There is technical debt associated with operating at a high level of secrecy. I used to work in a place that did classified work for the three-letter agencies. The teams working on the most classified projects tended to stagnate. They had advanced technology in narrow areas, but had fallen behind commercial technology across the board. They were still building minicomputer-based systems a decade later than they should have been. And they'd get stuck in dead-end niche technologies.

As a rule of thumb for bidding purposes, we assumed that classifying a project doubled the cost.