[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by tsofian

Instead of taking all the best of anything and putting them all together you parcel them out so that instead of having a GREAT team and then ones that are increasingly lack luster you have a number of teams that have a really top person and some other folks that that leader can mentor and keep alive in the post oops world until they have enough experience to be more likely to survive.In all the military units I served with we always tried to spread the wealth of experience and skills across squads, platoons and such so that we didn't have all our eggs in one basket.

What you are describing is the other side of the special operations issue, and the usual response is to combine the two approaches - If you have 100 "elite" soldiers, you might create a 40-50 man special ops unit and sprinkle the others among your line units in the manner you describe. I never meant to imply that Phoenix (or similar units) would or should be allowed to take ALL the "best", merely that some of them would be used for this.

And again, this is not a new argument - it is the constant struggle in allocating troops between line and elite units, and no one goes entirely one way or another.

Originally Posted by tsofian

Secondly the Phoenix guys are all supposed to have no strong social connections. So were they psychologically unable to form strong social bonds or did they suffer the loss of everyone they cared about? Either of these options is bad (The former is REALLY bad-are they a sociopath?)

I never took that as being much more than the usual issue of recruiting Morrow personnel - if you have strong social connections, are you willing and able to abandon them to what you know to be an inevitable atomic holocaust? I thought this was included in the list just because it represented a standard Morrow recruiting issue that was not normally a concern with soldiers.

Originally Posted by tsofian

If a regular Joe team goes rogue several other teams can band together and deal with the issue. If this band goes rogue they can't be stopped because they are basically a Special Ops dream team.

It would be illogical for the Project to build the exact type of asset that would be most likely to leave the reservation AND be too strong to deal with.

And yet the US and other groups maintain Phoenix-like groups all the time. Which is more likely, that these guys are going to unify and go rogue against the Project or that there would be some external forces against which you might need people assembled together with more training and resources than a typical MARS team?

It seems like everyone is opposed to a world in which the PCs are not the de facto "best of the best". If they want that distinction, they will need to earn it.