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I agree that you've identified potential plot holes in the setting, but the point that I and others were making is that the concrete information on the setting isn't out there yet - and it'll only be out there when we put the strategy layer out (a couple of months away at most). Until that point it's kinda pointless to debate the finer details of the setting, because you're asking me to spoil the entire setting and plot in advance to defend the set-up against your queries by explaining everything from scratch - which is time consuming on my part, and potentially going to spoil things for other people who would prefer to learn about it by playing the game. As I say, I'm more than happy to have people poke holes in my logic once it's all out in the open but it'd be much more efficient if you'd wait until you had read the whole thing and then we can confine our discussion to the finer points of the setting where you think there are specific problems. Until then you'll have to trust me when I say that I don't believe the issues you raise are a problem for the setting; feel free to go to town on it if my claims don't match up to reality. Without going into too much detail, the reason the aliens can't beat humanity is because they have VERY limited numbers rather than because their technology is bad (and thus there's a difference between being able to pass unnoticed through our ranks and our airspace and being able to survive the fight that would happen if they were revealed). The way infiltration works is through mind control, but it's less direct possession and more just altering peoples' personal beliefs or accessing their memories. For example, making an important American officer or politican feel far more hostile towards the Soviets and far more skeptical about the existence of aliens would benefit the aliens significantly, but it's not really detectable in the conventional sense and also not powerful enough that the aliens could achieve their objectives by immediately mind controlling the US President and pressing the nuclear button. It's about them building up enough hostility and paranoia in the world to overcome the natural resistance that both superpowers have to starting a nuclear war; the same effect can be used to muddy the water about their own existence even if there is solid evidence that they do. This also means the Xenonauts consider the world governments unreliable actors and aren't working completely openly with them - if they tell an official in the US government where their main base is and then the aliens read his mind, the aliens can find the Xenonauts and wipe them out. Instead they have to operate in relative secret, making it hard enough for the aliens to track their activities that they cannot afford to divert sufficient resources from their main objectives to find and destroy the Xenonauts. This method of suggestive control and infiltration is naturally (and conveniently) woolly and indeed the game is probably not going to spell out the specific parameters under which alien mind control works. The player will know that it is powerful but certainly not all-powerful, and that's really all you need in order to use the secret war setup. That's all I'm going to say on the setting for now - I'm afraid you'll have to wait for the strategy layer for anything extra.