In my headcanon, until proven otherwise by our hosts, X-COM in the UF universe looks something like this:

(As always, I am not Ben Hutchins, and these are merely the imaginings of a reader.)

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The Extraterrestrial Combat Unit (X-COM)

Formed in SY 1948 as as a response to the Reticulan incident at Roswell the Extraterrestrial Combat Unit, usually abbreviated as X-COM or XCOM, was formed by the UN to study alien technologies and develop defense strategies against possible invasion. As there were very few extraterrestrial incursions over the next half-century, the organization languished in obscurity, avoiding disbandment or being folded into UNIT due to the periodic technological breakthroughs that emerged from its labs.

Priorities changed in SY 1992, after the flashy and destructive clash between the nascent WDF and GENOM Corporation over Neo-Worcester. One of the many panicked responses to that event was a sudden and massive influx of money, resources, and respect to the then-tiny X-COM, which had been waiting for its day in the sun for over forty years and quickly established a reputation amongst those in the know as Earth's premiere force of extraterrestrial hunter-killers and developers of weaponry that derived from nonhuman technological paradigms. Much good was done by them; Earth in the nebulous decade prior to formal first contact was the focus of much criminal extraterrestrial activity. However, much evil was done as well; the Vulcan Science Academy holds X-COM responsible for the disappearance of one of their survey vessels in SY 1998, the Incom Corporation claims that X-COM's Interceptor and Firestorm aerospace combat platforms were developed using information "obtained" from a SubPro liaison who vanished from his hotel room in 1995, and significant evidence exists that the organization attempted to mount an invasion of Mars well before the SY 2002 Colonization War, destroying the ancient Sarmak temple complex at Cydonia Mensae for reasons unknown.

X-COM itself splintered during the First Contact Wars, with the bulk of the organization siding with the holdout nations of the Anti-Alien Alliance. Brigadier General J.A Lethbridge-Stewart, leader of the "loyalist" X-COM faction, re-formed the rump of it into a division of UNIT in 2005; however, it was largely held together by his personal charisma and authority, and the tendency towards human supremacy remained strong in the rank and file. Following the Brigadier's death in 2057, X-COM was disbanded altogether, although rogue elements within it, sponsored by the industrialist Jack Harper, would abscond with much of their proprietary alien-killing technology and go on to form the human-supremacist terrorist group known as Cerberus.

The second iteration of the Extraterrestrial Combat Unit was re-chartered by the Olympus superstate in the 2300s as a bulwark against the ongoing interference of extrasolar powers (primarily GENOM, but also including the CFMF and others) in Earth affairs. This organization was much leaner and more focused than its predecessor, and never controlled the globe-spanning resources thereof; in fact, it rarely fielded more than a single strike team. It did, however, have significant engineering and scientific expertise; noted polymath and X-COM Head of Engineering Doctor Charles Shen was responsible for a number of remarkable advances in plasma bottling, and his Skyranger dropship design is very nearly comparable in performance to a Pelican for half the up-front cost.

The modern version of X-COM came fully into its own following the War of Corporate Occupation, during which Colonel David Bradford led the STRIKE-1 team against no less than twenty separate GENOM command and control nodes, often penetrating deep into enemy-held territory to do so. Operation RELENTLESS CONSULTANT (known officially as the Twelfth Battle of New Orleans and locally as the 12th Ward Uprising; see related Galactipedia entries) is the best-known of their still mostly classified missions. Shot down over eastern Texas en route to the insertion point, Colonel Bradford commandeered local transportation, led his team through back-country Louisiana, and rendezvoused with local partisans on-schedule and with their mission payload intact. Under cover of civil disturbance, STRIKE-1 infiltrated and destroyed the grounded Acclamator-class assault ship serving as GENOM's regional command hub, disabling aerospace C&C over the entire Imperial Americana. The team then deployed an experimental portable capital-class deflector shield generator in the city center, preventing GENOM from responding with an orbital bombardment in reprisal, as their tactical doctrine indicated in such situations. STRIKE-1 held the line against repeated MILARM orbital drop pod assaults for 48 hours until they could be relieved by the Olympus naval task force sent from Cuba to liberate and secure the city.

Folded into EarthForce following the formation of the Earth Alliance, David Bradford was made X-COM C-in-C. Commander Bradford re-organized and expanded the organization, which now had an interstellar as opposed to merely planetary ambit.

Unfortunately for X-COM, it was not immune to the political deterioration that would set into the EA during the 2390s and 2400s. Never regarded as politically reliable by EarthDome, too much of a patriot to resign, and too visible and renowned a war hero to dismiss, Commander Bradford was forced into a series of increasingly untenable choices. X-COM itself was saddled with a number of political appointees, including their Head of Research, Doctor Moira Valen, referred to by Charles Shen as the "craziest woman to pick up a vivisecting knife since K'athrynn Halsey."

The comparison to the Salusian war criminal was to prove apt; much like Halsey, Valen produced solid results in the field of genetically-enhanced soldiering and was not overly concerned with medical ethics in doing so. Provided by EarthDome with nearly limitless amount of the experimental bio-mimetic gel known as MELD (precise chemical composition and source still unknown) Valen produced a long line of super-soldiers. Primarily focused on quantity over quality (although both Charles Shen and Commander Bradford maintain that had she been given the budget, Valen could have produced Magnificent Ten equivalents; the thought kept them up many a night) X-COM's genetically and cybernetically enhanced strike troopers would prove to be one of the most cost-effective force multipliers in Known Space. This did not go unnoticed by X-COM's political masters; by 2408, Valen's influence within the organization was so strong and her position so untouchable she was known to go over Commander Bradford's head to make direct contact with strike teams in the field, directing them to recover or preserve this or that piece of rare technology or particularly useful-looking corpse, regardless of prior mission directives.

