But, in the US, the more likely it is that your research is not research the greater the chances of being funded as research.  
Except if your field, e.g., nuclear physics, opens the way for the US military to kill large numbers of people.

To be fair to the military ( shock, horror :-)) - some senior militay staff are  more reluctant to go to war than politicians who've managed to avoid it - like Bush. They also sometimes fund a surprising range of research - even Chomsky -). The Pentagon funded a study of the likely consequences of climate change and released it to the media - though they did pack-peddle when, predictably, given the source, it got a lot of publicity :

Indeed, widespread public alarm, particularly in Europe, was the predictable response to the Pentagon's October 2003 report, An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and its Implications for United States National Security, once it became available early this year.1 In an attempt to quiet these fears Defense Department officials and the authors of the report quickly came forward to say that the entire exercise was speculative and "intentionally extreme"; that the whole thing had been misconstrued and overblown in certain press accounts.

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0504editors.htm