I once worked at a startup that did just that. Developed a system that was significantly better and cheaper than an existing legacy solution. One of the generals who saw the DARPA demonstration overrode the whole bureaucracy and brought it with him into theater.

Five years later the startup had been bought by a major military contractor, budgets ballooned, a number of the original people (including me) left, our software was on its way to becoming the legacy solution, and the cycle continued.

After seeing how US military contracting works up close, I no longer find it surprising that military tech costs orders of magnitude more than commercial or consumer tech. It's also not surprising why so few organizations are able to do both government and consumer/commercial technology -- optimizing for one makes you ill-suited to compete in the other.