NEO Special Operations

What Exactly Is NEO Special Operations

The NSO teams are a specially trained division of Starfleet. They could best be described as a combination of a 21st-century police SWAT team and a military Special Forces group. They are different from the standard Marine security details carried aboard battleships like the Sisko as in they specialize in covert operations, and other operations where sending in the infantry would not be the best course of action.

The NSO training officer best explained what NSO is in a nutshell to 1st Lieutenant Kio Yuki:

"We're not infantry. It's not about shooting first, asking questions later. We're a special tactics team. Sometimes shooting everything is the right answer, sometimes not. You need to remember the sometimes not and act on those instincts."

NSO, short for NEO Special Operations, is currently an experiment being conducted jointly by Starfleet Intelligence, Starfleet Security, and the Starfleet Land Defense Corps. As of Stardate 61372, it is pretty safe to say that the experiment is so far pretty successful as most missions have ended in either a successful outcome or at a minimum, an acceptable one.

Several issues have arisen regarding the NSO, several of them being raised by members of the Federation Council who have gradually found out about them and their missions despite their classified status.

The primary object focuses around the Federation having such an 'offensively focused' task force that appears to operate without the direct authorization of the Federation President, or at the very minimum, the authority of the Federation Council. However, the mandate for NSO was signed into law by the Federation President by executive order (which was subsequently sealed), so all objections are merely for show and hold no weight.

The NSO teams take advantage of several technologies not currently available to much of Starfleet due to the experimental nature of the equipment. While placing their lives in the hands of untested equipment might seem risky, a large amount of it was seized from the Dominion, and therefore is known to work; it just hasn't been tested with Federation officers or procedures.

Despite all the technology placed into protecting the team members and the massive amount of training each member goes through, the NSO team has lost several members in hostile action, proving that keeping the Federation safe in itself, not a safe task at all.