CIA Special Activities Division PMO Skill Set

[TheOneRonin]

Per Wikipedia:

In addition to the eighteen months of training in the Clandestine Service Trainee (CST) Program required to become a clandestine intelligence officer, Paramilitary Operations Officers are trained to a high level of proficiency in the use and tactical employment of an unusually wide degree of modern weaponry, explosive devices and firearms (foreign and domestic), hand to hand combat, high performance/tactical driving (on and off road), apprehension avoidance (including picking handcuffs and escaping from confinement), improvised explosive devices, cyberwarfare, covert channels, Military Free Fall parachuting, combat and commercial SCUBA and closed circuit diving, proficiency in foreign languages, surreptitious entry operations (picking or otherwise bypassing locks), vehicle hot-wiring, Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE), extreme survival and wilderness training, combat EMS medical training, tactical communications, and tracking.

So my first question is this...how would you represent those skillsets in GURPS?

My second question is, what point value do you think these guys would clock in as?

[cosmicfish]

Well, the easy way to represent them is to take the template for a Tier 1 unit (DEVGRU, Delta, etc) and the template for a CIA Case Officer and then combine them. That will pretty well cover them all, but I would be surprised if the individual is then less than 500-600 points. Bear in mind that a typical entry-level guy has probably 5+ years in a "regular" special operations unit, followed by 3+ years in that Tier 1 unit, followed by the better part of 2 years in additional training... AT A MINIMUM. They are supposed to be the most highly-trained operators on the planet.

[TheOneRonin]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

Well, the easy way to represent them is to take the template for a Tier 1 unit (DEVGRU, Delta, etc) and the template for a CIA Case Officer and then combine them. That will pretty well cover them all, but I would be surprised if the individual is then less than 500-600 points. Bear in mind that a typical entry-level guy has probably 5+ years in a "regular" special operations unit, followed by 3+ years in that Tier 1 unit, followed by the better part of 2 years in additional training... AT A MINIMUM. They are supposed to be the most highly-trained operators on the planet.

Thanks for the feedback, fish.

While I'd be willing to bet that a significant % of SAD PMOs come from Tier 1 SMUs, I wouldn't use that as the standard.

Heck, Mike Span didn't even have any special operations experience to begin with.

I guess what I'm getting at is what would be the minimum skill ranks you would find amongst a freshly trained batch of SAD SOG guys?

Yeah...someone coming off of 10+ years in CAG/ACE is going to have a Guns (Rifle) skill somewhere around 20...but that's probably not the normal skill level. Heck, most of the recruits from Army SF, white SEAL teams, CCT/PJ, and other backgrounds won't have near that level of shooting proficiency, even after 18 months of SAD training.

I also think that, while there are undoubtedly some 500 - 600 point guys in SAD, I wouldn't think that is the norm, especially for new members.

Granted, your 45 year old SAD SOG Team Leader who spent 8 years as a Ranger, 12 in CAG, and 7 years as a PMO might be at that level. But the 28 and 32 year old guys under him probably won't be.

What I'm working on is basically a SAD SOG PMO template that sets the base level of skills, attributes, and advantages/disadvantages. Then I'll have some background packages that will round out the agents abilities.

So I just need help in pinning down where those base skills clock in it.

[johndallman]

You could probably make good use of GURPS: Special Ops, which has templates for many special operations organisations. It's for Third Edition, but skill levels mean basically the same thing.

[Ewan]

The designer notes for the 3rd edition Special Ops contains a template for a CIA SAD character which you could use for inspiration.

http://sjgames.com/pyramid/sample.html?id=3027

[TheOneRonin]

Thanks for the feedback, Johndallman/Ewan.

I didn't have GURPS Spec Ops, so I bought it from E23 today.

It's a great resource, and looks like it's going to be very helpful for what I'm working on.

The SAD template in the Pyramid article is a great starting point and helps me understand how the GURPS developers view skillsets and skill levels for these types of operators.

The templates in the Spec Ops book do raise some questions, though.

How on God's Green Earth do vanilla SEALs come out with more points than Delta/CAG guys?

WTF?

Smells like author bias to me.

[johndallman]

Some skills you might want to consider adding:

Administration: as all these guys are experienced NCOs, they will have some basic paperwork skills.

NBC Suit: They will presumably have had basic NBC warfare training.

Scrounging: You don't always have a full-function supply chain.

The template also looks a bit light on practical intelligence collection skills: some of Acting, Fast-talk, Holdout, Interrogation, Research, Search, and Urban Survival would be plausible.