I'm at the end of the day you really need to argue this with the military not me. as far as COTS parts, I mean if you think you can build a radio of that size

I'm at the end of the day you really need to argue this with the military not me. as far as COTS parts, I mean if you think you can build a radio of that size with its requirements,life span,etc someone probably would have. they moved to slightly modded radios similar to law enforcement for squad level communications, but I dont see that happening for larger scale systems in the near future. But the field operation guide doesn't tell you how to open the radio, that is beyond operator (RTO) and field services. There were at least 11 builtin counter measures, to prevent someone from exploring the guts of the radio, and sure you could see what is in the radio, but once the eproms fried themselves, you would be hard pressed to figure out what was on them. The manuals that explain those enter workings aren't issued to field units, hence why they have maint. Centers. Not sure what you mean by too late for SINCGARS, the originals before the half sizes came out, I just as you could load the crypto and hopset from and ANCD, all you need to do was take a dog bone cable and splice and map the wires to a serial cable, and then configure telnet. Then set the proper broadcast mode on the radio. you could probably find the specifics in a leaked field manual :)