Elisabeth Braw writes (WSJ),
For a model, look to Finland. For nearly six decades, the Finnish government has offered the National Defense Course, a quarterly boot camp for leaders from the armed forces, government, industry and civil society. “The beauty is that every sector of society is present,” explains retired Lt. Gen. Arto Räty, a former director of the National Defense Course. “Yes, the course is run by the armed forces, but it’s not a military course. It’s a national security course.”
Without the course, many of the participants would never cross paths. The course has allowed Finland to bridge the national-security gap between civil society and the armed forces that exists in most other developed countries.
Recall that in my annotation of the Cowen-Andreessen-Horowitz podcast. I wrote
In the case of government and tech, I think that the highest potential for mixing is in applications related to the military and to security.
It’s easier when the system is smaller. These solutions don’t scale on the network; the smaller programs are bounded at a few dozen people, simply to get people to mingle. The communities that need to be bridged are themselves many times larger in some countries, compared to others. We have a large number of courses which cross over domains, but they only engage small communities within national defense/homeland security. In Switzerland and Israel, mandatory service brings people together for life and bridge military to civil; yes, but the nations themselves are much smaller.
We could argue Utah (especially), Texas, Massachusetts, Minnesota or Canada have similar results. Throw South Korea, Japan, Singapore, etc. Even China with vast growth seems to mostly have a single culture. And doesn’t the vast change in Japan Inc. give a clue what happens with to much trust?
That said:
How the United States with the World War 2 experience the post war boom, in which:
1) The big difference of WW2 versus other US wars , it was a complete effort by the country. Just think how effective Hollywood propaganda was if you consider most movies at the time, especially Casablanca, was pro war propaganda. No other US war really felt like a unifying national experience. (Although the Confederacy was unifying for those states.)
2) And the post WW2 was the historical outlier in terms of centrist government and vast prosperity for all in which African-Americans were able to march for Civil Rights.
All that said about a single culture, leaves out the US experience overall has been better than the European experience precisely because of the ease of movement of people and goods. (Yes Finland and Germany had a better post-GR reality but balance that between Greece and Italy.)
Easier to do, of course, when your military has a relatively narrow purpose, and is not engaging in a worldwide set of operations to which more than a third of the population, and likely more than half of the cultural and cognitive elites, are hostile.
Using defense for technology gain is a very low payoff. I can hardly imagine a debate on the issue.