TM 1-1 says "In 1987 the Project carried out a complete updating of all the previously "stored" equipment, opening the buried & sealed chambers of the sleepers without waking them and leaving behind new equipment, vehicles, and the instruction manuals on how to operate them."

Some upgrades are well & good. Adding lasers & fusion reactors are probably fine- they are such leaps in technology that it's worth doing. But other upgrades get questionable rather quickly.

It's one thing to leave behind a new vehicle with a fusion power plant. The instructions might say "This fusion engine requires no maintenance & in fact has no user-maintainable parts. Start it by plugging it into the wall outlet in your bolt-hole, and once it's going it will run for 18 months. It's rugged but not indestructable so try not to break it. Simple."

But new vehicles, weapons and other gear are much more questionable. Imagine a team, frozen in 1970, which awakens to find their M-14's replaced with M16A2's. Besides the basic manuals on operation, maintenance & repair, there would have to be all sorts of other info. A MP supplemental manual might say "Look, we know the M16 had an iffy reputation when we froze you but they're OK now, really, trust us. Look, these bullets the M16 fires may be smaller in weight & diameter than the 7.62NATO ammo you had originally, they don't travel as far or hold their energy as well, they're more effected by wind, they penetrate less too, but really we think they work just as well and we think you'll like trusting your life to them. Oh, and keep the guns really clean or they'll fail."

Also, if the team gets into a fight before they can test out their new weapons, you can kiss their morale goodbye. God help the team whose life depends on using their new gear in a hurry, and they have to read manuals to know how to use it!

Besides that, there are way too many issues here to expect a simple manual or two to cover. The M16, for example, has a lot of finnicky parts and little things it doesn't like. And besides giving the team weapons they've never fired or handled before, they're not going to have any experience with maintaining or repairing them, much less using them. Manuals just don't cut it. Period. If you asked the team members, I'm sure they'd agree.

The happy balance for these teams is to upgrade the things that give huge leaps forward & previously unknown capabilities. Lasers are a good example. But be careful otherwise. As Jeff Cooper says "The man behind the gun is more important than the gun." Simplified, the operator is more important than the equipment. Part of what make the well-trained individual effective is their confidence & experience, and you reduce these considerably by handing them unfamiliar gear. They can still probably get the job done, but they would be better off if you just left them as they were originally. A team with it's original gear knows it can do the job it trained to do. The team with new "mystery" gear is no longer certain.

Also, opening up every bolt-hole, cache, and base to upgrade equipment is a HUGE security risk. HUGE. Would you want to open up every bolt hole if you knew that Krell agents were around, possibly even having infiltrated Morrow Industries? Man that's a big risk.

To be honest, this was never an issue in our campaign since we made a team's freezing date the same as the first night we played them. But if you play (or have as NPC's or whatever) teams frozen farther in the past then the upgrade question(s) will have to be looked at and answered. Good luck!