Military Maverick

"You have a rather insubordinate subordinate, General."

— James Hamner on Col. Jack O'Neill, Stargate SG-1 ("Seth")

A Military Maverick is one of those service members who often breaks the rules, and regularly annoys superiors: but he/she generally prevails in the end, just because they broke the rules in the first place.^note Breaking the rules in this context doesn’t have to be an outright violation, but could also include imaginative interpretations of the rules, serving as the justification of such actions.

Consider them the armed forces counterpart to the Cowboy Cop.

The popularity of this trope is largely because of the Rule of Cool. For in real life, any military needs people they can be certain will stop fighting when so ordered, just as much as they need people who will start fighting when so ordered. The primary purpose of order and discipline in the military, apart from doing what you're told, is to learn self-restraint, after all.

Still, most instances of this would have far more consequences in Real Life than in fiction (and so does everything). Note that the higher up you are in the chain of command, the more likely you are to get away with stuff. There are no recruits and privates who can get away with acting like a Military Maverick in fiction does. Or at least, if there are right now, give it a few days. You might get away with disobeying orders and regulations on rare occasions or under unusual circumstances, but doing so to the point of recklessness is a good way to end a military career with a plain and simple dismissal at best or capital punishment at worst. So it goes without saying...

That being said, this trope is Truth in Television to some extent. Some officers in regular militaries really do rise to the top without ever picking up the "regular" part. However, these folks are much more common and tolerated in non-professional insurgent armies, guerrillas, and during civil wars, where the entire society goes bananas.

If they're still competent military professionals, despite regarding following orders and regulations as optional, they might also be a Colonel Badass, a Sergeant Rock, and sometimes even a Four-Star Badass. If they can get away with just about anything, they have Ultimate Job Security.

It's possible they might also be The Neidermeyer, a Colonel Kilgore, a General Ripper, or sometimes all three. Often, they're a Glory Seeker.

Sometimes they're a Bunny-Ears Lawyer in uniform.

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Examples:

Air Force (includes pilots from the other services)

Anime and Manga

• Isamu Alva Dyson from Macross Plus. Reckless, insubordinate, short-tempered, and not even punishment details wanted him. Eventually transferred to Project Super Nova as a test pilot since the only thing keeping him in the military was that he was that damn good.
• Elizabeth Beurling of Strike Witches fame is a maverick herself, taking little heed to the brass and disobeying them at almost every turn (from simple things like smoking and going to the pub late at night to more complex things like refusing to use the new striker units), she is rather skilled in combat and has no ranged weapons instead just uses her kukri and cuts up enemy soldiers, grant she does have a rather gloomy personality to her. The girl has got issues but she can hardly care less. Not surprising given she was at least somewhat based on the real-life maverick George Beurling. See Real Life below for more details.

Fan Works

• The only reason NERV hasn't fired Asuka in Neon Metathesis Evangelion yet is that this would cost them use of EVA-02, a fourth of their fighting force.

Film

• Jyn Erso in Rogue One. She leads an unauthorized suicide mission to retrieve the Death Star plans after the rest of the Rebel Alliance had given up.
• Poe Dameron in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. The film ruthlessly deconstructs this behaviour. In defying General Leia's orders to disengage from the attack on the First Order Dreadnought, he gets dozens of pilots and ships destroyed just to take out a ship that was too big and cumbersome to chase them down later.
• Lieutenant Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, USN from Top Gun (later designated as Captain in the sequel). "Your ego is writing checks your body can't cash." — "You don't have time to think up there. If you think, you're dead." Maverick's tendency to ignore rules and abandon his wingmen to do things his way is his key flaw, and reining those issues in is the essence of his Character Development. The sequel also shows the consequences of it: he only served as a TOP GUN instructor for two months before his unorthodox style proved unacceptable (whether he was transferred or left willing isn't stated), almost forty years later he's still just a Captain (Iceman meanwhile has become an Admiral), and multiple Admirals express a desire to kick him out of the Navy. The only reason he hasn't been discharged is that Iceman, the Admiral of the Pacific Fleet, is supporting him.

Literature

• A fair number of people in the Dale Brown novels, most notably Brad Elliot. While the contrast with the politicians and other American leaders has always been there since the first, in Battle Born and beyond it's even more apparent with the more lawful newcomers to Dreamland serving as foils to the old-timers.
  • Lampshade Hung in Plan of Attack, where General Gary Houser claims that McLanahan has been "pulling shit that should have landed you in prison for a hundred years".
• The foul-mouthed Guinness-drinking cynic and anti-Biggles Major Wooley, in Goshawk Squadron. A working-class Brummie who made it into the WW1 officer corps, his superiors would dearly like to sack or demote him, but as he is an accredited Ace, they dare not.
• Derek Robinson's character of CH3, in A Piece of Cake. An American pilot and soldier of fortune who for political reasons is posted to Hornet Squadron in time for the Battle of Britain, he becomes unpopular not just for having more combat experience than all the British pilots put together, he is highly critical of the British command a tactical philosophy. It doesn't help that experience proves him right, although not before several pilots are killed in action.
• Mackenzie "Mac" Calhoun, of Star Trek: New Frontier, was specifically picked to command the Excalibur, the only ship in the sector because he was basically the Cowboy Cop of Starfleet.
• Star Wars Expanded Universe:
  • Wedge Antilles is a major maverick. He's led Rogue Squadron into defecting (temporarily) from the New Republic itself.^note Despite his extremely public resignation, one of his superiors "forgot" to file the paperwork... along with covertly providing Wedge with the equipment he needed... and thus retroactively made his actions an officially sanctioned mission. He was ready to leave again during Starfighters of Adumar when faced with the choice of doing what was ordered or what was right. But he and the Rogues are the best of the best, delivering the impossible, and they do get called on their behavior. Wedge created Wraith Squadron, an entire squadron of misfits specifically organized for unconventional warfare after seeing how the fleet had become hamstrung by being forced into the role of legitimate government (see the Space section) — and, though not even thirty, found himself feeling like a tired old man when confronted with their antics and tactics.
    Wedge: Wes, they're doing it to me again.
  • With respect to Wedge, at least, it's made clear again and again that he's one of the smartest men in the service, and that when he bucks the system, it's often because he really does know better than his superiors.
    Jagged Fel: If I may ask, how old were you when you first disagreed with your commanding officer, and later found out you were right?
    Wedge: Twenty. Which is when I first had a commanding officer.
  • The Rogues tended to be pilots with secondary commando skills whose missions meant those skills became important very, very often; the Wraiths were picked as commandos who could pilot snubfighters. The Wraiths were eventually transferred out of the military's Starfighter Command to New Republic Intelligence.
  • It's noted in the Wraith Squadron books (after one of the pilots essentially has a nervous breakdown in flight and nearly kills another pilot) that because of the war and the Rebellion/New Republic's need for pilots, it's possible to survive incidents that would absolutely get you canned in less troubled times. Since the Star Wars galaxy is pretty much in a permanent state of crisis, military mavericks thrive in it.
  • In the New Jedi Order, Jaina Solo, leader of Twin Suns Squadron, disobeys orders to save one of her pilots. General Antilles wants to reprimand her, but his nephew — the pilot Jaina saved — talks him down. It's not that hard. Wedge is asked when was the first time he disobeyed an order for similar reasons, and says it was when he was twenty, the first time he had a superior officer.
    • Jaina was encouraged to act like a Military Maverick, outside of (actually above) the chain of command, as part of a convoluted psychological warfare ploy to impersonate a goddess. In reality, she was carrying out orders given to her in secret by General Antilles and his staff (except for the above incident), but most of her allies not in the know thought it was a sterling example of nepotism gone horribly wrong.
  • In The Corellian Trilogy, Admiral Ossilege is fond of Refuge in Audacity strategies and uses dummy corporations to buy starships and convert them for military use to build up his system's defense fleet without alerting the New Republic. That being said, it's implied that his direct superiors may know about what he's doing.
• Colonel Temeraire turned into one of these, quickly, much to Laurence's dismay. It resulted in a couple cases of treason and eventually being banished to Australia. Of course, if Temeraire wasn't such a maverick Laurence would probably be dead.

