All of the feedback you guys gave here is the exact reason I haven't actually wrote the description of the suit in the book yet.
Yes, I meant ice axes. I didn't know what they were called and saw that they were practically picks in CoD, and they were used for more mobility on the ice, so I called them ice picks. I did mean ice axes.
I'm changing the idea slightly, they would never be inserted into extremes (arctic, deep-sea, aerobatics) without a change in loadout (which will be loaded onto the insertion helicopter if there's such a mission on the roster). The base suit would still follow my original guidelines earlier. For partly rule-of-cool reasons, I still want them to take the ice axes (it's gunna take a lot of practice to stop calling them picks now XD). How effective would an ice axe be versus a knife?
For similar reasons, I also want to keep the faceplate, although less of a focus and removable so that it isn't a problem on desert missions or light diving or wingsuiting etc. It'd be more or less so that you have more of a chance of an open-casket funeral than to stop a .50 cal bullet. It'd primarily be there to stop shrapnel from frags and burns from HE getting on the face and to prevent that flying sheet metal from decapitating you. Also if it cracks from something in battle you can remove it for the visability.
MY SCHOOL BLOCKED TVTROPES ON ME! NOOOO! Now I can't check what tropes my suit falls under (not without going to my ipod). My school has utilised the greatest weapon of all time: The website blocker. Known to cause people to abandon cities to try and find a way around the filter, it is only a matter of time before they go insane from a lack of Google and TVTropes and Wikipedia.
RE rods from God: I hated how CoD Ghosts did the whole rods from god thing. It felt like a cheap way of killing billions of people. Thanks for clearing the thing up a bit!