True, but I've always seen that as a side-effect of the sheer amount of money that flows through the military, which ends up sponsoring so many of these project

True, but I've always seen that as a side-effect of the sheer amount of money that flows through the military, which ends up sponsoring so many of these projects in the first place. If the major take-away from this is "money can improve our lives", then why are we spending so much of it on military programs in the first place? A fraction of the money dedicated to human lethality is capable of producing ARPANET or GPS - what can the rest of it do?