“On this ground, a powerful force will be built. A force that will someday help us to deploy a hundred times faster than we can today. Imagine it – thousands of strategic positions at our fingertips… and we’ll be able to secure those hostile territories, and establish new forward operating bases. This force will let us advance boldly… where no unit has gone before.“

– General Marcus Steele, at the dedication ceremony for the Advanced Combat Operations Center in Fort Prometheus, Colorado in 2025

These legendary words have long been repeated and paraphrased by successive generations of soldiers and tacticians seeking to fulfill one of the core mandates of the U.S. Army’s philosophy, and are etched into the minds of every military cadet and many Department of Defense personnel. In a time preceded by great regional conflicts and asymmetric warfare, the U.S. Army of the Continental Defense Force seeks to embody those principles once more, as the Army recovers from the devastation and existential threats posed by the Resource Wars and the cyber attacks on Fort McKinley, to once again rediscover its sense of tactical superiority and operational excellence, and return to securing the expanding frontier.

Armed with the same ethos and mandate that guided the historic Ranger-class battalions and their extended deployment missions of the twenty-first century, the U.S. Army is committed to operating in the most hostile and remote theaters of operation, with unprecedented access to both the Northern Wilderness Zones and Southern Desert Sectors, returning Army units to not simply protecting established territories and defending against conventional threats, but to establishing new forward positions and securing strategic resources, in whatever form they may take and wherever they may be located. To this end, the U.S. Army has dispatched a number of specialized units, manned by elite soldiers from across the United States and allied nations, to make this advance into uncharted territory.

By nature of the mission, U.S. Army units very often find themselves isolated, operating far from established supply lines or command support, relying strongly on their training, discipline and one another to survive and succeed, in an uncertain and often hostile environment of unknowns.