It's more, "Hey, if NASA is having trouble with this, with their big brains and frontier research, no way military capabilities exceed theirs at any real capacity." It's one thing to say they're a few years ahead, it's another thing to say that the military was working on a Hubble when the people who would eventually work on THE Hubble were still in grade school.

It makes me wonder about things like AR/VR, where, likewise, things are just starting to hit the lit sphere, with great difficulty; does the military already have tech that's 3 or 4 generations ahead?