“many in the military at present are calling that gross negligence due the fact that old military leadership was simply flummoxed by the entire situation and didn’t want to admit their weakness.”
That is a silly cover story.
The military spent a lot of resources trying to capture and reverse engineer anything they could capture.
They then highly classified the research—and are currently playing “hide the ball” with the old (1940s,1950s,1960s) files.
Very possible.
But the military can seek their capture and still be grossly negligent in other ways...all at the same time.