[R0b0t1]

Without explicitly supporting the theory it is a loosed weapon, I think your estimation of technology is off. Typically military technology will lead by about a decade, maybe more. So all of the rest could be explained, a little paranoically, as intentional action.

[jeduehr]

In virology and other related biological sciences, the opposite is usually the case. All the most cutting edge stuff either happens in university labs or in the private sector.

The military (in the US at least) has too much red tape and bureaucracy that gets in the way of that kind of fast-paced experimentation.

Source: I was about an inch away from working at the Defense Intelligence Agency after grad school, but this is why I turned them down. After talking to all the people on the hiring team, this was the consensus. They did it because they loved their country, despite those challenges. And this is what my friends at USAMRIID tell me (US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases). If they want to present anything or publish it, they have months of red tape to go through first. They can't collaborate as easily either.

Also you can read books like The Hot Zone (sensationalized, but shows they weren't doing anything that wasn't happening at the same time in academia) or Ken Alibek's BioHazard, both of which describe the past history of bioweapons research and how it wasn't 10 years ahead of anyone else (in the USSR or the US). It was about where everyone else was, but applying it maybe 2 or 3 years ahead of the game.

[R0b0t1]

> The military (in the US at least) has too much red tape and bureaucracy that gets in the way of that kind of fast-paced experimentation.

The DoD and specific branches of the armed forces just hand out money. It is those labs and the companies that staff them that are ahead of the current state of the art, but they're unable to commercialize them until after other applications are evaluated.

There is an increasing trend for the military to rely on CoTS hardware, but I know with some certainty there are still fields, like metallurgy (for jet engines), that are still leading anything else by a wide margin.