Does working for the DoD increase your chances to become a successful innovator?

While searching for quotes related to design I accidentaly stumbled on this Larry Keeley quote that Bruce Nussbaum captured at the last ID IIT design conference Innovate Now :

"Leonardo Da Vinci made money as a defense contractor"

I obviously lack the context in which the statement was made, but I would not be surprised if someone told me that after this sentence Keeley said "... like Jay Doblin did right after graduating from Pratt Institute".

Surprised? Take a look at a fragment of an interview I did with Keeley for the ID student publication back in 2007:

A designer in camouflage

"Jay Doblin went to Pratt Institute and his degree was in camouflage, which will surprise some modern ID students. But, remember, it was the war years and people were trying to do things that were relevant. I can remember more than one vivid conversation with Jay were he was teaching me principles of camouflage. What do you do to disguise a tank, or a factory, or ammunitions plant, or ammunitions storage facilities so that anybody on a bombing strafe will go past it and tend to drop their bombs in a way that misses the target? It is not a question of making it completely disappear. It is a question of actually trying to get it to appear somewhere else."

Did anyone attend Keeley's talk? Was there any mention of Jay Doblin? Any parallelism drawn, either implicitly or explicitly, between both innovators?