Clearly the pilot(s) made a mistake. Big time. But the question is, why did they do that? In the bad old days it would have been "sack the pilots -we're OK now, the problem has gone away".
In these slightly more enlightened times, the reasons behind the error are looked at in the hope of finding out something that might help to prevent a recurrence - after all, it seems unlikely that the pilots did it deliberately or were in general incompetent.
Those who say "pilot error. End of." are incompetent to hold any role in flight safety, even if they may hold some (self) important elevated position in the military. Let's hope that when they join the civilian world, it is in their deserved position as a junior copilot, since a lot of attitude adjustment will be required.