User:RelentlessRecusant/Signals Platoon (Forced Entry)

The Signals Platoon (Forced Entry) — known more colloquially as the Forced Entry Signals Platoon — is a unique and highly mobile platoon subordinated to a Joint Signals Battalion that specifically supports forward deployed ground strike forces during forced entry operations into hostile environs — specifically, orbital SOEIV drops and high-altitude airborne assaults.

"Forced entry" operations — operations wherein UNSC forces must rapidly breach heavily-defended enemy-held territories using high-risk ingress techniques such as orbital drops or airborne drops — pose operationally-peculiar challenges. The number of troops that can be delivered through these modes are relatively few; typically only light infantry can be delivered via forced entry (it is hard to drop, say, a Warthog LRV from planetary orbit); and the survivors of the strike force that manage to land are far-removed from their headquarters and are stranded in the middle of heavily-defended hostile environs.

The Joint Signals Battalion is also endowed with a highly unique capability — the faculty to provide long-range signals support to vanguard "forced entry" combat forces and the forward edge of the battle area; namely Orbital Drop Shock Trooper strike forces. When the leading ODST battalion is the first to drop onto a hostile planet, it requires a highly resilient communications capability to link it back to Navy capital warship captains in orbit and Marine Expeditionary Force commanders that are still awaiting word in orbit. This comes in the form of a unique Signals Platoon (Forced Entry) assigned to the Joint Signals Battalion — a high-risk platoon of mobile communications specialists appended to the Headquarters Company of the Joint Signals Battalion that is assigned to forced entry troops to provide them with moving and continuous communications linkages back to their home task forces. The occupation is, incidentally, highly dangerous; Forced Entry Signals Platoon forces do not reside on the rear echelon but instead are exposed to the very same "forced entry" operations as ODSTs — screaming down in a SOEIV pod on hostile soil, harassed by anti-aircraft fire all the way, and then upon landing, advancing with the leading ODST battalion as it breaks out of its drop zone to advance to its operational objective, all the while relaying reports back to Navy warships in orbit and receiving commands from the ODST battalion's home regimental headquarters, still in orbit.