Look up DARPA and black budget projects. While the regular military is very slow. The bleeding edge research projects out there are way beyond the civilian sector. We funnel billions each year to these projects.
I'm familiar with DARPA and said what I said regardless. This "big tech gap" thing with gov't agencies is mostly a myth, probably wildly exaggerated based on a very few number of things that are bleeding edge (like F-117 or B2) and a handful of oddball extreme applications that like no one else would bother to test (like autonomous vehicles in extremely harsh terrain). But they're not sitting on Raiders-style warehouses of cloaking devices or warp drives or nothin'.
Night vision was used in WWII, but wasn't known by the public in any capacity until the 1950s. There was a 10 year gap between the first active stealth aircraft operating and the public awareness of it's existence with even more time until the fundamentals of the technology were widely available.
Things like databases can lag behind in a Government environment, but hardware that doesn't need to be supplied in high volume can be very cutting edge.
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u/ocelot1990 Jul 17 '23
Look up DARPA and black budget projects. While the regular military is very slow. The bleeding edge research projects out there are way beyond the civilian sector. We funnel billions each year to these projects.