Live-Action TV

• Battlestar Galactica: Kara Thrace, a deconstruction of the trope whose maverick existence only exists with a messed up life and a lot of favoritism.
  • It's made obvious at the start of the series that the only reason she was able to get away with all the crap she pulls is that she's just that damn good and the Galactica herself was under the command of an officer who was going to be retired soon. Later, she was one of a few dozen fighter pilots left in the whole of humanity in a little fleet almost completely dependent on pilots for defense. There was a good chance she'd get discharged in normal times, but when you're down to 40...
  • Later a major reason for the favoritism shown by Adama (and a lot of the recklessness shown by Kara) is explained by revelations concerning her engagement to Adama's dead son.
  • Subverted with Pegasus Commander Barry Garner, who once made the typical Maverick "Screw the orders, I'm saving my men" decision, complete with his crew backing him against the outsider observer (aka Lee Adama) — only to notice that yes, it was a trap, it very nearly cost the human race its most powerful battleship and it gained them nothing.
• Harmon Rabb, Jr. from JAG, the Naval Aviator who became a lawyer.
• Colonel Jack O'Neill from Stargate SG-1. He manages to get away with it because his judgement in the field usually turns out to be correct in the long run, and the number of times he's saved the planet tends to give him some job security — plus, there's the fact that he can technically retire whenever he feels like it, having come out of retirement in the first place to lead SG1. Humorously, when real-life Air Force Chief of Staff General Ryan guest-starred As Himself on the show, Richard Dean Anderson, who played O'Neill, asked him if he had any officers as insubordinate as O'Neill. The response, apparently, was "Son, we've got colonels like you, and worse."
• John Sheppard from Stargate Atlantis and suffers far more consequences for it than O'Neill. His military background was built on this as in Afghanistan he disobeyed direct orders and took his helicopter to rescue his friends. Not only did he fail to save them, but he was court-martialed, nearly kicked out of the Air Force (and in an Alternate Universe, he was) but was literally Reassigned to Antarctica instead.
  • In the show itself the only reason he was even allowed to accompany the Atlantis mission is because of luck, skill, and the support of more alternative thinking higher-ups Elizabeth Weir and General O'Neill. He impressed O'Neill by performing a High-Speed Missile Dodge with a non-combat helicopter to escape an alien drone and then got Weir's attention by discovering he had the Ancient gene and could command their technology seemingly without effort. As Weir was a civilian diplomat rather than military commander, his rebellious streak didn't put her off (especially as it was motivated by personal loyalty) and she persuaded his superiors to let him onto her expedition since establishing a base in an entirely different galaxy required out-of-the-box thinking type people. Still, the mission's military commander Colonel Sumner, a far stricter by-the-book officer, didn't like Sheppard for his past and made it clear he wasn't welcome. Later after Sumner was killed Sheppard became Weir's second in command so Sheppard's superiors tried to replace him. Luckily Weir stepped in to defend him and he was safe with her support, but it was still obvious many of the other military commanders disliked him.

Video Games

• Lilya from Reverse: 1999 is an Ace Pilot witch, using a rocket-propelled broomstick to take down other, larger, better armed fighter jets by literally flying under the radar as she's too small and fast to detect properly, and destroying them with her superior maneuvaribility and being extremely hard to hit. Since she was also a Child Soldier, and since the administration of Zeno Military Academy decided to overlook her troublemaking and pranking for her skills, she's infamous for disregarding chain-of-command and any reprimands others have of her attitude, doing what she wants and only what she wants.
• Maniac, from Wing Commander, is generally agreed to have earned his callsign. At times, the protagonist, Christopher "Maverick" Blair, has as well. Some say he's a subversion. Ironically, he got his callsign because in his Academy Days where, unlike most other hotshot cadets there, he was actually the most by-the-book cadet, and thus a "Maverick" when compared to others.

