You do, it just becomes less robust as the sticker price goes up. It's one thing to bang away at code through a test suite, dump manure into rifle or crash test a Hummer, it's another to fire live shots at an airborne F-22 or blow up a Stryker. At some point your testing focus becomes chiefly unitary over cheaply produced components rather holistic over the final system.
As far as I know, DARPA's job isn't even proof of concept, but more along the lines of basic research done in universities in the new drug discovery chain."Because that's DARPA's job", I'm going to hear, I suppose.
I always thought DARPA's job was the really far out research - then, once you have something that may actually have applications, it transitions to the services.
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