I spent a dozen years as a US defense contractor across a broad spectrum of places (from R&D for the future to working with E3's today), and worked at internet scale and start-up B2B stuff in the other dozen years of my working career.
I think that the major difference about deployed military technologies- in contrast to both military R&D and the entire commercial side- is that they are, by and large, incredibly rock solid and reliable. If they aren't, they don't actually get used. It takes a lot of effort to get them that way. I remember once at a testing ground for our robot tanks of the far future, right next door was an outdoor test-track. And they were testing a kitchen trailer (a kitchen for ~200 men that can be towed by a Humvee). And they drove it around the track continuously for three weeks, stopping only long enough to change drivers/vehicles, and the four times a day they would halt and make 200 people meals, and then pack up and get back to driving. This was one of several reliability tests that the kitchen trailer had to get through before it was accepted for service.
Our R&D stuff couldn't handle that (it needed 3-4 engineers to carefully monitor it at all times), but the stuff that needed to be in the hands of some random 18 year old with a two week training course had to be rock solid to use, do regular maintenance on, and fix, even when they were only getting four hours of sleep a night. If it wasn't up to that level, then the troops ended up ignoring it, leaving it behind when they went out to do their job. And by and large, from what I could tell, most of the stuff they had was that reliable. There were some cool things that we were doing in the R&D space, but we were a long way from that level.
One thing I meant to add: this extensive testing- and the enormous amount of documentation/training materials necessary to take an 18 year old with average ASVAB scores and produce someone who can cook meals for 200 other soldiers on four hours of sleep a night- is both why military things cost so much, relative to commercial grade stuff, and why they don't get updated particularly often. Frequent software updates that change menus around play havoc with the detailed training powerpoints that the military relies on to produce those 18 year old tool operators.
Secret Squirrel projects (which I was near but never read into) can get away with lower reliability because they can count on the users to be much better trained and prepared, though again, from my brief encounters with these sorts, they will ignore anything they don't trust to be completely reliable. Reliability matters far more than cutting edge for like 99.9% of military gear.
The funny thing is when you have that spill over to civilians who then take it to 11.
Case in point: firearms. The standard-issue M4A1 is actually pretty good on that front already, but for civilian ARs, there's a whole cottage industry around making improved components that can handle even more abuse.
Knives, as well. Your average military field knife is something like 80 years behind the curve on materials, especially steel. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing - it's "good enough" (given what they're realistically used for) and cheap at that. But civilians can and do drop 10x money for knives that you can baton wood with and still have a shave after, even though there's no practical use for that kind of thing.
> drop 10x money for knives that you can baton wood with and still have a shave after, even though there's no practical use for that kind of thing.
Excuse you, I just came back from a 6 month backpacking trip where I had to split my own kindling along the way AND shave regularly and I didn't have weight for a knife/axe AND razor blade
/s
I think that the major difference about deployed military technologies- in contrast to both military R&D and the entire commercial side- is that they are, by and large, incredibly rock solid and reliable. If they aren't, they don't actually get used. It takes a lot of effort to get them that way. I remember once at a testing ground for our robot tanks of the far future, right next door was an outdoor test-track. And they were testing a kitchen trailer (a kitchen for ~200 men that can be towed by a Humvee). And they drove it around the track continuously for three weeks, stopping only long enough to change drivers/vehicles, and the four times a day they would halt and make 200 people meals, and then pack up and get back to driving. This was one of several reliability tests that the kitchen trailer had to get through before it was accepted for service.
Our R&D stuff couldn't handle that (it needed 3-4 engineers to carefully monitor it at all times), but the stuff that needed to be in the hands of some random 18 year old with a two week training course had to be rock solid to use, do regular maintenance on, and fix, even when they were only getting four hours of sleep a night. If it wasn't up to that level, then the troops ended up ignoring it, leaving it behind when they went out to do their job. And by and large, from what I could tell, most of the stuff they had was that reliable. There were some cool things that we were doing in the R&D space, but we were a long way from that level.