>You do know the military spend on research

The charitable reading of parent's comment is "reduce the spending on the parts of the military that aren't research (or research solely dedicated to killing people)".

I'm sure they were thinking more along the lines of bombing various countries (or $40MM birthday parades) rather than the next onion routing protocol coming out of the Naval Research Laboratory.

You can still disagree with that, of course, but responding to the steelman version of someone's argument is much better than a snarky "You do know XYZ, right?".

That’s fair. My intent was not snark but to maybe spark some curiosity about what that military spend goes towards. But I think the OP could have framed it a little better to indicate they understood that nuance. Just like the budget cuts for NASA leave a considerable amount of research in place, it’s about priorities. The problem in many of these discussions is a lack of nuance: eg, not understanding the scope of what the DoD does, for example. The DoD spends as much as 15X as NASA on medical research, but the OP doesn’t acknowledge any of that with a overly generalized recommendation to simply cut defense spending. The difference is I’m not as confident as you to claim I know what they were thinking without further information. That’s why I framed it as a question.