Real Life

• It's disputed how true this is, but many of the Polish pilots in the Battle of Britain. Prone to recklessness and spamming the radio with discussions in Polish on the parentage of their German opponents (who they, for obvious reasons, loathed), they were responsible for 12% of the Luftwaffe kills in that battle, despite being only 5% of the pilots. The RAF handbook was often ignored even by British pilots. For example, the rules stated that machine guns' should be zeroed (that is, the bullets would cross the path of the guns from the other wing) at 600m to allow newbie pilots to attack from a safe distance. But to be most effective, it needed to be at 200m, so many pilots from different nations changed them.
• A documented real-life subversion (not merely aversion) was going on with test pilots, at least back in the early '70s. Hunter S. Thompson wrote an article depicting the Air Force's test pilots as almost frighteningly sane, rational, by-the-book, methodical fliers who were as much scientist as warrior — which makes some sense, given their vocation. Hence the old saying: what's the difference between God and an Air Force pilot? God doesn't think he's a pilot.
• A documented real-life deconstruction is Colonel Arthur "Bud" Holland, the pilot of the B-52 that crashed at Fairchild Air Force Base in 1994, who had a reputation for aggressive flying and violating safety regulations. How aggressive? During a training mission at the Yakima Bombing Range, Holland purposefully flew his aircraft well below the recommended altitude of 500 feet and cleared a ridgeline by only three feet, causing his co-pilot to grab at the controls and forcing a photography crew documenting the flight to duck for cover. One of Holland's superiors was later court-martialed for failing to take action over his behaviour. That's like being so high your friend hallucinates.
• John McCain, who was more than happy to point this out. This dated back all the way to his time at the Naval Academy, where he graduated 5th from the bottom of his class due to just barely studying enough to pass in classes that he wasn't interested in and achieving membership in the "Century Club" of cadets who received over 100 demerits. After graduating, he became a bomber pilot and was known for being an extremely reckless flier, crashing several times and once colliding with power lines when he flew too low. It's likely that he got away with more than most junior officers could have because his father and grandfather were both admirals.
• World War I ace Frank Luke. He was bad-tempered and contemptuous of authority; when he took off on his last flight, the one that earned him a posthumous Medal of Honor, there were orders out to arrest him for being AWOL. His favorite targets were German observation balloons, which most pilots avoided because they were "invariably ringed with antiaircraft guns and often protected by a flight of fighters. Going after one was much like kicking a hornet's nest, but it was just the sort of challenge Luke liked...." Eddie Rickenbacker called Luke "the greatest fighter pilot of the entire war."
• Colonel John Boyd was one of these. He contributed arguably more to the Air Force than anyone before or since (his Energy-Maneuverability theory revolutionized air-to-air combat doctrine and he literally wrote the book on flying a fighter, and he's credited as the father of the F-15 and F-16 fighters), but had to step on a lot of toes to do so — and took pride in it. In fact, he practically forced the F-16 down the Air Force's throat because they didn't want it — they thought it would take too much money away from the F-15 and their pet bomber of the month. Hell, one time he got a major general fired for scripting a session with a congressman to attack the F-16. It wasn't uncommon for generals to leave one of his briefings muttering, "That fucking Boyd."
• Colonel Robin Olds, a World War II vet who fought in Vietnam, his unconventional leadership style and tactics got results but infuriated his leadership. Despite this, he had a very low tolerance for people or organizations who could not meet basic standards and perform their jobs. Being a Military Maverick didn't mean you stopped being military, after all.
• Although he was rather a different kind of Maverick, George Beurling counts. After failing to join the Canadian Air Force, and the Finnish air force, he hopped on a ship and went to England to try and enlist in the RAF in which he was successful. He was regarded as high-strung, brash, and outspoken, and he also never smoked or drank (which when you're a fighter pilot makes you a maverick...). He was a skilled pilot but rejected a commission at first and was reprimanded for attacking targets without permission several times. He was also known as a loner in the air and was written up for stunting as well. He was eventually discharged even before the war ended more or less for being a pain in the ass.

Army

Anime and Manga

• In Edward Elric's early years as a State Alchemist, Roy Mustang made good use of his sense of honor and knack for trouble-making by sending him in the general direction of cowboy-prone situations with rumors of the Philosopher's Stone surrounding them. One assumed he was tolerated for his position as a rare State Alchemist, not doing anything particularly harmful, and passing the mandated yearly combat test with flying colours — the future possibility of their nation Amestris going to war and demanding Edward be called for duty is also mentioned at one point, so it could implicitly be that he's tolerated for potential future combat potential (and State Alchemists are portrayed as likely having quite a lot of it). It may have also been explained by him being later shown as designated as a sacrifice for the antagonists.
• In Maiden Rose, both Klaus and Taki are mavericks at times. And it gets them both in trouble.
• Mr. Bushido (AKA Graham Aker in a Paper-Thin Disguise) from the second season of Mobile Suit Gundam 00 refuses to do anything except engage the 00 Gundam in battle, and won't even launch for combat unless the 00 is present as well. He gets away with it because 1) he is quite literally Just That Good, and 2) the 00 is Celestial Being's strongest weapon, and keeping it tied up is extremely helpful to the A-Laws.
  • And he's the Heterosexual Life-Partner of the A-Laws commander's nephew. Billy apparently pulled some strings.

Film

• Demons of War's Major Keller is a heavy deconstruction. His main characteristic is his utter disregard for HQ commands. The film opens with him being discharged for his insubordination. The story then examines all the pitfalls of such behaviour from a commander, despite at the same time playing the trope itself straight, with brash heroics and on-field competency. Ultimately, his decisions and actions eventually lead to getting most of his men killed, while he's shipped back home for a court trial in a plane loaded with their coffins.
• The highly fictionalized film version of The Devil's Brigade has numerous mavericks on the American side.
• The Dirty Dozen's Major Reisman, whose competency coupled with his ability to get results and tendency to exceed orders nets him a crappy, high-stakes, all-but-outright-stated Suicide Mission with a bunch of expendable convicts who hate his guts. Said convicts are actually mavericks (or much worse) but they definitely face consequences for it.
• Sgt. William James of The Hurt Locker is a deconstruction. Sure, he manages to defuse many bombs in his time at war, but he winds up alienating pretty much everyone in his unit due to his antics.
• Mel Gibson's character from Lethal Weapon tetralogy (though most prominently in the first 2 installments) is an extremely reckless cop and ex-army special forces. He routinely places himself in great danger as part of a suicidal deathwish, yet his skills are so great that he continues to live through his adventures.
• The protagonists in Play Dirty, although the only one of them who is officially in the military is the Michael Caine character, and his commission was supposed to be purely honorary. The rest are a bunch of Boxed Crooks turned into an experimental strike force by an eccentric colonel. Unsurprisingly, their tactics tend to be...nonstandard.

