But the topic here is both about private companies, not some research fund and it's explicitly about creating products (not doing research) for military use.
Things like DARPA are even more complex, because in a way, intentionally or not it is used by the US to have essentially government funded research and infrastructure development while bypassing the whole "but that's communism!" discussion and also simply not having to publicly discuss it other than "let's raise military spending!".
So in other words what you say makes sense and I agree, but it might not necessarily apply here. Like your quote states this is about money for research coming from the US DoD, not about private capital investors wanting to make money by telling you to do R&D for the military.
> “All of modern high tech has the US Department of Defense to thank at its core, because this is where the money came from to be able to develop a lot of what is driving the technology that we’re using today,” said Leslie Berlin, historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University. https://archive.ph/PY5sT