end is not military-related.
We should be able to research those things just because they are good, without laundering their best purpose. And we should open the door to other things that seem just as promising, but are harder to so launder.
The fact I can't tell you the counterfactual is kind of the point — most of us have no idea about the world-changing effects of the development not persued might be, just as the average person on the 1970s did not envision today's internet. The world of possible futures is simply too open ended.
I think the complaint is not that the government funds research for defense, it's that it could be funding energy, medical, etc research.
I honestly don't know if I fully agree with his complaint, because I'm fairly sure the government does fund a lot of other research that isn't defense focused (see a lot of universities).
It funds many sorts of research but much less development. Research ideas do not develop themselves and so the story of modern academia is zillions of abandoned ideas.
One prominent one is that we use fear to control other countries instead of love.
We spend so much human talent on defense, and sure we got a bunch of great technologies, but who's to say that we wouldn't have got them through some other avenue, later? Or perhaps even better technologies. I only speculate about the former, but I am quite certain a lot of the violence in the world has been caused by American Neo-colonialism and the terrorism we imposed upon the world. I am a betting man, and I bet that if we didn't fuck the Russians over so hard in WW2, that we wouldn't have had the cold war.
How did the US fuck over Russia in WWII? And are you aware of the billions of foreign aid many countries get from the US which is tied to issues like human rights, freedom, and democracy?
The US let the Russians break themselves fighting the Eastern front while they invaded north Africa. The North African front was basically secure while Stalingrad was happening, and if the US applied more pressure to Germany in this period, as the Russian requested, the Germans probably would not have done so much population damage to Russia.
Bitterness of this fueled a lot of ideological tensions. I was also taught that a large motivation of dropping the Bomb was to scare the Russians.
Source: My Highschool education. Obviously, commentary on WWII is not objective, but I stand by my thesis, considering the actual action that the United States engages in in present times. Its in our history to be both ideologically driven and meta gamers.
It’s hard to imagine the scale of the U.S. air operations against Germany and say the U.S. let the Russians break themselves without doing anything to help. Or look at the disaster that was Market Garden and think the U.S. could have invaded earlier. The U.S. was under no ethical obligation to throw away lives uselessly in a German blender as a distraction.
That line of argument doesn't make any sense to me. The Americans were actually in FAVOR of a cross-channel invasion in 1942-43 (see operation sledgehammer and operation roundup), but were shouted down by the British. Which, to their credit, was fair: the Allies lacked the ability to launch a large amphibious assault in 1942 into France. They lacked a sufficient fleet of landing craft, along with the proper doctrine, the same degree of air superiority they would have in 1944.
"The North African front was basically secure while Stalingrad was happening"
That doesn't make any sense. Operation Torch (the Allied invasion of Morocco and Algeria) didn't even start until Nov 8th, and Montgomery's position in Libya was hardly "secure" before November. But the Soviets were already launching counter-offensives and encircling the German army by the end of November. If you're counting from the beginning of the main Stalingrad offensives, August 1942, yeah maybe you could call the North African theater "stable", if by stable you mean that the Allies just one a defensive victory and managed to stall out an offensive into Egypt. But it's not like they could cancel their planned invasion of Algeria and Morocco and re-plan for an invasion of France in a couple months.
Plus the US would be invading mainland Europe Sept 3rd of 1943, and I really don't think they could have performed a successful invasion anytime sooner.