Literature

• The Arts of Dark and Light: Tribune Fortex, who disobeys direct orders when he thinks himself better qualified to decide when his unit should charge. Then Surprisingly Realistic Outcome occurs as this disorganizes the entire order of battle, and while his side are still victorious in the end, Fortex is nonetheless arrested and charged with insubordination.
• The Whistlers of A Brother's Price were a family of soldiers blacklisted from service after a sister's treason, who joined the thieves' guild out of desperation. When caught stealing by General Wellsbury, Tea Whistler had the chutzpah to tell her that they'd make excellent spies. They lied, they stole, they ignored orders, and they turned the tides in the War of the False Eldest since their duties were expanded from spying to wreaking general mayhem behind enemy lines.
• In Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts novels, over and over again; always crowned with success, which may be why they get away with it.
  • Dorden in Ghostmaker, refusing to leave a field hospital
  • Kolea in the opening of Honour Guard, defying orders to rescue Corbec.
  • Corbec and other wounded Ghosts in Honour Guard defy orders to get on the transport in order to join the honour guard.
  • At the climax of Honour Guard, Gaunt decides to defend the temple rather than remove the relics.
  • Mkoll deserting in Only In Death to recover Gaunt's sword. Unexpected, he also recovers Gaunt.
  • Beldavyr in Only in Death deserting his post in combat — to restart the power source for the xenos guns. Fortunately for him, it worked.
• This trope is given extensive treatment in the first volume of Reflections of Eterna: the youthful and overconfident general Oscar Fenschau is manipulated by Marshal Alva to walk right into the enemy's trap in direct violation of his orders, so Alva's own forces can flank and rout them. Afterwards, Alva has Fenschau court-marshaled and executed for insubordination, and when his other officers confront him (reminding him how often Alva himself ignored orders and regulations), calmly explains to them that had Fenschau defied his orders and won the battle by himself, he would have been made Marshal soon (like Alva did in his time), but since he disobeyed orders and lost his men, he is better off dead before he causes any more harm to his own army.
• Sharpe: Richard Sharpe, who even Cornwell calls a loose cannon. Though rules were a bit lax back then, he still gets in trouble for breaking them at times.

Live-Action TV

• The entire membership of The A-Team, most notably Murdock, who may or may not be certifiably insane.
• The Crossing shows George Washington as this, to the extent that absolutely nobody thinks his plan to attack the Hessians will work. Washington's maverick nature was Truth in Television.
• Firefly's Malcolm Reynolds, in his time as an Independent sergeant, made something of a reputation for himself for unconventional tactics, a distinct willingness to defy the odds, and an absolute refusal to quit... even when, it might be said, he should have. He was an irregular in a nonprofessional insurgent army, so not unexpected.
• Game of Thrones: Initially a green commander in charge, Robb Stark frequently ignores senior bannermen who try to rein him in. This is apparently the main reason he gives Tywin Lannister such hell on the battlefield — none of Tywin's commanders can predict his movements because, between his inexperience, boldness, and confidence at his success, he's willing to take risks none of them would dream of taking, and pulls them off.
• Leverage: "The Rundown Job" has an old associate of Eliot's, Colonel Michael Vance, who is known for putting together teams of people from different branches and agencies to suit specific situations, but he treads on a lot of toes in the process, and the beginning of the episode has him in front of a panel of congressmen being raked across the coals, and then warned not to do it again or face jail time.
• Hawkeye Pierce and, for that matter, about half the cast of M*A*S*H. The only reason Hawkeye is rarely, if ever, charged for being such a loose cannon is that they need as many medical personnel as possible and can't afford to lose him as Chief Surgeon.
  • There's also that as doctors drafted from civilian practice, most of the cast of M*A*S*H can afford to be utterly indifferent about damage to their military careers — they don't have any careers to damage. So long as they can actually avoid being caught in a major felony or committing medical malpractice, there's really not much they need to worry about in the long run. It's instructive to note that the one regular army doctor on the cast, Colonel Potter, is not a maverick...much.
  • Truth in Television to a large degree, even today; the U.S. armed services have enough of a need for medical personnel that they are given more leeway about their (lack of) military bearing than would be tolerated in combat soldiers/sailors/airmen. Crystallized in a saying going back to the Korea War if not earlier: "There is nobody as un-military as a military doctor."

Video Games

• All four of the protagonists (and their pilot) in Battlefield: Bad Company.
• Commander Michael McNeil of Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, who is defined by his headstrong aggressiveness, most notably in the final mission, where he refuses to obey orders to wait for reinforcements before assaulting Kane's headquarters.
  • Captain Nick "Havoc" Parker in Command & Conquer: Renegade also disobeys orders, but is arrested immediately upon his return from the battlefield. Of course, he doesn't spend more than a few hours in jail, but his boss is explicitly described as unusually tolerant of his quirks, "which makes him the ideal boss for Havoc". Note that while his motives are admirable ("They're torturing civvies, we can't wait six hours."), he hijacked a hovercraft that couldn't really be spared to go off and assault the enemy base single-handedly immediately after a previous attack had failed, and when there was absolutely no reason to not simply wait a mere six hours for reinforcements to arrive.
• Sabres of Infinity has Sergeant Harlech, a boisterous soldier who has little respect for authority or discipline and has the lowest loyalty stat of the available sergeants.

