Guest Post: Making Special Operators Special

The Problem
For right or wrong the special operator profession in the Agent's Handbook has got rather a bad reputation. Put simply, when players show up with an operator there is a fear that they are nothing more than a disruptive murder machine. In my experience this fear is far from ungrounded and sadly quite a few special operators really are just one trick ponies. My suspicion is that much of this comes from the players' lack of knowledge about special operations and a misguided belief that they aren't allowed to make their characters anything more than gunmen while staying realistic.

The Solution
While often relegated to the role of action heroes or the cavalry that rushes in to save the main characters, America's special operations community do a lot more than just shoot people. In fact, after twenty years of unprecedented expansion, the range of missions that fall under 'special operations' is truly massive, as are the capabilities of the units tasked with them. This post will offer a few examples of how the reality of special operators can make your characters and your game more interesting.

A Note on Unit Names
Due to concerns around operational security special operations units change their names regularly. For the purposes of simplicity the names used in the Agent’s Handbook are the names used here. When a unit isn’t mentioned in the Agent’s Handbook the most up to date term I could find is used.



Building a Special Operator
Despite the stereotypes mentioned above, the reality is that the Special Operator is, as a profession, second only to the federal agent in versatility. Operators start with every skill they need to stay alive, which means all an Agent’s bonus points can be invested into unique investigative or utility skills.

This section will break down a few different archetypes you may want to think of when building a special operator and give some examples of explanations of how an Agent might pick up those skills in the fiction of their backstory.

A FACE WITH A GUN
Skills
Two bonus skills take you to 50% HUMINT and another two give you 60% Persuade, which is really all you need to be competent in social scenes. If you want to go one step further, putting a few points into Psychotherapy would fit nicely to know when folks are close to snapping and calm them down if they do snap.

Who are you?
Social skills in general don't need much justification. An Agent could just be a sociable person, however, there are a number of reasons why a special operator, in specific, might have good person skills. Military command is essentially management and an effective officer or NCO will have the social skills to manage the men under their command. This is doubly true with units like the Special Forces which have to command not only their own soldiers but often large contingents of indigenous partner forces.
 
Special operations often include an element of psychological operations and there are many courses designed to train leadership personnel on how to conduct such missions. Senior NCOs, Warrant Officers and Officers all could have reasonably attended a course on the subject and have a fairly academic understanding of what makes people tick.

Additionally, several units in JSOC also have men who specialize in what is euphemistically referred to as 'Advanced Force Operations'. These are in essence, clandestine, undercover reconnaissance missions which often more resemble espionage than special operations. The men and women of units such as DevGru's Black Squadron, Delta Force's G Squadron, The Ranger Reconnaissance Company and the Intelligence Support Activity (though the latter is primarily a SIGINT focused organization) all need to know how to develop, recruit and manage sources. Similarly, Paramilitary Officers of the CIA's Special Activities Center are cross trained as case officers with the ability to run sources and collect human intelligence even as they conduct covert wars.

A DOCTOR WITH A GUN
Skills
When playing a combat medic I like to have around 60% First Aid (when just using bonus skills 50% is the closest you can get to and perfectly acceptable, you can go to 70% if you really want but don't need it since you'll almost always have a +20% bonus from a first aid kit), 40% Medicine, and 40% Science (Biology). If you don't have any other ideas of where to put your skills 40% Pharmacy is a good place for the last two. That’s enough to both identify drugs and prepare powerful ones safely (or intentionally dangerously) without a roll.

Who are you?
Combat medics abound in special operations. Many are qualified paramedics, some are physician assistants and several have gone on to get medical licenses and become fully fledged doctors. 18D Medical Sergeants on Green Beret ODAs are not only trained to keep a teammate alive in remote environments, but also to provide extensive medical care to the indigenous populations which ODAs are designed to partner with, giving them more expertise with clinical medicine than might be expected. Air Force Pararescuemen (often simply called PJs) are trained to locate, rescue, and treat downed pilots, however, throughout the Global War on Terror PJs have frequently partnered with other special operations units to augment their medical capability. PJs pair critical care capabilities with the technical skills to pull pilots off mountains, out of valleys, and from crumpled air frames. When it comes to the Navy things get complicated, Special Amphibious Reconnaissance Corpsman (SARC) are partnered with Marine Force Recon and the Marine Raiders of MARSOC, but the Navy SEALs have a few different medical personnel. The SEAL docs are split between regular SEALs sent to courses based on the 18D course (sometimes even the same course) to qualify as combat medics and Independent Duty Corpsman (IDC). Where the medics are integral parts of a SEAL platoon, IDCs are part of a Team's medical department and only occasionally function in an operational role attached to lower level units in the field.

A HACKER WITH A GUN
Skills
SIGINT and Computer Science are the backbone of any build along these lines. Beyond that,you can really develop in any way you want depending on why your Agent is focused on computers. I've personally built computer focused operators with everything from Craft (Electronics) to Pilot (Small Drone) to Forensics.

