Like what though? Historically what tech does did governments have that was unknown to commercial domains?

People are motivated by money, governments pay little and there’s no way to get rich working there so it doesn’t make that much sense.

Around WWII Computers, Radar, Nuclear power, crypto, jet aircraft, rockets.

Around 1960 space flight, supersonic flight.

More recently hypersonic flight, and we don’t really know becase people back in WWII had no idea.

True but now all that stuff is pretty much produced in the private sector by government contracts with these big companies. DARPA doesn’t have better scientists than MIT and there are a lot of extremely intelligent scientists who have moral issues about working for the military.