Healthy Breeze, what I think you and others fail to understand is that a majority of the technological advancements that take place in this country are driven by military or space research and imagineering. These advancements then trickle down to mainstream applications. A perfect example is the internet and computer technology you are using to post your un-educated rants.

Finding non-nonsensical reasons for funding weapon research should be a thing of the past. Sadly it's still proliferating.

Problem is that COTS (commercial off the shelf) equipment is built "good enough" for business and home use. The thing that gives us the trickle down is the research that the DoD funds. And, no, no one else will do it because no one in business-land has the same cross section of needs and funding as the military.

Is there waste? Yes ... an incredible amount. Do we see some of that kind of thinking in business? Yes, the bigger the company, the more wasteful from certain points of view. I've seen automotive OEMs do things that would boggle the minds of lesser companies. It has to do with a ruthless abandon to stay on focus and the money=time trade off.

It also sometimes has to do with the fact that people are stupid and make mistakes. And when even the smallest mistakes cost lives (aerospace, military, nuclear, etc...) you go slow or you wind up dead.

Sensible - "A perfect example is the Internet and computer technology you are using to post your uneducated rants."

You can't credit the internet to the War department.

In 1967 I conceived of a form of computer controlled communications to be used to replace and improve internal communication aboard aircraft carriers.

I tried to get the military and the military contractors to proceed with the development of this system, to no avail. It was a miniature version of the way the internet works today.

Back then, I was unable to find anyone who had the ability to comprehend what I was trying to communicate. I suspect they just dismissed me as some sort on nut.

Seven or eight years later the university systems in the northeast came up with an identical system that I recognized immediately. The military had nothing to do with the early development of the internet.

If it was up to them we would still be communicating by semaphore.

You guys can certainly lament that we count it a positive thing to put money into defense and regard the "trickle down" as a benefit. Certainly if the world were a few steps closer to a "global society" many more would agree with you. I think in today's world, trickle-down can be a good thing -- just because we have an incompetent administration and defense corporations are bastions of mediocrity, it doesn't mean trickle-down as a principle is flawed.

But apparently no commenter so far is aware of the huge trickle-down effect from military -> commercial that happens in the gas turbine world. All the state-of-the art high-pressure compressors in the core of our top-of-the line commercial engines? Even if they do not *directly* descend from the military world, the technologies and experience the engine companies gain on the military side always make their way into the commercial side. The amount of "inbreeding" between commercial and military core gas turbine technologies is staggering.

An example is the cfm56 family of gas turbines on which, by virtue of their being more cfm56 engines than any other model of jet engine in existence, you have probably flown. Its high-pressure compressor is originally from the GE F101. The F101 powers the B-1 bomber.

With jet engines, it's very different than the electronics (hardware/software) side in which the mil-aerospace side often lags the commercial world by up to a decade or more (as mentioned by Thomas Lankester and others).

I say all of this as someone who has worked as an aerodynamics/aerothermal guy in the gas turbine field.