On that note: if you read a lot of technology books and/or research papers and you pay attention to the "acknowledgements" section, you'll likely observe that it's quite frequent to find something to this effect in there:

"This research funded in part by a grant from the Naval Research Laboratory, grant number XXX-YYY-ZZZZZZZZZZ".

This aside from similar notices mentioning DARPA, NSF, and other funding bodies.