Mission of the Month May 2021 - Publicity Stunt
Added 2021-05-01 11:01:01 +0000 UTCOperation Kurgan will be conducted in the full glare of media attention. Mars has a complicated relationship with its media. On the one hand, they are respected and mostly trusted. On the other, they are seen almost as a shadow government that influences policy and public opinion. Consequently, their mission on Earth has attracted a lot of attention.
As a result, despite being of highest secrecy, Operation Kurgan - the Martian attempt to track down the Skylords, find out what they stole from the Namib facility and, if possible, recover it - has a lot of embedded journalists. The idea is that these journalists can report (live, in some cases) on on-going missions as long as the actual objectives and parameters of the missions are kept secret. Meanwhile, they can also report on all the secret stuff, but with a minimum wait time of half an M-year. So everyone working on Op Kurgan knows that what they are doing is going to be subject to public scrutiny once the mission is complete. This is supposed to keep them honest and discourage anything that would offend public morality, whilst still giving them time to operate sub rosa.
In the first Op Kurgan mission, the heroes take a journalist into the field specifically to provide the journalist with as much useful footage as possible, which the journalist will then be able to use later to pad out reports when too much has to be cut to maintain operational security.
The Red Force in this mission are just local thugs or troublemakers whose only job is to die in ways that make the team look cool.
