The most conspiratorial part of my mind thinks the projectile coated the debris in some isotope they have tracking capabilities for to build a “safety” use case for Soyuz
The DOD probably has a replacement for the shuttle that does the same thing. I seem to remember a DARPA program over a decade ago
IIRC there's a scaling limit with modern military/spy satellites on two axes: radar cross section and thermal output both grow with volume and make the satellite easier to target in a real conflict (which is ostensibly what many of them are for). The big ones like the satellite NRO donated to NASA with the 2.4 m diameter mirrors are easy to disable and AFAIK there's not much point recovering them anyway. The ones used for telecom with recoverable military encryption keys tend to be much smaller. For example, the 2nd gen Iridium constellation satellites are 30x40x70 cm.