I don't think that is the reasoning. IMO this comment by gostsamo is spot on:
>We are behind in the game and we don't have anyone capable in this sphere. Nokia, Erikson, Huawey, and Samsung have all the market now and we need american presence there. We can't create a state company, so we will try to break the leaders either by sanctions or by diminishing the value of their IP through open standards until the moment when the standards are open enough to favorite our proprietary IP using them.
You need some cohesiveness and a guiding force/philosophy of where to go. Otherwise you just have a bunch of corps only incentivized to make money, with disjointed ideas etc. Most are only incentivized for short time horizons up to 10-20 years max. Govs can plan a 50-100 year vision for a nation (like China is doing).
>Although ENIAC was designed and primarily used to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory (which later became a part of the Army Research Laboratory),[6][7] its first program was a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon.[8][9]
What was the first attempt at a large scale computer network?
>In 1959, Anatolii Ivanovich Kitov proposed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union a detailed plan for the re-organisation of the control of the Soviet armed forces and of the Soviet economy on the basis of a network of computing centres, the OGAS.[6]
States have always had a strong strategic interest in ensuring they have access and control of critical technology of the time for purposes of power projection.
It's less about "the economy" than ensuring influence over strategically critical tech.
