Red Teams or Red Cells are United States government terms for the National Security Co-ordination Team (NSCT). These teams or units are designed to test the effectiveness of American

tactics Tactic(s) or Tactical may refer to: * Tactic (method), a conceptual action implemented as one or more specific tasks ** Military tactics, the disposition and maneuver of units on a particular sea or battlefield ** Chess tactics ** Political tact ...

or personnel. In 1984, Red Cell was formed after

Richard Marcinko Richard Marcinko (November 21, 1940 – December 25, 2021) was a United States Navy SEALs, U.S. Navy SEAL Commander (United States), commander and Vietnam War veteran. He was the first commanding officer of United States Naval Special Warfare D ...

relinquished command of

SEAL Team Six The Naval Special Warfare Development Group (NSWDG), abbreviated as DEVGRU ("Development Group") and commonly known as SEAL Team Six, is the United States Navy component of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). The unit is often referre ...

to Commander Robert Gormly. Red Cell members demonstrated the vulnerabilities of military bases and would regularly use false IDs, dismantle fences, barricade buildings, take hostages, and kidnap high ranking personnel. Additionally, Red Cell planted bombs near

Air Force One Air Force One is the official air traffic control designated call sign for a United States Air Force aircraft carrying the president of the United States. In common parlance, the term is used to denote U.S. Air Force aircraft modified and used ...

, snuck into submarine bases, and took them over. Their operations were recorded and subsequently displayed to base personnel. This action was partly to humiliate the targets and also give them a look into vulnerabilities that they should patch. "I'd tell them Red Cell was coming, eat them alive, and then show the film and rub their noses in it," Marcinko stated in an interview. The original Red Cell was a 14-man team composed of 13 former members of

and one Force Recon Marine. The unit was also known as OP-O6D which had been organized to attempt to infiltrate and otherwise test the security of U.S. military bases and other installations sensitive to U.S. security interests. The team was led by the former commander of

(

DEVGRU The Naval Special Warfare Development Group (NSWDG), abbreviated as DEVGRU ("Development Group") and commonly known as SEAL Team Six, is the United States Navy component of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). The unit is often referre ...

)

until he was relieved of duty and charged with various offenses including misappropriating funds. It was alleged that these were made up allegations as part of a vendetta against Marcinko, due to anger felt at senior levels at how easily Marcinko and his team had infiltrated bases and procured top secret information from high-ranking individuals. A high-ranking Navy official says there was no vendetta and that "the general take was that Red Cell was a good thing." Realistic exercise scenarios executed around the world involved documentation using both civilian and military personnel. Remote, fixed and handheld video cameras captured all aspects of the exercises and were used to compile quick-look after-action reviews as well as in-depth lessons learned catalogs. The name was derived from ''

Red Team A red team or team red are a group that plays the role of an enemy or competitor to provide security feedback from that perspective. Red teams are used in many fields, especially in cybersecurity, airport security, law enforcement, the military a ...

'', a term for the

opposing force An opposing force (alternatively enemy force, abbreviated OPFOR) is a military unit tasked with representing an enemy, usually for training purposes in war game scenarios. The related concept of aggressor squadron is used by some air forces. T ...

in a

war game A wargame is a strategy game in which two or more players command opposing armed forces in a realistic simulation of an armed conflict. Wargaming may be played for recreation, to train military officers in the art of strategic thinking, or to s ...

by western nations during the

Cold War The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because the ...

, a reference to the predominantly red flags of Communist nations (i.e., the

USSR The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...

and

PRC China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...

) with the

western nations The Western world, also known as the West, primarily refers to the various nations and states in the regions of Europe, North America, and Oceania.

being the Blue Team. The USSR used the same colors, but reversed meaning—they were the Red Team and the

OpFor An opposing force (alternatively enemy force, abbreviated OPFOR) is a military unit tasked with representing an enemy, usually for training purposes in war game scenarios. The related concept of aggressor squadron is used by some air forces. ...

was the Blue Team. A new Red Cell team was formed by

CIA The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian intelligence agency, foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gat ...

after the

9/11 attacks The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated Suicide attack, suicide List of terrorist incidents, terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, ...

to brainstorm ways to attack America, in order to come up with security measures to prevent them. Novelist

Brad Meltzer Brad Meltzer (born April 1, 1970) is an Americans, American novelist, non-fiction writer, TV show creator, and comic book author. His novels touch on the political thriller, legal thriller and conspiracy fiction genres, while he has also writte ...

was recruited to write plots as part of this program.

1986 kidnapping incident

On March 20, 1986, Red Cell team members kidnapped Ronald D. Sheridan, a civilian security guard who worked at

Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach is a United States Navy weapons and munitions loading, storage and maintenance facility located in Seal Beach, California, with detachments in Fallbrook and Norco, both also in California. It also encloses the ...

in Southern California as part of an exercise to test the defenses of the base. They took him to a nearby hotel where he was held for 30 hours and tortured: stripped, kicked, beaten, and repeatedly dunked into a bathtub filled with water and a flushing toilet. While in theory the kidnapping could prove a weakness, actually committing the torture served no useful purpose. In addition, the kidnapping was not even successful as a show of weakness; Sheridan's wife saw the suspicious men with a van and got the drop on them with her own pistol, and was only prevented from shooting the would-be kidnappers by her husband calling her off and insisting it was part of an exercise, as he thought at the time it would be a brief matter. Since Sheridan was not naval personnel, he sued the government afterward.{{cite news , last=Willman , first=Martha L. , date=March 28, 1987 , title=Navy Weapons Base Guard, Wife Recall 30 Hours of Terror , url=https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-03-28-me-595-story.html , work=The Los Angeles Times , access-date=November 19, 2021

References

External links

Red Cell at Special Operations.com

by

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adv ...

—archived page Special Operations Forces of the United States United States Naval Special Warfare Command