Pigeons and bats were both used in separate projects. You're thinking of the bat one.
Incendiaries were attached to bats, who were dropped from planes. And then expected to fly into buildings. Incendiaries go off. Building burns down.
Pigeons were used as the guidance system in an early smart bomb. Rather than tracking a target with a laser or GPS, trained pigeons would steer the bomb.
This is how harbors work. Ports employee pilots, who board ships, get them through busy waterways, and dock them. The regular crew on a large ship just sits back when coming into port.
A reasonable argument for a 90-day exercise window could have been: employees are told upfront that they need to remain with the company through a liquidity event for their options to be worth anything. The incentive to stay is both transparent and explicit. And aligns everyone's incentives, e.g. long-tenured employees perform better, making the startup's equity worth more, enriching the employee who stayed through the IPO.
The arguments in this article however were wholly incoherent.
This is exactly what most companies do. They hire in house counsel for their baseline, routine legal needs. And then outsource to biglaw for peak law stuff (litigation, big transactions).
In house counsel salaries are way less than those at a top law firm and you don't have to pay the difference between the firm's billings and what an associate--who's actually do the work-- gets paid.
I would gladly pay for 5 hours of training for a combustion endorsement, if I could avoid fuel costs for 40+ hours of training to get my private certificate.