[cosmicfish]

Sorry this is so long, considering the ongoing failure to communicate, I wanted to be thorough.

Originally Posted by tsofian

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.

If you are going to accuse me of moving the goalposts, please show where I made this statement. MARS serves as the military for the Project, but that is not their primary job:

3ed Rule Book, pg R1: "All work accomplished up to this point was incidental. Now the real work of the Project could commence. It was the process of rebuilding for which the members of the teams were most carefully trained. During the rebuilding process all teams would work together, not as Recon, MARS, or Science, but as conservators of civilization."

The "up to this point" explicitly includes MARS teams being "sent in order to deal with 'special' problems". This sums up my understanding of the Project pretty well: the Project, although trained and equipped for combat, was primarily a reconstruction organization that expected to delay operation until the need for military action was minimized.

Originally Posted by tsofian

"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.

No, it does not. My argument is that:

(1) Military action is the primary job for exactly ONE unit in the Project, and that is Phoenix. For everyone else, reconstruction is job 1 and military action is secondary or lower. Training should match the priority, so the focus during training should be on reconstruction, not manufacturing special operations forces.

(2) Training people for military action is indiscreet, especially at top skill levels, and high-level military training would therefore threaten to expose the Project.

(3) The Project does not have the ability to openly recruit, and cannot draft people. The Project must find people who are willing and psychologically able to enter the Project (i.e., abandon the world they know, trust an unsanctioned advanced technology, and walk willingly into a nuclear wasteland with a gun, a shovel, and a first aid kit). After that the emphasis should be on the ability to contribute to reconstruction (the primary job), and only then on the ability to contribute to military operations.

(4) Considering that SOF troops represent a tiny percentage of the US military, it seems unlikely that they would constitute a majority of MARS recruitment. While they would undoubtedly be desired and pursued, a more likely (to me, and it seems most of the other posters) result is that Morrow veteran recruiting reflects the diversity of military careers and that MARS would be happy to get line infantry or SWAT veterans for front-line MARS teams.

(5) While most MARS teamers are veterans, many are non-veterans. At a minimum, MARS would need to restrict the "typical" mission profile to whatever they could train civilians to do from scratch.

(6) Once people are recruited, there is only so much training you can give someone. Even, perhaps especially, on the reconstruction side, additional training will be required. There is also going to be additional training to handle Project equipment and vehicles, and survival training, And for all the non-veterans, a significant starter-level amount of military training is required. When all this is accomplished to a satisfactory level, how much more time can you really spend cranking up the knob on military training?

(7) This is not "skimping", it is acknowledging that training all MARS teamers to the ideal level endangers the Project and likely inhibits reconstruction - their primary mission, after all.

Originally Posted by tsofian

This would include selecting and training their protective assets as well as they could.

If you add "without exposing the Project or impairing their ability to serve in reconstruction" I would agree, with the additional caveat that "as well as they could" should also reflect that they are recruiting from an actual population who all have to volunteer. The Project isn't going to spend $10 million on an APC and $50 training the guys inside it, but it also isn't going to put itself into the position of openly training Green Berets or telling people who signed up to rebuild the world that they must spend 6 months training for combat and 2 weeks training to help people.

Originally Posted by tsofian

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.

If MARS is the military of the Project, then its missions and training can be compared to those of other militaries, otherwise calling it military has no meaning. There is no reason to expect that MARS is a homogeneous organization with every team able to do every mission, but it certainly seems to me as if the line infantry mission and the Delta Force mission both have places in the MARS spectrum. And I am not trying to say that MARS team = infantry, I am trying to say that the quality of recruit and the amount and type of military training they receive is going to be far closer to infantry than it will be to Delta. Sure, they'll be smarter and better educated than the average 11B but they won't necessarily be any more athletic or anything, and their training isn't going to be a superhuman effort focusing on their secondary mission.

Originally Posted by tsofian

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.

Many of those skills will need foundational skills, not just polish. Many come in as civilians, and (to most of us) it seems that even the veterans are likely to come from a diverse set of MOSs and may require some additional shaping prior to "polish". And remember that "intelligence" isn't one knob that turns up ability on all skills equally - the fact that someone has more book smarts, on average, does not mean that they are better at physical skills or social skills, and educations and careers generally have an impact on physical readiness for combat. The Project has to recruit for basic Project criteria (willingness to abandon, etc, etc,) first, ability to assist with reconstruction second, and ability to fight 3rd, and there just are not that many supermen around who are going to be great at all three.

Professional military training also comes with a lot of resources the Project lacks: the ability to operate openly, the ability to operate outside civilian safety requirements and regulations, the ability to force some level of participation on the trainees, etc. The Project is dealing in secret with volunteers for a reconstruction program, money and quality of recruit aside, there are limits on what they can do.

Originally Posted by tsofian

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 agree with most of this, up to the point where you imply that the end result is a typical MARS team (6-8 people?) going head-to-head with an experienced, entrenched, 12-man SF A-Team and not being outmatched. The Project cannot train every member for an indefinite amount of time, and if there is X amount of time to be spent conditioning and training the candidates, even ignoring the time spent training for non-combat tasks, then there must be a point where you hit "as possible" and I think that point comes before a typical MARS team can expect to outdo the Snake Eaters.

Perhaps it is worthwhile at this point for you to lay out what you think the MARS training pipeline looks like and where you see the results falling. Please bear in mind that the key requirements for Phoenix (meant to be the deus ex machina of the game) were "combat veteran from a SOF, psych pass, a black belt, a language, and a year of extra training", which is I think the only real specified pipeline in canon and with which in decades of recruiting they got 46 guys.

Originally Posted by tsofian

I focus on what MY project is, not yours, as I have been careful to state many times.

The entire purpose of your thread was to solicit other people's opinions on how a Morrow team (later specified as MARS) would handle a potential confrontation with Special Forces, and that is exactly what you are getting. When you are getting "this is how I handle it" that is part of the answer to "how I think you should handle it". I did not come onto a random thread and start dissing your ideas, in post #8 you literally asked "Also the SF troops are good but are they better than the best of Morrow Project or the best of the soldiers in Texas?" and all of this has been myself and a few others trying to provide an answer to that question (to which my shortest answer is "SF will be far better than a typical MARS team but not as good as Phoenix").

If you want to make a Project where every MARS teamer is Chuck Norris with a PhD and Snake Eaters are just a little better than, I dunno, 11B's with a little CQB and language training, then go for it. But that is a very different game with a very different feel to it than how I think it was intended or how I or most other people play it. If you don't like what I'm saying, then don't use it, but don't expect me to just abandon my considered position either.