I mean I am overstating the case for effect here, and I am sure there are small cliques of competent people hidden within big organizations everywhere, but if this were a government official project, it wouldn't have been done by those people. I knew brilliant people in the military in Iraq, but they weren't brilliant due to their jobs. If we did awesome stuff on the side it wouldn't have been a product of the US government.
Government also discourages small side projects, especially in the classified world, and particularly discourages them from becoming production. They would far prefer to run a program of record, or pay for (well defined) innovation by third parties.