There was certainly a lot of neat military-related innovation, and a lot of it had great civilian applicability (e.g. the Internet), but I'm minded of the Mr. E

There was certainly a lot of neat military-related innovation, and a lot of it had great civilian applicability (e.g. the Internet), but I'm minded of the Mr. Eisenhower's speech: 'Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.' Every one of those dollars, had they been spent on the market's priorities rather than on the State's, would have done more to satisfy basic human needs. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't have fought and won the Cold War — indeed, the fall of Communism was perhaps the only good thing to come out of the benighted, bloody, blinkered, blunderous 20th century — simply that it was costly. War is necessary for survival, but war is also a mis-investment, but the best investment in the world doesn't matter if one fails to survive. It's a tragic paradox.