Spec Ops forces tend to be between 500 to 750 karma spent after the base character. I started breaking down a number of the NPC grunts especially in Ghost Cartels or War to see whether or not you could build an equivalent base character with said backgrounds. It's pretty ugly.
The regular army grunts usually can be built but not much else. Even alot of the gangers outstrip your base starting PC.
I built the 'expeditionary soldier' out of War with the base 400 BP (using human metatype), but that's about the best I could come up with.
That said, I looked at the stat data of the Tir Ghost, and I pretty much found out that it'd take 600 BP to build one of those (dropping some gear of course since the Tir Ghost has more than 250k worth of equipment and stuff).
That's interesting. I did a breakdown of the stats for the Tir Ghosts in the SR3 campaign book, Corporate Punishment, since a lot of people I know tend to consider them to be the most dangerous combat builds up to that time. It turns out that they were about 250 karma if they are built specifically with the intention of them being given more karma to finish them off. Min-maxed. That's what I meant. They can be efficiently built with around 250 karma. If they were built and then progressed organically, the karma cost would have been closer to 300-350.
I never got around to figuring out what the build would be for the Ghost adepts and mage would be in SR4A, though I have a couple equivalent characters that I built for Artifacts Unbound. But I tend to build characters on paper, and that could have gone anywhere by now.
What has never ceased to amaze me about the Tir Ghost archetype in the core book is that it's not an adept; it's a cybered elf. That should be really weird given the unit and country. I mean, Critias and I have discussed this quite a bit and come up with reasons, but there are already a bunch of heavily-cybered goons in that section.
This whole line of discussion does bring us back to a point earlier in the thread. You can have a starting PC with any kind of background, but the wheels come off the wagon mechanically when you realize that it costs almost twice as many starting BP as you get to actually build a former Navy SEAL. I think that, for me, it simply becomes a matter of a sliding scale. It should probably require more BP, but that scale applies to everything in the game. So if you're playing Casey Ryback on your first game ever, and run into other SEALs, they're going to be similar builds to you. But when you're Casey Ryback, 300 karma badass, then so are they. Because your PC may have been doing all sorts of crazy stuff, but along the same lines, this is all they do, and they have the UCAS government making sure that they are equal to or better than you. But eventually they hit an "standard" experience wall, and you do not. So 2,000 karma Casey Ryback is going to tear apart those 300 karma SEALs before they see him coming.