If you spent even a fraction of the defense budget of the world on education and civilian research, you can still have those things and more. Without having to snuff out a few million people and rebuild every city in Europe and half of Asia at the same time. You could still pay those scientists, you know!

ARPANET was military in origin, but "the Internet" happened at CERN, a civilian project.

The ROI on CERN then, is astronomical, as it only cost a few billion. Less than a month of a war in a desert that achieved...what?

And if ARPANET hadn't happened (because the US wasn't worried about having a chunk of comms destroyed in a nuclear war), the NPL in the UK was also working on packet switching networking in the 60s, and that was a civilian-industrial thing. So something roughly Internet-shaped would probably have happened anyway.

While on the subject of the NPL, they also developed the first atomic clock. So then GPS also has a non-military underpinning.