Scan military history and you will find all manner of odd weapons that either never saw use or were militarily indecisive. But that's just the beginning. Secret occult projects. Experiments in telepathy and telekinetics. Speculations about UFOs. The list goes on. What all of these things have in common is that they were functionally pointless, yet became bureaucratic facts due to the willingness of governments to simply try nutty things out. Why? It depends. Sometimes a dictator needs a vanity project. Sometimes intel says that the Russians are doing it so we need to do it too. Sometimes it is just a particular government department no one knows about that has money to spend.