The NYT claims it will. Bob Wright counters:
If we cut defense spending it's not as if the dollars we would have spent disappear; they go various other places–some of them go into commercial R&D, some of them go into consumption (which people seem to like), and so on. And it's not as if the human resources those dollars would have supported just dry up and blow away; they get put to a different use.
Yglesias is on the same page:
[T]he question we need to ask about this is how elastic do we think the supply of innovators is. Maybe if spending on military robotics declines, reducing the total returns to robotics-related innovation, the we'll have many fewer people going into robotics and way less innovation. Maybe they'll teach yoga instead. But maybe if spending on military robotics declines then our most talented roboticists will focus more of their time and attention on civilian applications. The people who make the Roomba also make the PakBot for the military. To an extent, PakBot spending supports the existence of the firm and attracts capital to the industry, spurring the development of Roombas. But to an extent the PakBot simply diverts engineers away from thinking about how to make better Roombas and into thinking about how to make better PakBots.
The Dish 