Thank you for asking. I am always glad when someone engages the community and asks how to participate better, and I'm doubly glad when someone asks how to improve a question. I believe that is a vital part of H:SE.
I can only offer my personal opinion.
First, make the title a question. That helps make it very clear what you are asking.
Second, I think the close reason is incorrect. I agree with you that what you are asking is relatively clear. I don't believe I voted on this; if I had, I would have suggested that it was trivial; as the comments indicate, the answer can be found with a Google search. The easiest way to improve the question is to do (and document) the preliminary research.
Part of the problem is that no matter how you intended your question, questions that ask "What was the influence of X on Y?" tend to fall into two groups:
- Homework questions - the teacher/instructor/professor has taught to this question and the student hasn't bothered to do the reading/research/attend the lectures. These are bad questions for H:SE because as stated they are really only relevant to that class.
- Beer and Pretzel questions - someone asked a random question and rather than do any research, they come to H:SE and ask for others to do the work. These also frequently fall into the "Gorilla vs. Shark" category of questions where there isn't an answer, there is no meaningful way to reach an answer, there is no agreement on what a good answer would be or how to recognize it, and even if we found an answer, nobody would really care. This kind of question is excellent for Symposia at the Pub, but very bad for Stack Exchange.
In the case of your question, I would first have rephrased it to "What influence did the cold war have on the formation of the internet?" Then I'd have included some preliminary research. First I've have defined /referenced the two terms.
Al Gore created the internet; On 3/9/1999, the internet sprung forth fully formed from his his forehead like Athena from Zeus' skull. The internet is defined as a set of tubes through which pictures of cats flow.
Charles Stross' Laundry file defines the cold war as the conflict between subterranean extraterrestrial entities and a possessed cat. (sorry for the spoiler). As such the cold war began prior to the beginning of recorded civilization and ended in 2012 at the end of the Laundry Files. The key features of the cold war are a fixation on exotic mathematics and computer programming.
(in case the pop culture references aren't obvious, those answers are wrong; no matter how amateur your research, you can do better than those two bullets.) I would have used Google and Wikipedia (and possibly Snopes) to check to see if there are any existing theories about the origin of the internet, and I would have referenced that research in the question so that people don't waste their time searching out the obvious.
Sometimes it is also useful to understand why you're asking; what difference does it make if the cold war influenced the internet? If the cold war didn't influence the internet are you looking for what did influence the internet, or are you actually looking for knock on effects of the cold war on the civilian technological base?