I know it is a pipe dream but I wish they could be forced to sell this to the general public.
I have looked into buying LTSC. Apparently you need a business (I own a “shelf” company which has never done anything, but legally it counts), and a Microsoft volume license agreement. I looked into the later. Supposedly there is this trick where you order all these useless-but-cheap Identity Manager CALs to cheaply meet the minimum order requirement for a volume license. But I got a bit stuck working out what to order (or even if it was still available through resellers in my country). I lost interest at that point.
Is there a “US Government Edition”? Is it different from the Chinese one?
How does G differ from LTSC?
This info is publicly available so more detailed info should be easy to find.
Telemetry is a bit of a non-issue for many national security applications-they run on special air-gapped networks with zero direct access to the public Internet, Windows can try to phone home to Microsoft all day long, it’ll never get through.
And disabling telemetry doesn’t require LTSC or Enterprise G. All Enterprise, Education and Server editions support “Diagnostic data off” telemetry level. Even if that’s not the default, most enterprises who want that will build their own install images with that setting configured.