Waste of time and energy. People forget how much activity happened in that area over 20 years during the Iraq/Afghanistan fiasco that didnt achieve anything. Same story will repeat because the chimp troupe cant handle that level of complexity no matter what toys they have. So its like spending time collecting data on ants, that have learnt to speak and have declared they are going to control the weather. There are better things to waste a life and career on.
"Greatness cannot be planned" - K. Stanley
Technology, methods and people at the time are bound to have been different, even if only slightly so.
Throughout history, many things were thought of as wasteful and looked over, until some people serendipitously spent time and energy and found some diamond in the dirt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Stanley#:~:text=lead%2...
What would you say the %time that "research science managers" spend looking in/for the "dirt" should be? 100? 50? 20? 37?
It depends, but in general, it is expected be on the lower end.
The principal task of a "research science manager" is not to "do" the research, but foster an environment that will help other researcher that are actually focused into looking in / for the "dirt" (by dirt I assume you mean the nitty-gritty details of unraveling research problems). This would be setting high level direction, advising on approach to research problems, as well as the general "bureaucracy" and logistics required to make the team running. If time allows, a research science manager can still explore some research topics on his own as a research, but that becomes more of an side quest than actual main quest. Of course, they can still yield interesting result.
Finally, a research science manager should not just work in a top down fashion, but also incorporate bottom up feedback, i.e. adapt the overall research team's direction based on the "dirt" that is brought up to him by the dedicated researchers.