My point is, you can make claims about Bell labs being semi private, but that doesn't explain why all the innovation happened at Bell Labs and not at some fully government run lab or the military. The government couldn't even keep up with them when they knew what to do, forget about the government actually initiating that kind of research.

In the last 50 years almost nothing has come out of government research. All innovation has occurred in the private sector, or privately owned research universities. At best, the government has succeeded in some cases where government funded academics managed to get private funding from industry.

See David Hounshell's Science and Corporate Strategy https://www.worldcat.org/title/science-and-corporate-strateg...