"but don't believe anybody else gained from that: not us Americans as a whole"
Engineering Departments get large portions of their revenues through Defense programs.
MIT's Lincoln Laboratory made 27% of their revenue (roughly a billion dollars) in 2016. That's one research center.
Do you have an engineering degree? Were your facilities nice? Might want to follow the money with that.
I think we probably could have figured out a way to give MIT $1 billion/year without going to war for $1.5 trillion. Like maybe not going to war and instead spending that money on research.
Lincoln Labs is an R&D facility dedicated to military technology. It doesn't really make sense to compare their funding composition to facilities without similar purpose.
There's nothing in your comment that logically follows that a war is required to give engineering grants. Solution: Give engineering departments money without a war. You would, in fact, have far more money to give if it wasn't spent on war.
History and the technology we all use today disagrees with you.
NASA (really NACA) wouldn’t exist today if the Soviets hadn’t launched Sputnik. Competition and fear spur quite a bit of innovation and public reason for funding research projects.
Convincing large amounts of people to give you money without reason doesn’t usually work. War is easy to sell, people can conceptualize the risk easily. I’d argue you’d see more funding and research for preventing climate change if it were as easy to conceptualize risk wise for the general public.
Engineering Departments get large portions of their revenues through Defense programs. MIT's Lincoln Laboratory made 27% of their revenue (roughly a billion dollars) in 2016. That's one research center.
Do you have an engineering degree? Were your facilities nice? Might want to follow the money with that.
http://web.mit.edu/facts/financial.html