For more than 70 years, the US Department of Defense has had the notion that the United States must balance geographical and quantitative advantages of rival armies with technological superiority of its own troops.

The consequence of this idea was that the Pentagon reserved a substantial part of its budget for research and development - the dimensions are breathtaking from today's perspective: In 1960, every third dollar that was spent around the world on research and development flowed into in American defense projects, as reported by the US Congressional Research Service in a study published in the middle of last year.

Winand von Petersdorff-Campen

Economic correspondent in Washington.

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The Pentagon was one of Silicon Valley's most important midwives.

Engineer Frederick Terman, as the dean of Stanford University's engineering school after World War II, forged links with the armed forces.

He was driven by the ambition to make Stanford a leading university and the heart of a thriving industry.

In fact, the Pentagon provided half of the engineering school's research budget in the early postwar years.

The companies that had settled in the university industrial park at Terman's instigation were often founded by Terman students;

they turned research results into prototypes, often for the military.

The fruits are impressive: The economist Vernon Rutten, for example, recalled a long time ago that

that the first digital computer was developed in 1946 with research funds from the military.

The first computer program on it simulated the detonation of the hydrogen bomb.

IBM got into computer production because of the Korean War - after promising developments in a research project funded by the US Air Force.

Finally, according to Rutten, the Internet would be inconceivable without the funds of DARPA, the Pentagon's innovation agency.

DARPA stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

"In retrospect, it is clear that no organization, public or private, other than DARPA would have been able to provide the scientific, technical, and financial resources for what eventually became the Internet," Rutten said.

DARPA later financed the artificial intelligence project CALO, from which, among other things, the Siri language system arose.

Others invest too

Fund flows from the Pentagon regularly widened when foreign developments were perceived as a threat to United States technological hegemony.

When the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite into orbit in 1957, it sparked a race to conquer space fueled by many Pentagon dollars.

A similar thing happened when President Ronald Reagan launched "Star Wars" in response to Russian saber-rattling in the 1980s, and in turn DARPA launched the "Strategic Computing Initiative" to keep Japan in check, as historian Margaret O'Mara writes in wrote an article for the New York Times.