>There are lots of research labs, and researchers aren't about buying software from contractors.
In these DoD research environments (I've worked in them before), researchers typically aren't about building software, either. It's expensive, even if you hire the teams. Not always, but unless your research is technology driven, it tends to be about cutting corners on software and delivering research quality MVPs (semi-working prototypes) while all focus is on the research. You can forget overhead of best practice infrastructure for development/engineering, that's wasted overhead in some of those group's eyes. The more theoretical it is, the easier it is to get away with, the more applied, the less easy it is to handwave away reality.
If you're at a heavily funded technology focused org like NRL (which the description sounds a lot like--neat stuff comes out of NRL), then this can be the case. There are, however, a lot of DoD funded research labs that are dumpster fires in terms of the software--NRL is almost the golden child compared to most of them. Again, in some such labs, a project may only have sufficient budget for 0.05 to 0.1 FTEs worth of software engineers. In such cases, 0.4 FTEs of software engineers can be considered a significant investment for a project, which is beyond laughable.