No, he doesn't miss anything.
Your history on the creation of the Internet is based on myth promoted by folks who don't want to admit that the Internet was a successful, well-planned government endeavor. The Internet was created by computer engineers and other scientists working largely on non-defense projects (ARPA has a long history of funding projects with pretty tangential defense relationships) who wanted to encourage communication for exactly the purposes it is now used for.
This was a government-created network created by progressive folks who had a pretty clear view of what the Internet would become 35 years ago.
>From my writing on that history:
http://www.nathannewman.org/diss/chap3.html#d
It was in 1968 as well that Bob Taylor, now in charge of the ARPA office developing the Internet, would publish with J.C.R. Licklider an article entitled "The Computer as a Communication Device" which outlined a vision of ordinary people using new tools to share information, arguing that "When minds interact, new ideas emerge." They would cite ARC as the prototype of their vision.[19] And it was in 1968 that Bob Taylor asked Engelbart to make ARC the Network Information Center (NIC) for the ARPAnet. Engelbart saw the ARPAnet as the perfect vehicle for extending his vision of distributed collaboration, so in 1969, SRI would become the second computer on the ARPAnet. As the NIC, Engelbart would help identify and organize electronic resources on the Internet for the easiest retrieval. Until 1992 (when the NIC functions were awarded to other companies), the function of the NIC at SRI would include administration in assigning IP network addresses and domain names for all servers, essentially creating the yellow pages for the Internet.[20] Surveying the initial implementation of the ARPAnet in a speech in 1970, Engelbart could already envision the evolution of the networked community where, "there will emerge a new 'marketplace,' representing fantastic wealth in commodities of knowledge, service , information, processing, storage, etc."