Vanguard
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Vanguard is a highly secretive research and development program within the United States military under the oversight of the Department of Home Security. Officially, its function is to speculate on potential terrorist threats and to provide recommendations to U.S. law enforcement and military forces. However, under the direction of Colonel Gideon Vasher, it has become a powerful and independent paramilitary agency dedicated to protecting the United States and the entire human race from the emerging mutant threat.
History
Initially a cooperative effort between the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. military, Vanguard suffered from a lack of executive direction and poorly-defined objectives which hamstrung its effectiveness as an anti-terrorism agency. It languished for several years under a series of unimaginative directors who were hesitant to take any action beyond holding routine training maneuvers and filing regular reports. The program was a bureaucratic wasteland, redundant, under-funded, and ineffective.
That changed with the arrival of Colonel Gideon Vasher, a decorated military operative with the U.S. Army department of intelligence. Despite his effectiveness in the field, Vasher had acquired a well-deserved reputation as a loose cannon, and his superiors were eager to shuffle him off to a quiet position where he could do no harm. Vanguard appeared to be the perfect assignment in which to effectively retire the maverick officer.
However, Vasher recognized a great deal of potential in the convoluted network of contacts and requisitions that Vanguard had in place, and he quickly supplemented it with his own resources and contacts in the States and abroad. Taking advantage of his program's lowly state in his superiors' eyes, he secretly cast a nation-wide web of supply orders and grant requests that all led through a variety of tortuous channels and into Vanguard's accounts. Backed by friends in upper levels of American intelligence, various defense contractors, and private corporations, Vasher transformed Vanguard into his own personal Black Ops division.
Facilities
Vanguard occupies a converted nuclear fallout bunker built into the mountains of western Montana. Within this bunker are numerous medical facilities, holding cells, scientific labs, and field testing ranges. Colonel Vasher has assembled some of the finest minds in genetic and military engineering to populate the facility's extensive research and development wing.
Vanguard also is intimately involved with the Genetic Research Institute in Connecticut, a medical facility that conducts extensive and possibly unethical experiments on resident mutant youths. In addition, Vanguard has ties to a number of pharmaceutical, weapons, and manufacturing corporations throughout the United States.
Agenda
Under Colonel Vasher's directorship, Vanguard has taken a highly liberal interpretation of its original mandate. Rather than speculate broadly on the potential activities of conventional terrorists, Vanguard now focuses exclusively on what Vasher believes to be the greatest single threat ever to face the United States - the mutant strain.
In the eyes of Vanguard, mutants represent not a subset of humanity but a competing species vying for dominance. Conflict between the two species is inevitable; therefore humans must find a way to overcome the mutants' genetic advantage or risk their own eventual extinction. To that end, Vanguard has developed a variety of anti-mutant countermeasures including restraining collars, blood tests for the X-gene, adaptive tranquilizing agents, advanced tactical weaponry, and body armor. Some of these technologies have already been released to hospitals and law enforcement through Vanguard's various partner companies.
However, all these pursuits are secondary to the goal of creating an entirely new kind of soldier capable of matching the mutant threat force for force. To that end, Vanguard has poured considerable resources into advancing the state of both military hardware and wetware. Their facilities have conducted extensive research into genetic resequencing and cybernetics. They have even created a series of viral serums, dubbed "mutagen," designed to infuse human soldiers with the power of the X-gene.
