To grow the science pie you need to shrink the military pie. To shrink the military pie you need to make profiting off of science much more lucrative than profiting off of slaughter.
I get where you're coming from, but honestly, I'm not sure there's even that much logic to it.
The US federal government seems to have a largely arbitrary budget. No real experience or rational principle restrains it. We have never seen a clear case of negative consequences related to spending too much, so no one is quite sure how much might be too much. Sometimes a politician sees political advantage in grandstanding about fiscal responsibility, but seconds later, that same politician will be found funneling some arbitrary number of billions of $$$ in pork to their district.
I suspect the truth is that politicians mostly just don't care that much about science because they aren't smart enough to understand its value, or decent enough to care.
We could and should 10x the science budget, and it would have vastly more impact than almost everything else the government spends money on. But we don't because politicians see it as some amusement to fritter a limited amount of money on. Occasionally Republicans will publish a list of ridiculous scientific projects and no one wants to be caught in the crosshairs of that -- even though tens of billions are probably being simultaneously spent on murdering people in a country you've never heard of, or flushing thousands of tons of soybeans down a toilet.
Defense-related science gets an exception to this, which is why a big war is often also a big leap forward for science.
No, politicians are very (street) smart. Science produces results in the long-term, but elections are every x years and a career is maybe y years, all of which are shorter than the time in which science will show definitive results. So politicians will just look out for themselves as much as they can. The reason militaries get funded is because it plays on the basest fear in people and the money makes it back into politicians' pockets fast without having to show any more results than a pile of rubble.
You're right however, that nowadays it's structural that scientists request funding through defense, like of course it needs that cover.
Building housing and infrastructure can be a jobs program. Science itself (e.g. Apollo program, even though that's dual use) can be a massive jobs program. Being the security apparatus of the world as a pure play though is a choice, and a rather unique one.
> I suspect the truth is that politicians mostly just don't care that much about science because they aren't smart enough to understand its value, or decent enough to care.
Most politicians understand that humanity is never going to leave earth and so all of this stuff is basically pointless to the actual business of governing. So we will miss out on the next MRI or microwave because we missed some new technology... so what? How does that make their lives, personally, worse in any practical way?
Humanity is going to melt down in the pretty near future here... if the Russia stuff doesn't escalate, and the US doesn't slide into fascism, there will be yet another wave of conflicts tomorrow due to extremity from climate change or something else. Water is going to become extremely scarce, habitable lands are going to become uninhabitable and undesirable tundra is going to become extremely desirable, and countries will fight for ownership of the reshuffled deck.
Humanity has passed the peak of this enlightenment cycle and is heading for a new dark age, maybe the Forever Dark Age given the depletion of most of the accessible reserves of energy and critical materials. The best-case scenario is that we wind down to some steady-state existence with some level of mechanization/etc, but the exponential growth thing mathematically cannot continue indefinitely. The Earth does have physical limits and just because Malthus was wrong about it in 1700 doesn't mean you can grow an exponential rate in a finite system forever.
Who cares about space? We're not going there. And their job is making themselves comfy and keeping things going mostly straight in the meantime. Science really doesn't matter in that context as long as someone else isn't drastically ahead of you such that it produces a military advantage, they don't care about the absolute advancement, only the relative to everyone else.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, I'm saying this is how it is.
> the exponential growth thing mathematically cannot continue indefinitely.
It's not continuing indefinitely. Since the 1960s, women have been drastically curtailing their reproduction when given education and access to contraceptives. Fertility is above replacement only in Sub-Saharan Africa and a couple other places. Global fertility is projected to drop below replacement in this decade, leading to a population peak and decline a few decades later.
People are constantly predicting doomsday because they think humanity deserves it. Maybe we do, but by my reckoning, there is no guarantee of our imminent demise just yet.
it's extremely humorous how "trend-chasing" the small arms market was at that time. First cartridges... then brass cartridges... then centerfire... then brass... then repeating weapons... then high-velocity cartridges... then spitzer point bullets... it's almost a Pentagon Wars style story chasing the latest technological developments and often trying to modify your existing inventory to fit the latest need.
The Krag didn't have spitzer-point bullets so it had to go, despite poor tactics really being more at play than the rifles themselves. And the Krag was banned from the service-rifle category of the influential National Match shooting competition after some humiliating upsets showed this.
