While I agree that we over-fund out military, probably by an order of magnitude, I still want our military to be functional. And that requires good IT. The two goals should not be mutually exclusive.
IT departments in large organizations often see their users as adversaries rather than customers. The department's goal isn't to enable productivity but to prevent computing. This is probably WAI.
Sounds like somebody thinks they need root access to the production servers.
Try getting an unprivileged Python REPL to run on a “managed” computer. (Yet you can probably make arbitrary kernel32.dll calls from an Excel spreadsheet.)