Who are you?
Signals intelligence is key to identifying and targeting leadership in an enemy organization and has only grown in importance as technology has expanded, making it essential for special operations forces. The premier special operations unit tasked with SIGINT collection is what was originally called the Intelligence Support Activity (ISA) though it cycles through code names on almost a yearly basis. These men and women are, in the loosest sense, reconnaissance troops — employed to gather intelligence on a target before JSOC hits it. In the War on Terror they used cell phone networks to map insurgent networks and even follow high value targets in real time. However, as the operational tempo increased each different unit in JSOC has felt the need to develop its own, organic capability, these are the previously mentioned Black Squadron, G Squadron, and Ranger Reconnaissance Company. These units increasingly overlap in terms of capability and it is a fair assessment to say that even if the ISA owns SIGINT in JSOC, everyone has people who can do it.

Outside of the Hollywood hacking that JSOC’s SIGINT collectors do there are plenty of other reasons for an operator to know their way around the inner workings of a computer. For one, operators have to process what they find at a target. In the old days this was just whatever papers you could find on the enemies, today it includes a whole host of personal electronics. The details of just what ‘sensitive site exploitation’ training includes are hard to come by, but unclassified documents include mention of ballistic imaging, handling large volumes of digital media, and ‘advanced cell phone exploitation’.

Old fashioned reconnaissance is the oldest special operations mission and that too has undergone a technological revolution. Operators these days are trained to use everything from drones to long range sensors to the microphones in their targets’ phones to do their job. In particular, Air Force Special Reconnaissance focuses on electronic intelligence gathering and cyberwarfare to help keep American planes in the sky.

A THIEF WITH A GUN
Skills
When it comes to breaking and entering in Delta Green you will very quickly run into a debate over Craft (locksmithing) and Special Training (Lockpicks). The argument being, whether they do the same thing and if so why must someone wanting to start with the ability to pick locks invest into Craft (locksmithing) when the rulebook suggests ‘An Agent might start the game with special training’. Personally, I try to differentiate between the two by having the craft represent a more fundamental understanding of, and ability to manipulate, locks which I have given an example of in a previous post. I suggest having this conversation with your Handler if you plan to build a character of this archetype.

Other than bypassing locks, the next obvious choice is Disguise. Additionally, Criminology can be quite useful. Though it is, in many ways, primarily a social skill it also covers broader knowledge of criminal behavior. Perhaps counterintuitively, I would also suggest Craft (Engineering) and Craft (Electronics). A combination of those two skills with the ones above and the Demolitions and Stealth you start with will allow an Agent to gain access to just about any building.

Who are you?
As noted earlier, reconnaissance is the bread and butter of special operations and that means covertly entering buildings. While anyone in special operations has a reason to have these skills, those in Advanced Force Operations units who recieve undercover training from the CIA, and of course CIA officers themselves have additional reason to have ‘thief skills’, especially those such as Criminology and Disguise.

If one goes down the Engineering route there are also a similar breadth of options. Breachers can be found in every unit, but 18C Engineer Sergeants on Green Beret ODAs are trained to put up, pull down, or blow apart just about any structure and have even been attached to Delta Force in a ‘Heavy Breaching Cell’ to give the Unit extra expertise when faced with particularly hard targets. One of the Navy SEALs’ primary missions is underwater demolitions against targets such as enemy ships or infrastructure like bridges as well as how to infiltrate a facility from the water. No matter what unit they are in, these experts use plasma cutters, halligans, explosives, shotguns and just about anything else you can imagine.

AN ANTHROPOLOGIST WITH A GUN
Skills
Putting a couple bonus skills into each to get 40% Anthropology and 50% History is the obvious starting place. If you want to invest more than that you could consider picking up a language, but unless you know that it will feature in your campaign (talk to your Handler about this, or ask if you can keep a ‘blank’ language slot floating) then my actual recommendation would be to drop some points into Occult. One bonus skill will take it to 30% and most damaged veteran packages give an extra 10% to put it at 40%, if you aren’t planning on taking a damaged veteran package then I suggest putting two bonus skills in.

Who are you?
The Green Berets of Army Special Forces have long referred to themselves as ‘armed anthropologists’. Such a characterization would no doubt be enough to make any academic scream, it is a good enough characterization of the Delta Green skill Anthropology. Green Berets are trained to integrate with an indigenous population overseas and train them up into a capable fighting force, as such they receive specialized language and cultural training. Agents do not have to be in Special Forces currently to have received this training, Delta Force, the Intelligence Support Activity and the CIA’s Special Activity Center all recruit Green Berets.