Real Life

• More or less the whole of German Armed Forces up to around 1942. Their standard response to an enemy within range, no matter what their orders? Attacking. It was in fact this very aggressive style of conducting military operations that made Germany and Prussia before it so successful on the battlefield.
• Let's not forget the quintessential real-life maverick General Patton. Rommel serves as a good German version.
  • As generals they were granted more leeway, but Patton did suffer from his maverick ways, consistently being demoted and kept from a higher command, at one point almost being dismissed from service during WW2 due to his 'poor' conduct outside the field of battle. Rommel, however, was a maverick only in the field, mainly due to frequently outrunning his own supply lines without informing his logistics officers or setting up fuel dumps beforehand. Outside of it, though Rommel presented himself as every inch the perfect officer.
• Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied forces during WW2 and one of the most polarizing generals in military history. His loose-cannon ways, combined with his titanic ego, eventually got him fired when he mouthed off about America's strategy in the Korean war ^note  and by "mouthed off" we mean that he recommended launching several nuclear strikes on China. When Truman understandably refused, MacArthur tried to override the president's orders and nuke China anyway.
  • After reading MacArthur's letters to President Truman, General George C. Marshall quipped: "Mr. President, I wonder why you have waited and not fired that son of a bitch two years ago!"
  • Prior to World War II, MacArthur was sent to the Philippines so that FDR wouldn't have to deal with him. Dwight D. Eisenhower, another 5-star general and also a future President, said that he learned how not to be a good general during his time as MacArthur's aide.
• To be honest, the Australian Armed Forces, as a whole, during WWI. They hated being ordered around by British officers (partially because they were being used as cannon fodder against Turkish soldiers; in interviews with the last surviving Australian soldiers from WWI, some noted they sounded more scornful of the British Officers than the Turkish soldiers they were actually fighting) and, as such, ignored them...a lot.
  • Likewise, WW2, though not quite as bad. Old joke: in 1943, a British officer complains to a British general who'd served in the last war that a group of Australian soldiers didn't salute as he passed them. The old British general replies, "That's good news. Before, they'd've walked straight over you!"
  • British Field Marshal Birdwood reminisced that an Australian private came up to him, on the officer's first day at Gallipoli, to "complain about inferior bloody materiel." To demonstrate the low quality of equipment, the soldier pulled the pin on a grenade and tossed it near the field marshal. This grenade, not as inferior as the Australian had expected, exploded as they're supposed to, luckily not severely injuring anyone, and the private commented in surprise, "Gawd, Birdie, that is the first bastard that has gone off this month."
• This was kind of Ariel Sharon's thing, with variable results. In the early stages of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, his overconfidence and tendency to attack without orders led to disaster, with a considerable portion of Israel's entire tank corps falling prey to Egyptian ATGMs and RPGs, while his failure to cover the flanks of his adjacent commanders' units critically weakened their positions against the Egyptian assault; he only escaped being relieved of command due to his political connections. Later on in said war, after the Egyptians were thrown onto the defensive after suffering massive losses in the central Sinai,^note due to Egyptian president Sadat ordering them to advance beyond their protective SAM umbrella, exposing themselves to Israeli air attack in the process, in order to try to relieve the pressure on the Syrian troops retreating headlong from the Golan Heights Sharon managed to redeem himself somewhat when his... stretching of orders played a critical role in Israel's ultimate victory against Egypt. In The '80s, though, the pendulum swung back yet again, as his habit of leaving superiors in the dark and going far beyond his mandate as Minister of Defense played a large part in the fiasco of the Israeli involvement in the Lebanese Civil War.
• Andrew Jackson. He led American troops into the then-Spanish colony of Florida, without official approval from the Government. This is the very rare case of it working out for the best because the U.S. managed to bargain for Florida and make it an official State, and Jackson is widely regarded as a hero, becoming the first Governor of Florida and then later the President of the United States.
• On a bit different note, the Order of Maria Theresa founded by its namesake was awarded to commanders who defied orders and yet achieved victory. Although historians generally agree that it was meant to promote not recklessness but rather a healthy initiative on the battlefield.
• Most smaller White armies in the Russian Civil War consisted of mostly these types. Ataman Semyonov and Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg come to mind.
• An ancient example: Though it's hard for Alexander the Great to disobey orders, seeing as he's the one giving them, he had an easy enough time disobeying the entire conventions of warfare of the time. He would deliberately ask his older generals for advice, knowing that they would give him conservative answers, and then did the opposite, making him completely unpredictable to his enemies on the battlefield.
  • The Romans also encouraged initiative among their individual legion commanders. Cynoscephalae, the last decisive battle for Roman control of the Mediterranean, was won largely due to an unknown Roman commander leading a charge to the unprotected Macedonian rear without being ordered to.
• A Real Life example of why this trait is usually not at all desirable in a military leader: the Imperial Japanese Army before and during World War II was plagued by a concept known as Gekokujo, a concept which in practice led to field-level officers deciding they knew better than the national government in Tokyo or their own senior officers how to serve the country's interests. The result was the 1930s in Japan were filled with assassinations, attempted coups and the aggressive expansionism that led the country to Pearl Harbor, while from 1941 onward Japan's already hopeless war effort was hobbled still further by officers who would attack without orders and end up getting their men slaughtered.

Other

• A cartoon by Bill Mauldin in World War II showed two officers walking past an unshaven, scowling U.S. paratrooper who leaned against a lamppost ignoring them. The higher-ranking officer told the other, "It's best not to speak to paratroopers about saluting. They always ask where you got your jump boots."

Government and Federal Agents (includes spies)

Anime and Manga

• In World Trigger, Masato Kageura is one of Border's best close-combat agents, with naturally heightened senses and blinding speed. However, he is Border's loosest cannon, only following orders from his superiors if he agrees with them and violently attacking fellow agents who annoy him. Because of his recklessness, he is ranked somewhere towards the upper-middle among all Border agents, rather than near the top, as he keeps getting reprimanded and demoted at about the same rate he rises the ranks for his skill in battle. He is still considered a valuable asset to Border as he can easily get the upper hand on his enemies through sheer power and guts, and he cares about his own subordinates, who have much cleaner records than he does.

Comic Books

• The adults-only MAX incarnation of Nick Fury, who has at one point beat up a General with his belt.

Film

• MI6 Agent 007, aka Commander James Bond. Spies tend to play things by ear as a rule, but Bond seems to revel in doing things that will give Q, M, and the British government a heart attack. The fact that he saves the world with clockwork regularity tends to offset this.

Literature

• Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga features Lt. Miles Naismith (Lord) Vorkosigan, Barrayaran Imperial Security. He is assigned directly to Simon Illyan, the head of ImpSec, because while he succeeds in absurd situations, he repeatedly drives his commanding officers nuts.
  "Hm," Illyan said. "And yet... who shall I assign you to now? Which loyal officer gets his career destroyed next?"
  Miles thought this over. "Why don't you assign me directly to yourself, sir?"
  "Thanks," said Illyan dryly.
  • It helps that Illyan knows Miles literally since birth, being his father's long-term aide and then principal political ally.
  • Miles' operating philosophy can be best summed up by this quote, from Brothers in Arms:
    Miles: No, no, never send interim reports. Only final ones. Interim reports tend to elicit orders. Which you must then either obey or spend valuable time and energy evading, which you could be using to solve the problem.
  • He also counts on the "seniority lets you get away with more" front; when he is first admitted to the Imperial Service Academy, his father admits that "I think he will make a terrible ensign... but he might make a fine Chief of Staff one day." Miles is such an insubordinate ensign that Illyan has to either dismiss him or shorten his chain of command so he has fewer people to disobey.
  • Miles makes a career out of creatively interpreting orders and using a heavy dose of artistic license when writing his reports, much to the chagrin of his superiors. Keeping with the tradition of this trope, he never outright lies to a commanding officer and always carries out his orders, in spirit if not in letter. And when he does lie, it gets him permanently kicked out of the service.
• At the end of their initial run in the X-Wing Series, the Wraiths (see above under "pilots") were transferred to the New Republic's Intelligence service. They don't become notably more by-the-book; indeed, they tend to become vastly quirkier although, in a twist, it's their commander, Garik "Face" Loran, who picks up most of the weirdness. His approach to operational security is to never tell any of his subordinates anything that isn't immediately relevant to their mission, and Wraith operations carried out under his sanction include "persuade an Imperial admiral that a bomb is actually a very valuable sculpture" and "infiltrate the Imperial bunker using a fake Gamorrean janitor". But his crowning achievement is the plot of Mercy Kill, wherein he suspects that his superior is actually part of a Government Conspiracy to bring back the Empire and so creates two teams of Wraiths, not telling each about the other and not telling his superiors about either.

