I have often thought this myself. All this talk of fire and fury, modern warfare and military capabilities - it just seems like two tribes arguing over who has the pointier stick. We don't seem to invent much when it comes to understanding our physical realm and how to master the physical world. We have advancements in military technology but that's just refinement of, or increase in, deadliness.
Firstly, Ringo, I must disagree with you on the notion that we as a species don't invent much when it comes to understanding our physical world. Since the advent of science, the sheer volume of machines devoted solely to measuring things to obtain an understanding of our world has simply blossomed beyond belief. For example, the computer you are now using has literally millions of potential scientific uses when attached to appropriate devices. Every single laboratory in the world is filled with glassware, some of which can be traced back to the 1st Century AD when similar devices were used in Hermetic alchemy, such as the water powered vacuum pump that created the "Hermetic Seal", but it will also have hundreds, if not thousands of other items that have been made since. It is a pity I don't know where you live, I would love to take you on a tour of some university labs I have access to and show you many thousands of devices, some worth millions of dollars, that are used every day to help our species push back our ignorance of our physical reality.
Here is a link to Rowe Scientific:
https://www.rowe.com.au/rowe/Products.htm
Pretty much every product listed is or can be used for exactly what you say we haven't invented things to do, and this catalog is only a tiny fraction of what is out there.
On the other hand, academics seldom have the sort of budgets that corporations and the military have to spend on their research. It is hilarious how successful academics are in comparison to those better-funded projects, however. The old adage that "the USA spent a million dollars to develop a biro that would write in zero gravity, while the USSR used pencils", holds true it seems.
On the other hand, war does serve as a major driving force in human technical advancement. If you look at nature for a moment and consider the process of evolution, you can see that every living thing is involved in an evolutionary arms race to avoid being prey while potentially killing and consuming some other species. As humans are part of that ecological system, only consciously aware of the system, it would be wrong to suppose that we are not or should not be part of that pattern of life. Nature is writ red in tooth and claw; if you are an obligate vegetarian, you are prey; so sayeth the food chain; its the circle of life, hakuna matata etc.
What I find interesting is that so few cultures developed what we now call "secret weapons" or what the military scientists now call the "technical surprise". The fact is that in most societies there was a strict distinction between the military, the natural philosophers (scientists) and the artisans, such that the military didn't know they had the option, the scientists weren't interested in inventing secret weapons unless there was a threat to their research, and artisans had no market impetus to organize their creation until after the secret was common knowledge. In many ways it is not until the 20th century that we get a situation where everything lines up and we have science and technology heavily being invested into military applications. Even in the 19th Century the British admiralty were very resistant to the notion of steam powered ships for example.
To summarise: The military mind has not generally been very open to new ideas, that is a new thing.