Interesting you mention Israel, I feel like they might be the prime example for your theory. They are small and not wealthier than say France or Germany. Howeve

Interesting you mention Israel, I feel like they might be the prime example for your theory. They are small and not wealthier than say France or Germany. However they do have enormous IT talent and even more importantly their IT talent is motivated to help the military. In stark contrast to e.g. Germany where both bureaucratic rules (payment is fixed and terrible), the militaries reputation and the relative stability mean hardly any IT professional would be motivated to work on this. Also no first world military gets even close to the amount of real world use the IDF gets. No other nation can test their anti-missile systems straight from the backyard of its manufacturer using real enemy missiles. And we are already seeing this, Israel's Iron Dome is basically the only missile defense system we know actually and definitely works.