Live-Action TV

• In 24, Counter-Terrorist agent Jack Bauer is the epitome of this trope. Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique is named after him.
• NCIS: Jethro Gibbs doesn't cross the line with his agency's directives unless he has to. Or needs to. Or feels like it. Quite frankly, it's amazing that Gibbs has a job sometimes. He finally gets chased out of the service early in season 19, after beating a suspect on camera late in season 18.
• The X-Files: Special Agent Fox Mulder is considered odd by most of the FBI and outright disliked by a few. However, he is also known to be one of the best detectives and crime solvers in the whole Bureau.

Marines

Anime and Manga

• In One Piece, all members of SWORD have technically resigned from the standard Marine hierarchy, and therefore aren't required to follow normal protocols. This allows them to do things like attacking Pirate Emperors without being authorized by the higher-ups. The drawback is that, if they're captured or discovered, the World Government will disavow them and leave them to their fate.

Comic Books

• Not a lot of Marines on this list, but two that fit, both from DC Comics' Hitman (1993), are Tommy "Hitman" Monaghan and Natt "The Hat" Walls of the United States Marine Corps. Tommy ends up killing two fellow Marines with a sniper rifle (Don't worry, they had it coming....) They ingeniously, if messily, Make It Look Like an Accident and get away with it. Later, during Operation Desert Storm, Tommy and Natt accidentally kill several British S.A.S. troops in a "friendly fire" incident. They get away with that too. Well, for a few years, anyway.

Film

• If it is a cousin of the Cowboy Cop then Clint Eastwood has to be here somewhere. Gunny Highway from Heartbreak Ridge fits pretty well. At least the part of annoying your superiors. If there is some sort of regulation that forbids the drill instructors from firing live ammunition at their recruits he'd have two excuses: He isn't a drill instructor, and he isn't firing *at* them; he's firing at places he's told them not to be.
• Colonial Jessup from A Few Good Men makes no secret out of the fact that he thinks he is one of these, lampshading more than once how he considers himself to be successful for being able to do things other people aren't ready to do like punishing one of his subordinates in a way that is forbidden in the military. He is a fairly strange case since he claims that this case of him disobeying the rules was necessary in order to ensure that orders are always followed, and also because he is high-ranking enough and/or simply stationed on a place remote enough (on Cuba) that his violations of the laws of the military never got him into trouble prior to the film. Deconstructed since at the beginning of the film, a marine dies because of the illegal punishment he ordered, and when the military sends people to investigate, it becomes clear that high-ranking or not, Jessup still committed a crime for disobeying the rules and will be punished himself for it.
• In Starship Troopers, the Mobile Infantry seems to be entirely run by these people and they encourage this behaviour in recruits. Fraternisation between male and female troopers is rife, discipline is incredibly lax, and the only time anybody is disciplined is Rico when he gets a squadmate killed during a horribly unsafe live-fire exercise (and he is still shown sympathy for explaining his actions with "I wanted to win, sir!")

Literature

• Captain John Rumford in Victoria regularly uses highly irregular tactics, often subverts orders, and frequently commits regular atrocities against military standards of grooming and conduct, yet does so with the full blessing of his superiors and maintains amiable and generally respectful relations with them. In effect, he respects authority, just not its trappings, and has an understanding CO who lets him get away with it because he can be counted on to deliver when the going gets tough.
• Marine pilot Malcolm "Pick" Pickering in WEB Griffith's The Corps tries to come across as one of these, but he's a drunken, irresponsible, immature, lazy, insubordinate Jerkass who got shot down as a result of disobeying orders and can't be trusted with anything. It gets so bad his friends and commanding officers get sick of excusing his behavior and an Admiral reams his ass out, pulls him out of the fighter cockpit, and assigns him to flying transports.

Live-Action TV

• Sarah "Mac" Mackenzie in JAG.
• Averted by Greer in Stargate Universe. There's no doubting that he knows his job and is willing to give his life to protect even people he dislikes, but he displayed such a temper. He also reputedly beat up a superior officer...and so was languishing in the brig waiting to be shipped back to Earth when the attack hit Icarus Base.

Video Games

• Doom's protagonist is a Marine who was shipped out to the Mars base because he assaulted a superior officer (who himself deliberately ordered the company to open fire on people he knew were probably pacifist monks).

Navy (for space navies, see Space below)

Anime and Manga

• One Piece has Former Vice-Admiral Garp and Captain, turned Commodore turned Vice-Admiral Smoker. Though, the latter is the only one known to have risked being kicked out. Interestingly, the naval forces of the One Piece world are referred to as the Marines.

Film

• Captain Frank Ramsey in Crimson Tide. He's apparently given a lot of leeway due to his combat experience, even taking his dog with him on the boat.
• Down Periscope is pretty much based on the idea of the main character playing the part of this trope; in fact, he is under direct orders to do so in order to test how well other navy units do when the enemy doesn't follow the script. In particular, one of his crew is deliberately trying to be as big a nuisance as possible so he'll be discharged because he really doesn't want to be in the Navy but his dad's an Admiral and won't hear of it.
• One of the central members of Team 7 in Wetworks is Jester, a hostile troublemaker who has spent more time in the brig than in the field. His commanding officer, Jackson Dane, is infamous among top brass for his creative interpretations of mission objectives and orders — and is the only CO Jester has ever shown any respect.

Literature

• Jack Aubrey from the Aubrey-Maturin books and film, and Thomas Cochrane, the real-life British officer he is based on.
• Dennis effing Silva from The Destroyermen series...where do we start? Asides from fighting the imperial Japanese navy, he fought Chinese gangsters with a jade statue, disobeyed orders NOT to be in a location only to show up guns blazing, sneaking aboard a carrier by jumping into an ocean from an airplane that would normally kill you in minutes if not seconds...all in the name of the greater good. His lack of discipline has been commented to be why he is arguably the alliance's deadliest warrior.
• Horatio Hornblower, mostly because he has an extremely active mind and naval service is mostly routine with bursts of action; therefore he does his best to increase the frequency of those bursts. In Ship of the Line, he deliberately sails past a rendezvous at night so he can continue to independently raid. In Hotspur he casually mutilates the stern of his ship to put guns in it for a single but crucial battle. In Lieutenant Hornblower, it is suggested that he pushed his dangerously insane captain down a ship's ladder. His fellow lieutenants suspect this, but no one calls him out on it.

