You're overlooking the counterfactual here. The fact that ARPANET was a Department of Defense project doesn't mean that defense spending itself caused it to com

You're overlooking the counterfactual here. The fact that ARPANET was a Department of Defense project doesn't mean that defense spending itself caused it to come to fruition, and similarly it doesn't mean that without war (and defense spending), something like the ARPANET would never have been invented. Separately, it seems far more significant that the early ARPANET was composed of networked computers based at universities.