The naval equivalent to DARPA is the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and their website used to be amazing, describing even the unclassified research they were doing. They really covered the gamut of the applied sciences.
Since the Patriot Act, the site is now pretty bare bones. But for a time, between them and DARPA, it came across as “old fashioned science done by scientists.” With none of the modern hooey done by most pseudo scientists.
Doesn't ONR long predate DARPA??? And in fact didn't the need for DARPA arise from the need for DARPA-like capabilities for the other services??
I seem to remember reading in Bucky Fuller's (a distant cousin) autobiography that he learned "big-project thinking" from his training as a Naval Officer. He also mentioned that the USN had learned the capacity for "big-think" from the British Navy, and that, at that time, the other services did not have a similar agency/thought process.