The missions themselves were of an increasingly uncomfortable nature to the dwindling number of X-COM veterans among the command staff and the unmodified troopers in the rank-and-file; where before they were tasked with destroying genuine extraterrestrial threats to human life, increasingly X-COM strike teams were being deployed for targeted assassinations, snatch-and-grab jobs, dubious black ops in the space of fellow Federation members, and on one very memorable occasion for riot suppression on Proxima Centauri.

Ironically, it was the sidelining of Commander Bradford and the remaining old guard that would prove to be the undoing of EarthDome's new and improved X-COM. With so many mission directives coming from outside of standard channels, Commander Bradford was free to focus X-COM's intelligence assets on genuine threats as opposed to political targets of opportunity. Big Fire, the Church of Man, the Sword of Salusia, the Ktulhu, among others, were no more beloved by the Clark and Greeley administrations than they were by other galactic polities, and when not needed to act as a cudgel the Dome was more than happy to let Commander Bradford do his job as he saw fit.

What happened next remains classified at the highest levels, but the broad details are known; sometimes in late 2411, Commander Bradford uncovered evidence that what he had previously thought to be malicious and cynical xenophobic propaganda was indeed true; the Earth Alliance, and by proxy the Federation, had indeed been compromised at the highest levels by extraterrestrial forces hostile to its existence.

Bradford acted decisively, as he was known for. He passed his intelligence through a back-channel to the Salusians, and from there it made its way to the 3WA and the IPO, where it reinvigorated their long-stalled investigation into the explosion of the USS Danzig. He then quietly began preparing X-COM for the worst.

When the worst came, in the form of the Federation Civil War of 2412, much of X-COM simply vanished. Ordered to execute pre-invasion strikes on New Avalon and Jyurai to decapitate vital strategic targets prior to the arrival of the Federation task forces sent to subdue those polities, only a single X-COM strike team arrived at the pick-up point. It was subsequently discovered that Commander Bradford and Doctor Shen, in conjunction with X-COM's entire engineering staff and a little over a third of its combat strength, had pulled the trigger on a long-planned mutiny. Doctor Valen and her research team survived, barricaded in their offices, at the cost of the lives of another third of X-COM's combat strength, but the armory was emptied, the generators and other vital base infrastructure destroyed, and the hangers bare; Bradford had disappeared.

He hadn't gone far. As X-COM C-in-C, Commander Bradford has been one of the only people on Earth to both know about and care about Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart's centuries-old collection of files. Contained in those files had been a complete accounting of every weapon, craft, and building that the first iteration of X-COM had ever commissioned... including the location of their secondary research base, buried under the ice pack on Ellesmere Island. It was cold, isolated, completely inadequate to the logistical needs of a modern military organization, laughably designed and laid out... but it was undetectable from orbit, still had a working runway, and the thermal borehole that powered the base hadn't collapsed yet. Once there, they linked up with other partisans, most notably the Canadian Resistance, and got to work. X-COM engineering expertise and the location of the base itself were particularly useful to the outlaw aerospace firm Avro Canada, and five of the famous 48 Avro Arrows that reclaimed the skies over Canada on the Day of Reckoning based out of the Ellesmere base and proudly wear X-COM livery alongside their RCAF insignia to this day.

Bradford would remark that the work done by X-COM during the Federation Civil War was fundamentally the same as what he'd done in the War of Corporate Occupation, just with "a certain flavor of outlawry we didn't have back when a legitimate government was footing the bill." X-COM primarily busied itself with strikes against Psi Corps installations all across North America and Europe; in a twist of fate, one of the genetic modifications Doctor Valen had approved for widespread deployment rendered the person receiving it nearly immune to telepathic attack and compromise, and a higher proportion of these genemodded strike troopers had sided with Bradford than any other group. X-COM also busied itself with further crippling the EarthDome loyal remnant it had left behind; Doctor-cum-Commander Valen was an excellent scientist but in no way Bradford's strategic or tactical equal, although some of her increasingly monstrous strike troopers proved to be nasty surprises on more than one occasion.

On the Day of Reckoning, X-COM strike teams preceded either civilian uprisings or IPO/Galactic Alliance landings into many major urban areas, often decapitating vital command nodes prior to conventional assault. Bradford himself reportedly wanted to drop into Paris personally with STRIKE-1 in order to deal with President Clark and his associates face-to-face, but was waved off by the IPO at the last minute. STRIKE-1 had to content itself with reclaiming their recently-vacated original base and apprehending the erstwhile Commander Valen.

Granted amnesty and with their charter amended and restored, Commander Bradford and X-COM were rapidly and swiftly integrated into the Sheridan Provisional Government; the destabilization of the Federation Civil War had caused massive surges by Big Fire and other opportunistic entities seeking to cash in on the collapse of EarthForce and Starfleet and the subsequent overstretching of the military and law enforcement resources of the newly-minted Galactic Alliance. They operate closely in conjunction with the IPO, and discussions are underway to devolve operational (though not strategic) command of the entire Centauri sector to X-COM, freeing up IPO resources for use on the Outer Rim and Coreward Frontier.

Moira Valen vanished from her cell in January of SY 2413, days before her trial was to begin.

Her current whereabouts are unknown.

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(Yes, this is what I spent my entire day doing. What of it?)

-Merc
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