When they're talking about classified defense networks, the actual restrictions they mean is least privilege and separation of duties. Devs are not admins. They don't get root privilege on their machines. They can't create virtual network interfaces and they also can't change kernel settings. But if you put a full TCP/IP stack in userspace, well, they can run that and do whatever they want with it.

To answer the upstream question about why arbitary outbound connections are allowed, they're not. This is connecting to a cloud development environment, and I would have to assume this service can be self-hosted, because on a classified network, the "cloud" isn't the cloud as Hacker News readers know it. Amazon et all run private data centers on US military installations that only the military and the IC can access and they're airgapped from the Internet. If you're on a workstation that can access this environment, that's all it can access. The only place you can exfiltrate data to is other military-controlled servers.