Something to be said for using mass-produced, very cheap, locally produced electronics in military stuff. Even moreso when the electronics engineers you hire stand a good chance of owning a few at home.
My experience is that government / military contracts are difficult to deal with / get if you're not established and those synergies like "engineer has some at home" are non existent.
Was more thinking that if an engineer has some at home, they're probably already gonna know how it works versus some arcane chipset and driver set that they need to learn from scratch.