>>With all due respect to the late mr Welles, this whole mantra of "war is good for science and art" is baloney. It's just the weapons' industry sales pitch.
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>What about "necessity is the mother of all inventions"? The military needed it, so it was invented. And some of those invented gadgets happens to be very applicatble to civilian use.
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>.... I guess.

Sure, I use the finer points of ballistics every day. And about half of the things around the house couldn't work without the precise mechanics which was invented to allow passage of bullets between the blades of an airplane's propeller. And I love the invention of tripwires, have them everywhere around the house, with occasional mine jumping out with all the fine shiny little balls bursting out.

And I'm actually glad that the psychology of armament race has influenced car sales so much - I love the theater of absurdity (did you read Ionesco?, he's great).

Now how about the military mind having split the scientists into disconnected little teams - disconnected not only from their colleagues abroad who could have helped, or who could have done the peer review, but disconnected from their civilian colleagues? How does this total opposite of cooperation help development of anything? That the private sector research does the same thing is no excuse.

The only big invention I can honestly say the military mind has brought us is the Internet - but then it's become the businesses' nightmare: there are no wires or pipes which they would own, where they could plug the meter and control the content. It's too anarchic and centerless. I figure they're still regretting it :).