All three of them along win Lone Star/Red Star tried to hint that the team had previously served together in Europe for the most part. With many a new member or two pick up from here or there.

I guess all the Twilight 2000 books pretty much where special operation type adventures. Especially Kidnapped, Satellite Down, and the Last Submarine series. I mean Mediterranean Cruise is some straight up Navy SEAL shit y'all.:D

I think everybody and his brother is going to have an interest in having the ability to conduct reconnaissance and sabotage. At the risk of constantly referring to my own work, folks who don’t have pre-war SO/LRS (special operations/long range surveillance) are going to develop them as time and resources allow.

Fort Huachuca builds its own LRS capability from the ground up using a handful of veterans from Europe, the Middle East, and Korea and USAF operators who make their way to southern Arizona after Albuquerque and Kirtland go south. The emphasis is on gathering information—hardly surprising for an MI command. Almost immediately, the trigger-pullers who run the training and operations program start agitating for an expanded role for LRS. MG Thomason refuses to authorize an expanded mission profile until 2000. Huachuca greatly benefits from having cadre and students from the USAF SO arrive on-post in the second half of 1998, courtesy of the collapse of civil order in Albuquerque and the Mexican invasion of New Mexico. Not everyone is going to have this luxury.

USCG First District in New England, for instance, has to make do with homegrown material. There are a few Marines and soldiers with some of the right experience available, but it would be impossible to compare this situation to having proper facilities and cadre. The Maritime Rifles develop a doctrine for reconnaissance based on small watercraft and waterborne infiltration. Here again, just getting to the point at which intelligence gathering can be conducted costs many lives. First District has an active interest in sabotage and assassination, but heavy losses have made the leadership leery of overreach with their sophomoric reconnaissance troops. Even during the raids on pirate strongholds in 1999 and 2000, the LRS types are used almost exclusively for information gathering. Not until the 2001 offensive against the UBF do the Guardians attempt to mix combat engineering and sabotage with reconnaissance.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, on the other hand, light infantry infiltration combined with assassination and combat engineering develops rather quickly. The nature of the terrain (heavily urbanized) works against large-scale infantry operations. Local combatants are forced to develop infiltration and counter-infiltration tactics rather quickly. Combat engineering grows from its roots of arson into a surprisingly sophisticated art form by early 2001. Local militias/police throughout the Bay Area have small groups who have accumulated the skills to move into enemy areas unobserved to attack caches of food, arms and ammunition, and other useful materials. The so-called “legitimate governments” have certain advantages in this area because they have some support from MilGov (principally US Navy) personnel who can show them how to employ explosives and booby traps effectively. However, the various gangs and warlords of the area are quick learners; whatever they lack in formal training they make up for in cunning, desperation, and keen powers of observation.

The Shogun maintains little in the way of LRS. His security comes from having his secret police in place throughout his realm and the constant and unpredictable movement of his motorized army, the Gunryo. Information about the outside world comes from EPW and the occasional merchant convoy.


Webstral

Web, don't apologize. It's helpful to show how some of our thinking here has been applied directly to a campaign setting and yours is top-notch.

I think that pretty much every theatre command or major long-term military cantonment area is going to set up some sort of RECONDO "school" or course to train small units in long-range patrolling and intelligence gathering. Without satellite or aerial recon, and with diminished SIGINT capabilities, long-range patrolling/recon is going to be every field commander's primary intelligence source. These units will not only sneak and peek, they will tap field telephone lines, snatch prisoners, ambush couriers, etc. In Vietnam, the NVA didn't use radios a whole lot so LRRPs and SOG recon teams were essential for collecting intelligence on enemy capabilities and intentions.

To take this thinking one step further, I'll bet the Soviets are doing the same thing during the Twilight War. By the later years of WWII, the Soviets became masters of long-range scouting. I'm sure that the T2K Red Army would be creating it's own LRRP units. This could justify more frequent PC encounters with Soviet "commandos" without resorting to the somewhat cliche'd Spetznaz trope.

Well the Spetznaz detachment that one find either the Free City of Krokow or the Black Mondana would qualify as one of these mobile recon units...

Rae,

Reconaissance was the cornerstone of Soviet military doctrine. During and after WWII, the Soviets built a large corps of Razvedchiki (reconnaissance scouts) or "Special Reconnaissance Troops", aside from the Okhotniki/Vysotniki of the Spetsnaz. Razvedchiki ("Raiders") gathered tactical intelligence, recovered documents and captured prisoners for interrogation during the Soviet-Afghan war. They were also the only Soviet troops trained in ambushes, and while I don't know if they would be exactly the same as LRRPs or LRS units, they probably would be by the end of the Twilight war.

Tony