Red Cell

Red Teams or Red Cells are United States government terms for the National Security Co-ordination Team (NSCT). These teams or units are designed to test the effectiveness of American tactics or personnel. "Red Cell" was purported to be a U.S. Navy SEAL team (composed primarily of members of SEAL Team Six) otherwise known as OP-O6D which had been organized to attempt to infiltrate and otherwise test the security of U.S. military bases and other installations sensitive to U.S. security interests. The original Red Cell group was led by the former commander of SEAL Team Six (DEVGRU) Richard Marcinko until he was relieved and charged with various offenses including misappropriating funds.

"Red Team" was also a term for the opposing force OpFor in a war game by western nations during the Cold War, a reference to the predominantly red flags of Communist nations (i.e. the USSR and PRC) with the western nations being the Blue Team. The USSR used the same colors in reversed meaning&mdash;they were the Red Team and the OpFor was the Blue Team.

The novelists Brad Meltzer, Dan Brown and Brad Thor were recruited to write terror plots as part of the US Department of Homeland Security's Analytic Red Cell program.

A Red Cell was used after the 9/11 attacks to brainstorm ways to attack America, in order to come up with security measures to prevent them.