#btw I grant him divine protection from dedovshchina

[fancyshooting]

thoughts on ocelot’s time in the navy(?) - based on that analysis of his uniform

cushy!

if his conceited attitude is anything to go by, he was treated very well in russia. he has an inflated ego but is sorely lacking in skill. he becomes indignant at snake's criticism, as if he has been used to constant praise. I think the KGB would've congratulated him for defecting, then in the GRU we know he gets special treatment from volgin due to his background. his youth would get him a lot of adulation too. so young! so clever!

I was struggling to find any irl battles or idk events ocelot could've been involved with but then I realised that his whole thing in mgs3 is that he doesn't actually have a lot of combat experience. a lot of that is likely due to the leniency afforded to him on account of being a very special boy. he does wear a ribbon bar though, suggesting that he achieved something of note at some point within those first four years in the soviet union (although judging by his epaulettes, he was promoted not long before the start of the virtuous mission, so maybe the ribbon bar is related to that)

since he was only sixteen when he defected, he probably wasn't enrolled into the military straight away. he and EVA had NSA secrets to spill first, so he must have had meeting after meeting where that information would have been recorded by KGB officials. then, he would have to be taught the russian approach to espionage and the political climate etc. etc., which would take some time. I'm not sure if he would still officially be with the KGB by the time he joins the military... we're never told exactly what kind of work he was doing for the KGB other than acting as an informant and secretly passing on intel from the GRU. the KGB also had their own spetsnaz (spetsnaz literally just means "special forces" so you can get GRU spetsnaz and KGB spetsnaz - both totally different groups), meaning that ocelot might still have been operating in a military environment rather than focusing on civilian matters, which I think is what you tend to think of when you hear "KGB"

the soviet naval infantry was disbanded in 1947 and remained as such until 1961 (there was still a soviet navy but no naval infantry, the branch that the west would call marines). I personally believe ocelot was sent to join the GRU when he was eighteen, so I'm trying to fit everything around that. apparently the cuban missile crisis was a factor in prompting the ussr to strengthen its navy and that was in october 1962, meaning (according to my headcanon) he would already be in the GRU. this could be why he ended up in the naval infantry and not, eg. the air force

there's no way that, as the son of two legendary war heroes, ocelot wouldn't have received any combat training in childhood. the philosophers would have been pushing him to meet the standard set by his parents. russia isn't supposed to know about all that training though, so he would have had to have pretended to be nothing more than a cryptographer (maybe his skills dulled and he's just rusty in mgs3...?)

regardless of the exact years and specific organisation he was working for, I think little captain ocelot probably spent more time hanging out with the high-ups learning about military strategy while the other men his age were out in the field doing the taxing, dangerous work. if he was pretending not to have had any prior combat training, maybe he was put to use working on a radio team or something. idk signals, communication, all the skills that he would be expected to have as a known former NSA agent

he could've trained with the naval infantry while already being part of spetsnaz. apparently navy spetsnaz were accommodated with regular recruits and went through pretty much the same training so that they wouldn't be marked out as SECRET SPECIAL FORCES. that means he could technically still be doing navy stuff in mgs3, even though he's stuck up a mountain

he's definitely trained in jumping stylishly from aircraft into water at least. naval infantry conduct operations mostly by amphibious assault... hey wait. what if the croc cap was..... omg thank you ADAM...

um... he got to go on boats and maybe a submarine. cats generally don't like water but ocelots do so swimming is fine. he travelled around the coast and saw a whale one time. he read lots of secret documents about submarines and developments in the world of sonar and radar and underwater weapons. torpedoes and um... um... idk I wish I had more to say about this but idk anything about the navy, let alone the cold war soviet navy sorry :( I hope it wasn't terrible B) ty for the ask!!