Live-Action TV

• Lieutenant Commander Steve McGarrett on Hawaii Five-0. Extra points for being a Cowboy Cop in his regular day job, as he is technically a reservist Navy SEAL and not on full-time active duty. He will break the rules to complete a "mission" (military or police), or to help his friends and family.
• Horatio Hornblower, which covers his early career from the novels. Horatio is particularly fond of Dressing as the Enemy; in the first episode, he forgets to strike the colors on a captured French frigate and refuses to have them hauled down later because it will let them ambush the corvettes attacking the Indefatigable, despite what the Articles of War say.^note Technically you were allowed to sail as close and as long as you liked under false colors, but you had to show the correct flag before opening fire. One fellow midshipman later accuses him of "cheating" tactics for stealing uniforms later, and he gets called incompetent by the (admittedly paranoid and insane) Captain Sawyer for firing a half-loaded gun to scare off a couple of frigates who caught them off-guard.
• Harmon Rabb from JAG.
• Another water-based one: McHale's Navy. If nothing else, typical naval crews were probably discouraged from carrying Japanese soldiers on board.

Real Life

• Horatio Nelson. At the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, he was signalled by superiors to withdraw. On being informed of the orders, he put his spyglass to his right eye and declared, "I really do not see the signal." He had been blinded permanently in his right eye in an action at Corsica in 1794. He then proceeded to demolish the combined Danish-Norwegian fleet. (The episode, incidentally, gave rise to the expression "to turn a blind eye".)
  • The signal was giving him permission to retreat, not ordering him to, and his commander sent it knowing full well that Nelson would ignore it if his situation was still tenable. Still an example, for the attitude, if not the action.

Space (not fighters)

Anime and Manga

• Yang Wen-Li and his group from Legend of the Galactic Heroes.
• Murrue Ramius in Mobile Suit Gundam SEED is a Reasonable Authority Figure who repeatedly ignores military regulations and, occasionally, direct orders in order to best serve the well-being of the people involved. She is contrasted by Natarle, whose strict by-the-book adherence to the rules ends up putting her on the wrong side.

Comic Books

• Discussed in Star Trek: Debt of Honor (set within a year of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home). Hikaru Sulu explains to an ensign that the Enterprise crew get the jobs they do because they're both politically inconvenient (especially after having stolen the previous Enterprise from their own government and destroyed it) but also very good at their jobs. Ditto their Klingon counterpart Commander Kor (who is on the outs with the Klingon Empire because of the ridged-forehead Klingons gaining power) and their Romulan counterpart Commander T'Cel. If it works, the day is saved. If it blows up in their faces, they're expendable.

Literature

• Zack Lightman and Xavier Lightman from Armada are both mavericks. Somewhat justified because they aren't really soldiers.
• Ender Wiggin from Ender's Game was a deliberate Military Maverick — he thought he was being a rebel, but they figured he was smart enough to know better than the rule-makers, and actually intended him to break the rules.^note And there was one 'rule' they especially wanted him to break... because he would be less conflicted about giving the order (versus regular soldiers) until after giving it.
• Honor Harrington: Lester Tourville used a mild form of this as a method of Obfuscating Stupidity. His persona as a competent but somewhat reckless officer helped him avoid promotion to a rank where he would be at risk of getting shot for either failing or being perceived as a threat to those in power.
  • Captain Aivars Terekhov was another milder form of this. He never once actually disobeys orders, but in Shadow of Saganami he goes WAY outside his authority, requisitioning every ship in range in order to launch an attack against another star nation without a formal declaration of war — and to boot, he commandeers a Solarian freighter in order to recon said system. He does at least set things up so that if things go wrong, his superiors can disavow his actions. As it is, he ends up promoted and knighted.
• Inverted in John Hemry's The Lost Fleet. Captain Geary is thought of as crazy because he uses reasonable and not particularly noteworthy tactics. Which baffles his fleet, who are used to simply rushing into the enemy and counting how many ships are left over to determine a victory.
• Willard Phule of Phule's Company. He gets promoted as a result of accidentally strafing a peace conference after the war had already ended. It wasn't a reward. He was only not fired because the Space Legion never fires anyone, wasn't demoted only because of politics, and winds up in command of an "Omega Company", a dumping ground for troublemakers too stubborn to quit.
• In a rare example of someone at the top flouting convention, though actually very cultured and refined in a way most Imperial fleet officers only hope to be, Grand Admiral Thrawn spits in the face of conventional strategic and tactical wisdom. He is confident to the point where he bases entire planetary assaults around esoteric uses of obscure or rare technology and other extremely unusual ideas — ideas that are so odd that he and the captain of his flagship once had a barely-civilized argument over his use of a particular tactic. That particular tactic was in fact outright reasonable (and became routine) compared to some of his more inventive concepts. Then again, Thrawn is only one step down in the chain of command from the Emperor: so long as he remains loyal to the Empire and continues to succeed in his assigned objectives, he has the authority to do whatever he damn well feels like. Thrawn was a military maverick among his own people, too. In Outbound Flight, he was the one making preemptive strikes, to the consternation of, well, just about everyone. He actually got exiled for that.
  • Similarly, General Garm Bel Iblis is a slightly more conventional commander, but despite his cunning and ability to make do with less is often politically ostracized. He even resisted an upgrade to his aging flagship's comm center so that secure messages would remain more secure. This has more to do with his time as an independent rebel, as opposed to capital-R Rebel, than his behavior, but he seems quite content to let matters remain as they are.
  • Thrawn's old student and second-in-command Pellaeon, having picked up a bit of that genius and becoming Supreme Commander in time, also manages to utterly frustrate his poor captain with tactics that seem counterintuitive at best and stupid at worst.
  • A sort-of inversion comes in the Star Wars Expanded Universe where the Rebel Alliance fleet, now the legitimate military arm of the New Republic, has to adopt the tactics they once so desperately yet handily worked around. Some try to make the change, but find themselves psychologically hamstrung by being unable to convert to the necessary way of thinking; others take to their new roles with gusto, but forget how to anticipate unconventional tactics. (Operation Emperor's Hammer resulted when New Republic officers took to the Empire's tactics very, very well.)
    • Emperor's Hammer, for those who never read the book, was employed against the Yuzhaan Vong, an alien race that only briefly skirmished with the Empire. Therefore they were not aware that one of the primary uses of a Star Destroyer was orbital bombardment... and with something like sixty times the guns, a Super Star Destroyer is even better at it. Wedge Antilles made the Vong think he was desperately retreating, thus luring a very large ground force into the killzone, and then opened fire.
  • Vader is definitely a maverick within the Empire's military (proper court-martial? what's that?), but he's Vader and more or less an extension of the actual Emperor. His lieutenants can't complain (literally). Then again, he and not the Emperor held the rank of Supreme Commander of the Imperial Forces...
    • He was a maverick even before he fell to the Dark Side. During the Clone Wars, Anakin was known for disregarding protocol and orders from higher authorities — whether it be from the Jedi Council or the Supreme Chancellor — and still ending up with successful results.
  • In the Wrath Squadron trilogy, General Han Solo, commanding the anti-Zsinj task force, discovers one downside to being a Military Maverick:
    Han: With my history, I'd be the laughingstock of the New Republic if I ever brought one of my officers up on charges of insubordination.
    Wedge: Yes, sir, I was sort of counting on that.
  • Wedge himself later becomes a flag officer (against his wishes) and fleet commander during the New Jedi Order, without a notable change in his attitude vis-a-vis orders. Notable is the incident in Rebel Dream where the new (self-proclaimed) Chief of State orders Wedge to commit his forces to a suicidal Last Stand at Borelias. Wedge, believing (not wrongly) that the chief's ascension is itself extra-legal, begins dictating terms and implicitly threatens the head of his own government to get the resources he needs to pull the mission off.
• Sister Miriya from James Swallow's Warhammer 40,000 novel Faith & Fire regularly pisses off her Canoness for her "creative" interpretations of instructions given to her, although she usually doesn't disobey the direct orders of a superior and usually gets good results. However, with her actions in the course of the book included discharging her weapon in a library, disobeying direct orders, postponing the arrest of a psyker to go find a deacon and killing that deacon, so it's a miracle she wasn't executed on the spot, this being 40k and all. As it turns out, there was an assassin in the library, the psyker helped them uncover a conspiracy (and was killed later) and the deacon was hoarding psykers for an experiment to try to turn all the humans of the Imperium into psykers, so in recognition of that, she was just demoted into a line Battle Sister and reassigned to another Canoness.

