-WHO DARES WINS, 2023-

"What the hell kind of name is 'Soap', eh? How'd a Muppet like you get past selection?"

Northeastern Poland, Narew River

22 SAS, B SQN, BOAT TROOP, with elements from SBS, M SQN

Alternative Universe - "A Disillusioned Earth"

01// THE WORLD — WORLD WAR THREE, EASTERN FRONT

The early hours of a Tuesday morning was interrupted when ACMF paratroopers dropped into Poland and Germany and the world that had been managing its contradictions stopped managing them. What followed was not the war that any NATO planning document had fully anticipated.

What NATO has on the Eastern Front without full American strategic weight is what it has built in the decade since the first ACMF treaty was signed, which is, it turns out, more than the ACMF planning assumed. Germany's Bundeswehr mobilized within forty-eight hours of the Polish invasion. The French contributed their rapid reaction element within seventy-two. The Baltic states, which have been preparing for exactly this since 2014, were already forward-deployed. The line that the ACMF expected to break in the first week has not broken. It has bent in three sectors, held in four, and is being contested with the specific determination of nations that understand what losing looks like from the inside.

The Eastern Front in 2023 now runs from the Baltic coast through Poland's eastern border region and into the Carpathian foothills, after the initial offensive made by NATO forces, with the help of the 10th Panzerdivision.

The line of contact shifts daily and neither side has been able to stabilize into the static front that both sides' logistics would prefer. The Russian main effort is in the north, through the Suwalki corridor and into Poland's Baltic flank, supported by Belarusian forces on the southern axis. The ACMF's Chinese contingent is providing equipment, logistics, and military advisors that NATO's intelligence architecture has been mapping with incomplete success. The Turkish and Iranian contributions are running in the south, in the Carpathian sector, where the terrain advantages NATO's defensive posture but the force ratios do not.

In this war, the special operations component is doing what special operations does in a peer conflict: not winning the war, which no special operations force wins alone, but shaping the conditions in which the conventional fight occurs; degrading command architecture, disrupting logistics, producing the intelligence picture that conventional forces need and cannot produce themselves in denied territory. Task Force Knight is the British contribution to this effort.

02// SAS, SBS; TASK FORCE "KNIGHT" - REACTIVATED

Task Force Knight was the operational designation for the British special operations task force that ran direct action and intelligence operations in Kashar and Nahrain (the Iraq equivalent of this universe) at the height of those campaigns. It was stood down when the campaigns wound down and the institutional appetite for the model it represented reduced to a maintenance posture.

It was reactivated forty-eight hours after the Polish invasion.

The reactivated Task Force Knight draws from the full UKSF order of battle — 22 SAS providing the land and maritime direct action capability, the Special Boat Service providing the dedicated maritime and reconnaissance elements, the Special Reconnaissance Regiment providing the intelligence and surveillance architecture, and 18 (UKSF) Signal Regiment elements providing the communications infrastructure that connects all of it.

The joint nature of the task force is not a bureaucratic arrangement. It is an operational necessity. The Eastern Front generates requirements that exceed what any single UKSF unit can resource alone, and the integration of SAS and SBS capabilities in particular; the SAS's direct action depth and the SBS's maritime technical expertise, which produces a combined capability that neither unit has at the same level independently.

Task Force Knight operates from a forward mounting base in northeastern Poland, where the location is classified, but it is running the planning and intelligence cycle that produces the targeting packages that the task force executes. The packages run every seventy-two hours when the intelligence picture supports it. The current cycle has produced a target. RSM. Chelsea Delaney is leading the ground element.

*pictured above: Task Force Knight operators preparing for a spin-up.

Team Composition:

WO1 Delaney - Assaulter, Element CO

SSgt. Hendricks - Breacher, XO

Sgt. Farrelly - Breacher, with Hendricks

Cpl. Tullock - Assaulter, with Delaney

Sgt. Osei - Rear Security, Machinegunner

04// MISSION STATEMENT:

Direct action strike against the Russian 3rd Combined Arms Army forward command element and concurrent rescue of three Polish civilian hostages, Białystok region, occupied Poland. Riverine infiltration via the Narew system. Two co-primary objectives. One facility. One window.

CO-PRIMARY OBJECTIVE ONE - HVT STRIKE: Capture the 3rd CAA forward command element. Four targets. Colonel Volkov, capture preferred, confirmed neutralization if capture is not achievable. Two operational planning officers, neutralize or capture. 3rd CAA Intelligence Officer, neutralize and confirm identity via SSE.

CO-PRIMARY OBJECTIVE TWO - HOSTAGE RESCUE: Locate and extract three Polish civilian hostages confirmed present in the primary building. Location within the building is unconfirmed, but assessed at MEDIUM confidence in the northeast room.

The SSE phase may confirm the identity of HVT-4 and may answer the question of what information the 3rd CAA's intelligence officer has been extracting from the hostages.

05// CHARACTER

Name: Chelsea Delaney

Age: 34

Rank: WO1 (RSM)

Nationality: British

Unit: Special Air Service, 22nd Regiment, B Squadron

Backstory:

Chelsea Delaney is 34 years old, a Warrant Officer 1 in 22 SAS B Squadron's Boat Troop, and the ground element commander for tonight's operation against the Russian 3rd Combined Arms Army forward command post in occupied Poland. She was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Lisburn Road, South Belfast, the specific geography of a city that has its own complicated relationship with British military service and that produced in Chelsea a specific kind of loyalism. She hated the Provos growing up, and naturally supported British-occupied Northern Ireland

Her father was a former Ulster Defence Regiment soldier who became a mechanical engineer after the Good Friday peace process. Her mother was a nurse at the Royal Victoria Hospital. She grew up in a house where service was understood as normal and where the specific Northern Irish relationship with understatement; the dry wit that treats the most serious things with the most humorous and flattest possible delivery. She underwent three SAS selection attempts produced one pass, on the third, at twenty-four. She doesn't discuss the first two attempts in terms of what they cost and especially doesn't discuss the third in terms of what passing it felt like, because neither conversation produces anything useful.

When she passed, she was assigned to B Squadron's Boat Troop at twenty-five, qualified combat swimmer, closed-circuit rebreather, the full maritime portfolio, and has been running riverine and maritime operations for nine years.

Her pre-war deployments were; two in the Middle East, one in West Africa, one classified location that is not on her official record and that she does not discuss. The classified deployment produced her current facility with a specific type of direct action work that the Eastern Front has turned out to require more of than anyone anticipated when the campaign planning was done.

She arrived on the Eastern Front six weeks ago as a Boat Troop operator. She became the ground element commander in the second week when the previous commander was evacuated with a compound leg fracture from a compromised exfiltration and the task force needed someone who knew the operational picture and could run the element immediately.

misc notes: okay... might be my last real world SF character before I go on to make more SCP MTF characters. No one has ever made a proper SAS character on this site, (except for the call of duty ghost slop characters), so I thought I'd make one. I originally planned this character to be a ROK NAVSPECWARFLOT character... but I decided not to. I have almost zero information about the unit.

cheers for 80+ followers.