You're really stretching here. First, with regard to your example of spending billions to harden steel on tanks, such a discovery might not be a worthy breakth

You're really stretching here. First, with regard to your example of spending billions to harden steel on tanks, such a discovery might not be a worthy breakthrough to you, but that doesn't make it any less innovative. Many of our incremental advances in military technology have led to wider benefits in society at large. One could argue that the project that ARPA created that eventually gave birth to the Internet was one such project. Second, while the aggregate impact of R&D efforts is difficult to measure, we do have some tools at our disposal, many of which agree with the OP's statement that "no one beats the US when it comes to research and development." There is no perfect way to measure global trends involving hundreds of countries and billions of people and trillions of dollars and expect to have a nice, neat little data-point. Think about education, or economic development. Our measures for those are incredibly imperfect and ugly and hackish, but they're what we've got. R&D spending is a well-recognized measure of the level of importance a country places on innovation and technological advancement. If you have a better one, we're all ears. If not, it seems unreasonable to attack someone you don't know for being chauvinist because they used the standard measure.