The article makes it seem like they're testing the capability of field personnel rather than doing R&D. For the actual R&D stuff, I can see why they'd need to

The article makes it seem like they're testing the capability of field personnel rather than doing R&D. For the actual R&D stuff, I can see why they'd need to do something in the field to see how it behaves. But I would also imagine that sort of testing to be fairly infrequent with long experiment cycles.