Though Special Forces may be the one organization designed to do this sort of work, other special operations units have increasingly found the need for similar training. In fact, General McChrystal, the former commander of JSOC and later all forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, emphasized the need for extensive cultural training as part of an anthropological approach to counterinsurgency. Agents who work in an intelligence role in their unit are especially likely to have extensive training in these fields.

AN ACCOUNTANT WITH A GUN
Skills
Six of your bonus skills will get you the powerful investigative trio of 50% Accounting, 50% Bureaucracy, and 40% Law. If you can’t think of anywhere else to put those last two bonus skills I’d suggest a skill that will help you gain access to records you can use your accounting on, such as Persuade, Search, or Computer Science.

Who are you?
Being an officer in any military unit, even a special operations one, means lots of paperwork. In fact, in a special operations unit, trusted with the best bits of kit, it means even more scrutiny is placed on accounting for everything. This in itself would be enough to justify more than a bit of bureaucracy, but special operators have also been trusted with managing multi-million dollar budgets more or less on their own.

In the War on Terror, the US found out quickly that the best way to get cooperation from a local kingpin was a bag full of money. Pretty much every counterinsurgency effort in the past twenty years has involved huge sums of money being handed out to any prospective partner force. It is common knowledge that these funds offer an easy off the books way to supplement government salary and, at least in some units, widely accepted. If you aren’t an officer or a senior NCO and you're handing out big sums to shady characters, you probably work for the CIA Special Activities Center.

ANYTHING ELSE
The archetypes here are just a few suggestions and only draw on what training an Agent might have had on the job, but the special operations community is remarkably diverse. In an organization that is now larger than the entire German army you can make a place for just about any concept you want. The former commander of the Marine Raider Regiment had a law degree from University College London, Morgan Luttrell had a degree in psychology, etc.

Bottom line, if you have a cool concept but are hung up on making it realistic, just explain why they joined up.



Other Concerns and Misconceptions
What profession do I use?
In the Agent’s Handbook there are the core professions in the Agents Creation section and agency specific professions in the ‘Federal Agencies’ chapter which include several variations on the special operator. I would never recommend a player use an agency specific profession to make a special operator. These professions are made by slicing off a bond and adding 50 more professional skills, but with a profession that only has two bonds to start, this simply leads to a very fragile character when the same skills could be better obtained with bonus skills. The best use of these ‘back of the book’ professions is simply to serve as inspiration for your own build.

Additionally, your profession isn’t necessarily your job and it is perfectly valid to use a different profession than the Special operator to represent someone in special operations. I have, for example, used the Intelligence Case Officer profession to represent a Black Squadron member and a Police Officer to build a CIA protective agent.

What do I Normally Carry with Me?
The ‘Tools of the Trade’ for special operators includes a ton of equipment that doesn’t really make sense in most scenarios. I like to figure out an everyday carry and some personally owned equipment with my Handler that I can normally use and then mark down the tools of the trade as in an armory. The Agent's Handbook offers some avenues to access stuff locked away like this through the rules for official requisitions (page 86) and the section on SOCOM's ‘Operational Budget’ (page 140).

EXAMPLE:
Civilian Attire: Medium Pistol (personally licensed), Extra Magazine, Multitool, Flashlight, IFAK on ankle (+20% to one first aid test), Military ID
At Home: Light Carbine with Holographic Sight (personally licensed, +20% to Firearms rolls if you haven't taken damage since your last turn)

In Armory: Assault carbine with holographic sight, targeting laser and sound suppressor, six spare magazines in a chest rig, medium pistol in a holster, two spare magazines in a chest rig, two fragmentation hand grenades, two smoke grenades, two ‘flash-bang’ stun grenades, combat knife, flexible cuffs, tactical body armor, Kevlar helmet, tactical light, goggles or sunglasses, night vision goggles, military-band radio with earpiece and throat microphone, multitool, compass, field dressing, and GPS.

Do I have to be Adapted to Violence?
No. Of course not. Damaged veteran packages are purely optional and you should only choose one if you want to.

If you are particularly worried about sticking to realism, well the answer is still no. Remember, you can experience violence without adapting to it.

Can I Play a Woman?
Yes. Of course. Play who you want.

If you are particularly worried about sticking to realism, well the answer is still yes. Shaina Coss became the first woman in the 75th Ranger Regiment in 2018 and led a Ranger platoon in Afghanistan, the first woman joined the Green Berets in 2020 and a female sailor completed SWCC training in 2021. However, women have long been part of less well known special operations units since their inception.

As JSOC's internal intelligence aperatus has expanded over the War on Terror the command came to the realization that having a woman on the team makes operating in many places a whole lot easier. The units which are known to have women among their ranks are DevGru's Black Squadron, Delta Force's G Squadron, and the Intelligence Support Activity. Though the Ranger Reconnaissance Company conducts similar missions I have not been able to find any information on women in the unit. It is unclear exactly what training female operators in these units receive and if it is the same as the shooters on the teams get, but this is a roleplaying game and that ambiguity should be your playground. Go with what you think is cool.

