You're missing something critical - in a post-scarcity cooperative society resources are distributed more evenly, which makes it much easier to create breakthroughs.

In a militarised competitive culture there's a huge "tax" on innovation, because maintaining a competitive posture is so incredibly draining and expensive that it starves all but a handful of possible projects of oxygen.

So instead of a tiny collection of stand-out military-sponsored projects you'd get a broad spectrum collection of equivalently powerful breakthroughs in many more areas.