It's interesting you say that, one of the primary architects of the modern metric (Kuznets) had a similar critique, in that no one should use national income metrics as a shorthand for all encompassing prosperity. Totally agree on that point.

I think calling military expenditure a black hole is a little bit reductive. Many of our technological advances were at least partially accomplished by military funding. We probably wouldn't even be having this online thread without the billions of $ the US military put into ARPANET.