Redundant, ineffective, and a waste of taxpayer money. But hey, it took half the time to be as wasteful, so that is an improvement!
In hindsight, these will be soon redundant. I remember lots of pundits (rightly) cautioning that it might take 1-2 years to get an effective vaccine. The army had to start designing before they knew how effective vaccines would be and when they'd be released. Sure, they had a guess that a SARS-CoV2 vaccine would be a much easier vaccine target than HIV, but there are often unforeseen difficulties.
Fair enough, I guess I'm sort of primed to criticize these projects as wasteful and expensive, but you're right that they needed to do something.
They'll still be useful during the ~15 months or so that a vaccine rollout will likely take.