What I mean is, how come the military of any country weaponize and test new kit or technologies first before civilian use?

An example of this was when the Internet came about and TCP, Apparently these technological inventions were being stewed for use by the U.S. military before they allowed it to be opened to the public.

Yeah I get it, military complex want loads of profit, but you’d think some five or 6 star general would go “Yeah nah we don’t need this shit, waste of tax money just stick with what works”

I might come off as being naive here but I genuinely wonder why all the new bleeding tech time it gets introduced and patented for concept, the army dudes wanna see if it can cause damage to the enemy first in any way.

  • jet@hackertalks.com
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    4 months ago

    I think you got the order wrong.

    It’s not the military getting dibs on every new thing. The military is spending huge amounts of money to make the next new thing, often in areas that are not profit focuses of businesses. You could make a good argument the internet wouldn’t exist at all except for the military trying to solve communication problems in a nuclear war context.

    DARPA/NASA huge investors in fundamental sciences and technologies that don’t have a immediate payoff.

    We are also touching on the evolutionary forces at play in long term sustainable systems. If the military is weak (i.e. behind the tech curve compared to neighbor militaries) that system tends to fall to its neighbors, so the steady state is one where militaries need to be at parity with each other (more or less). Kinda like, why do humans care so much about sex? Because the humans who didn’t care about sex didn’t reproduce, so we are left with the ones who do care making the next generation.