Not a surprise. The entire fields of system theory, control theory (previously known as cybernetics), information theory and computing were originally developed

Not a surprise. The entire fields of system theory, control theory (previously known as cybernetics), information theory and computing were originally developed with heavily influence from wartime problems, especially fire-control problems. Early fire control computers in WW2 were their earliest large-scale computers in practical use. Early torpedoes had control loop stability problems that can make them oscillate up and down between the programmed depth, which needed insights on control theory to solve. Same for information theory, cryptography was the driving force, see Bletchley Park. Also, one closely related result by Shannon was an analysis of cryptography and ciphers, see Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems by Claude Shannon [0], written in 1945 and remained classified until 1949. In this paper, Shannon proved the security properties of One-Time Pad. Also, the NSA made a digital computer in 1943 in Project SIGSALY. The computer itself was an engineering accomplishment, but even more, the system was the first implementation of digital audio in PCM, with its own audio encoding algorithm for compression. [0] http://netlab.cs.ucla.edu/wiki/files/shannon1949.pdf http://netlab.cs.ucla.edu/wiki/files/shannon1949.pdf