How Do I Work in the Continental United States?
There are an almost infinite number of ways to explain how a special operator might operate in the continental US, this section should not be seen as an exhaustive guide but rather a collection of options drawn from real world examples and the clues of how Delta Green operates in the books.

If you are an active duty military member in the Program, you will mostly use Temporary Duty Assignments (TDYs) to ‘attend Operas’. A TDY any travel that isn't a deployment or permanent transfer of base. They are most commonly used for service members who need to attend training, but are also staple of the more secretive parts of the military. A TDY allows for small elements of an organization to be tasked with a special mission outside their normal remit. For example, members of the Intelligence Support Activity were TDY-ed to Northern Virginia to work with the CIA on their targeting program and CIA officers were TDY-ed to the NYPD after 9/11 to help them expand their Intelligence Division. These assignments are possible because of the secretive culture fostered in these sorts of organizations.

In truth, the closest thing to the Program in real life is probably the compartmentalized special access programs run by the likes of CIA and JSOC. To look at just one example, the stealth helicopter program that eventually built the aircraft used in the bin Laden Raid was compartmented from the rest of the 160th SOAR and even several commanders of the unit were never told about the program. Being sent on a TDY you can’t talk about to anyone at your home unit may piss some people off but it won’t raise too many eyebrows.

The Outlaws do not have a special access program to put on official paperwork and form a task force under. What the Outlaws do have, as I have written about elsewhere, is a conspiracy of career government employees scattered throughout almost every federal agency imaginable who believe their corruption is literally saving the world. As such, having someone pull strings is probably not the hardest thing in the world for them. TDYs would still be used but more often for actual training or conferences. Agents may have to put in a token appearance at a local national guard base and tell the weekend warriors a war story to ‘train them on survival techniques’. Alternatively, Agents might be transferred to a stateside training position on a more long term basis. If necessary they could even put in for leave due to a bogus family emergency.

White SOF, Black SOF?
Within the Special Operations community a divide is frequently drawn between those units who carry out operations relatively publicly and those who work covertly. In truth the difference is not so clear and both sides work extensively with each other and their mission sets overlap.

Yet, there is a real divide between those units housed under the broader umbrella of Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and those in the SOCOM component known as Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). ‘White’ SOCOM units — Rangers, Green Berets, SEALs, PJs — are officially recognized, you can look up their names and find their basic force structure from official sources; ‘black’ JSOC units are mostly unacknowledged, while everyone knows that Delta Force exists you can’t find it in official army publications and it regularly changes its official code name.

Who do I say I work for?
Much of the appeal of playing a special operator comes from the world of secrecy they exist in and players often want to play coy with the rest of the party about who exactly they work for. If you are in a ‘black’ unit you have reason not to openly use sensitive code words. Obscuring your unit can be as simple as telling other agents “you’re in the military” or outright lying, however, special operators enjoy making themselves sound mysterious, so euphemisms are a fun option. Here’s a few I have heard:
▪    SMU (Special Mission Unit) — Any unit that is ‘task-organized to perform highly classified activities’ namely the components of JSOC.
▪    USASOC (US Army Special Operations Command, pronounced You-Sah-Sock) — Technically any Army special operations unit, but used to refer to Army SMU components.
▪    A JSOC element tasked with non-HUMINT, non-Imagery intelligence collection —           The ISA.


Guide to Further Reading
First up, a disclaimer. This is NOT a guide to academic research. There are sources here I would never cite in a formal publication, but are good enough for a tabletop roleplaying game. If you want to educate yourself on this topic beyond its application to Delta Green make sure you cross reference and look up the author.

If you want to do your own research on American special operations the single best place to start is Sean Naylor’s Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command, it is the definitive history of JSOC and covers the wide array of missions they have been tasked with over the years. The second place to look is the vast array of reporting by Naylor and other journalists on SOF. In specific, beyond Naylor the work of Mark Mazzetti, Nick Turse and Jack Murphy (the last being the least academic by far) is usually illuminating and gameable. If one is looking for specific publications to follow, The Intercept has continually produced in depth investigative journalism on the topic.

There are also an increasing number of podcasts focused on interviewing special operations veterans. These offer bite sized glimpses at what individual special operators look like and are a great way to get a character concept. The Team House and Combat Story are two popular examples.

If you are looking for further book length stuff, the ‘Recommended Media’ section of the Agent’s Handbook (page 180) offers a good selection. I would also recommend Annie Jacobson’s Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins and anything by Linda Robertson.

Lastly, if you are simply looking for inspiration for unusual skills to give a special operator a great many catalogs of courses are unclassified and available on the web. The Academic Handbook for the JFK Special Warfare Center and School is a good place to start with this, but more can be found on government websites and by trawling google.