There are ancillary upsides to waging war and the defense spending that fuels it. It happens in technology – think the Internet and GPS, for the two most recent significant Pentagon-sparked advances – and medicine, too.
The Office of Naval Research has funded work into vascularized composite transplantation that led to a vascularized composite allograft – a face transplant – for a 37-year old Virginia man at the University of Maryland a week ago. There are some 200 U.S. veterans who might benefit from such an operation.