If price is a problem, buy Russian optics. The cheap 1st Gen stuff is what most people are familiar with, but you CAN buy high quality current state-of-the-art gear made by manufacturers like LOMO.
LOMO of St. Petersburg supplies NV gear to government agencies around the world, and the biggest difference between their best stuff and our best stuff will be the price. LOMO supplies 90% of the high end optical gear to the Russian military.
My 6" LOMO telescope blows my 8" American Meade telescope into the weeds on optical quality, and the same goes for a comparison against Celestron. I looked through a 9" Celestron that was vastly inferior to my 6" LOMO Mak-Cass on planetary and lunar viewing.
LOMO is comparable to Carl Zeiss in optical quality. One of the finest American telescope companies, Stellarvue, has used LOMO objective cells in it's best quality telescopes. LOMO is a big company and isn't too interested in dealing with common consumers anymore, which is why you may not have heard of them. In things like medical optics and other high end applications, LOMO is known around the world.
Compare LOMO's best NV goggles against American PVS. The biggest difference will be the price. Finding a source is your problem, but if you are creative there will be people willing to sell it to you at far below American NV prices. As far as the restricted stuff goes, my visits to Russia seem to indicate that if you have the will and the money, there will be a way to get hands on it. And I am sure that's what a lot of people have been doing. Government agencies included. Special forces troops often use foreign made equipment as it has "deniability" in case it is captured or abandoned during operations. I'm sure some of our tropps are using LOMO NV gear when the situation calls for deniability.