How are modern military technologies (I.e. Thermal imaging, laser designators, missile defense systems, etc) actually developed from scratch, and what did the early developments look like decades ago?

Question

I’m really fascinated by the progress which is very visible in military technologies. Even ‘simple’ technology, such as radar, baffle me when you think of just how the pioneer devices were made, I.e. how did they manage to make the devices used to process the information/data collected.

In: Technology

Answer 1

Money determines the pace of most research as PhD’s gotta pay bills like everyone else. The military has traditionally been able to throw oodles of money at anything they fancied, so when some discovery is made in a lab somewhere (to my knowledge, the military has _never_ done anything ‘from scratch;’ I’ve studied the history of technology to some degree – note that organizations like DARPA has funded _civilian_ research from ‘scratch’ from time to time) that might languish for years/decades due to lack of money will be ‘drowned’ in money and expertise.

There’s also the secondary, but no less relevant issue that the military can expedite testing to a degree typically not available to the civilian world, meaning they have access to resources that are simply not available to anyone else, plus the ability to… ‘waive’ certain legal/ethical issues to get the data that’s necessary to take a given concept and put it into a form that a private who doesn’t give a damn can operate it while under fire.