I was going to let this go, but decided I really couldn't.
Your original position was that MARS teams weren't military, which when canon shows this is not the case you decided to move the goal posts. "Well trained" somehow doesn't mean they are trained for the mission they are designed for and equipped for. Your argument indicates that an organization that spends a non trivial amount selecting, equipping and freezing a large number of people would skimp on training them and on doing everything it could to preserve its assets in the post war era. This would include selecting and training their protective assets as well as they could.
Comparing the need of Morrow Project to train up its MARS teams to the need to for the US Army to train its line infantry is a false equivalency. Line Infantry has a very important job, Delta Force has another important job and MARS teams have their own set of jobs. They are all different. Also the training of any military unit is geared to the slowest soldier in the group. Both Delta Force and Morrow Project will have less slow learners than your typical 11 Bravo MOS or 13 B MOS course, so instead of spending a lot of time trying to get the slow pokes up to speed the cadre should be very much about polishing skills for "high speed/low drag" students. To say that MP MARS team members are the same as "average" Infantrymen seems absurd. The US Army knows that quantity has a quality all its own and that 11B soldiers are replaceable. MARS teams are NOT replaceable. Once they are needed, they like every Morrow asset, are unique, they are absolutely irreplaceable. No draft, or recruitment drive or shortening of the training cycle will put more MARS teams in the field or replace losses. Period. The Project has to front load as many resources-including training-as possible. This means to me that MARS teams, as well as every other team, is going to be as highly trained as possible.
I focus on what MY project is, not yours, as I have been careful to state many times.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cosmicfish
To add to what others have already noted:
MARS describes the mission profile of an entire branch, it does not imply that every MARS team is capable of every single possible MARS mission.
The statements given in canon are broadly interpretable. "Assault" and "Strike" are roles regularly assigned to line infantry, "Rescue" is, as has been noted, a SWAT role. The fact that there are top-tier military units performing these roles as well does not mean that the Project is at that level. "Well trained" does not indicate for which parts of their mission this applies, nor does it give us any comparison to know how "well" they really ARE trained. I don't have the book with me this weekend, but if I recall correctly the base combat skill numbers for MARS are only about twice as good as the abysmal scores acceptable for Science teams - that doesn't seem that "well".
You focus on what the Project teams SHOULD be, but that is an unrealistic standard. Every US infantryman SHOULD be as proficient as a Delta commando, but realistically we can only get so many men of that caliber and can only spend so much time and money on their training... just like the Project. The Project has very strict recruiting standards (psych profile, willingness/ability to abandon all family and friends, the willingness to abandon the US to destruction and rebuild something presumably at least a little different in its place, etc) and even if they hit up every SOF operator they would probably only get a small number of takers, so I suspect that line MARS teams will probably not have anything more elite than line infantry.
You also note (correctly) that even in MARS units not everyone is a veteran - whatever the standard may be, the Project must be able to train civilians up from scratch to that standard or else send teams into the field with weak sisters. I don't think the latter generally works and the former requires that the Project have a military training organization that (a) hits a particular standard (SOF for you, perhaps AIT or so for me) and (b) can sustain it without tipping anyone off for the entire recruiting phase of the Project. The latter alone is daunting even for the AIT level, I am not sure how the Project could do it for SF.
FWIW, I always assumed a tiered system (as with everything in my Project-Region-District-Group scheme) where MARS units down at the Group level would be tasked with dealing with small scale disturbances - bandits, mostly. Larger or more difficult opponents would involve retreat or holding actions while waiting for the progressively better recruited/trained teams assigned at the higher levels to show up. So if Phoenix represents the top capability of SOF in the Project, then perhaps the Regional commands have a few teams with SEALS and Green Berets and the District teams have some Rangers, EOD techs, and Force Recon Marines. But you cannot maintain that skill level across the entirety of MARS.
And I (and I think others) have been assuming that the players in this scenario represented a low-level MARS team, not "the very best of the Project". The very best of the Project is Phoenix, and they (or some reasonable facsimile of them) should be able to outdo an SF team if they really wanted to - I suspect they too would prefer to work with them rather than against them.
One last thing to consider is that most of this discussion has focused on the classic war-game scenario - Red forces entering the board from the left while Blue forces are entering from the right, find the enemy and engage. The reality here is that the SF team is established, and if they are at all competent in their jobs it means that they know the lay of the land and have recruited and trained allied forces. The Project team would probably never see more than a couple of the Green Berets at a time, they would be facing larger numbers of "indigenous" troops with the soldiers in command/advisory roles. This just makes things worse for the team, despite their edge in equipment.
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