Here's the DoD's list of approved and in house standards.
http://risacher.github.io/DoD-OSS-FAQ/
Cryptography and was introduced in 3.0. You are correct. 3.0 was also released over 10 years ago. 3.0 was also the first public and recommended release besides development. So, as of encryption. This has been around since Windows 2000 and was introduced in SP4. I remember this service pack and was much intended one indeed. The Samba server will be running on Linux, correct? All Windows will be doing is acknowledging the certificate.
Also, most Linux distributions come nowadays with 4.0 + installed already.
I was comparing Samba to iSCSI since my expertise with managing HP SAN's. This is how we mount file systems for the same use I'm suggesting with Samba. As for what you state, if you had a slice of intelligence you would know I'm talking about using a Initiator not partitioning logical volumes.
You firstly cannot compare this with SSH. This can be ran via a secure shell, sure. There's nothing wrong with using SFTP or FTP either. They both do the same job but Samba has the extended features for mounted shares which you cannot do with SFTP but you can with FTP. The mappings for SFTP have not been implemented yet on Windows.
To be clear, I'm suggesting this only for a easier method of managing files from your computer to the server. You'll still need to use SSH as a remote to manage your server in other ways. For what I'm suggesting has nothing to do with SSH.