Live-Action TV

• Babylon 5:
  • John Sheridan was such a maverick that he participated in a conspiracy against the (increasingly dictatorial) civilian Earth Gov and finally decided to turn his command into an independent country. He also was not a fan of standard military tactics.
    President Luchenko: Half of Earthforce wants to give you a kiss on the cheek and the Medal of Honor. The other half wants you taken out and shot. As a politician you learn to compromise, which by all rights means: I should give you the Medal of Honor, then have you shot.
  • His predecessor, Jeffrey Sinclair, was a bit of a twist on this: While he wasn't afraid to fight the enemy in battle (more often than not, he'd lead the attack himself), but he was also a master at defusing conflicts, often through Loophole Abuse and predicting how others would react to his actions. His style tended to make him more enemies within the Earth Alliance than with outside parties.
  • Captain Jankowski presents a deconstruction of the trope. His fellow officers consider him overly Hot-Blooded, or as Sheridan describes him, a Loose Cannon. When Sheridan is offered the career-making opportunity to be Jankowski's XO on a recon mission into Minbari space, Sheridan refuses. Jankowski ends up inadvertently kicking off the most destructive interstellar war in human history when he overreacts during a standoff with a Minbari task force.
• In For All Mankind, virtually all the astronauts have a tendency to disregard orders they do not particularly agree with. They are, after all, selected precisely because they push the envelope and have to be able to take quick decisions when reaching Mission Control would take too long or is plain impossible (e.g. being "behind" the moon). It is sometimes acknowledged by members of NASA's ground crew with words to the effect of "it's his/her spacecraft" and it is often pointed out that there is no way to actually enforce an order from earth to a spacecraft. Still, Molly Cobb takes the cake. It pays off, mostly, except when She gets exposed to way too much radiation saving a fellow astronaut against clear orders.
• In the classic (if short) German SF series Raumpatrouille, Commander McLane and the crew of the Orion are this to the extent that the series starts with their being reassigned to 'boring' patrol duty for a couple of years and saddled with a security officer who's supposed to ensure they tread the straight and narrow from now on. Needless to say, that's not quite how it works out.
• Most of the captains from Star Trek seem to fit this mold. Even Picard was credited with violating the Prime Directive about eight or nine times, and that's in the middle of the series run. This would have some meaning if the Prime Directive wasn't redefined nearly every episode. Often, the Federation seems to survive more on supreme acts of heroism than any actual organised strategy. Against technically superior forces like the Borg or the Dominion (early on, before the Federation learned to counter the latter's advantages), this approaches Conservation of Ninjutsu; elsewhere, it's more a case of One Riot, One Ranger, with single ships scattered through the galaxy. Said ships usually prevail by some fantastically risky tactic, as often as not a brazen bluff or Making Shit Up On The Spot, many times never to be done again. The lack of effective fleet-level planning may derive from Gene Roddenberry's reported dislike for making Starfleet "too military" — feel free to insert any joke about his Air Force background you wish.

Video Games

• Axton from Borderlands 2. Once while assigned to protect a foreign dignitary he just let the guy get captured, traced him to an enemy outpost, and blew it up with the guy still inside. He got discharged shortly before the events of the game.
• Halo:
  • Sergeant John Forge from Halo Wars apparently had discipline problems (with multiple promotions AND demotions) and a cocky attitude, once punched out a superior officer, and even brawled with a Spartan-II. He makes up for it by being extremely Badass Normal. Avery Johnson is another badass sergeant with a checkered past and a cocky attitude; he also happens to be a Spartan-I.
  • Corporal Kojo "Romeo" Agu, whose only reason for not being kicked out of the military yet is because of his sniping skills.
  • In the Expanded Universe, there's Kurt-051, who does a lot of things behind the back of his superiors in order to help his Spartan-IIIs, and Gray Team, the most unruly trio among all the Spartan-IIs who were explicitly separated from the rest for covert operations because of their tendency to play fast with the rules to complete objectives and talking back to their superiors.
  • Admiral Preston J. Cole was probably the biggest of all, to the point his first notable victory during the war with the Insurrection was because he made an incredible breach in military protocol by shooting a missile into the enemy vessel that was only possible because he sent a surrender and shot it into their docking tube to gut the ship. The top brass wasn't sure if they should give him the highest honors or have him court-martialed. Afterwards, he continued to distinguish himself with unconventional strategies and tactics fighting the Insurrection and later the Covenant.
• Revan and Malak in Knights of the Old Republic, before their Motive Decay.
• In Mass Effect 3, the turian general Adrien Victus is widely mistrusted by the turian military for using unconventional and "dishonorable" tactics. He ends up as the leader of the turians after everyone else above him in the line of succession is killed by the Reapers and turns out to be pretty good at it, if still unconventional by supporting such measures as curing the krogan genophage to secure their assistance.

Web Comics

• In Far from Home, the lieutenant made a paper airplane out of a briefing. Hence, the scouting mission.
• While Tagon's Toughs were under Breya's employ in Schlock Mercenary the entire crew from Tagon and downwards (i.e. everyone except Breya) arguably qualified. While the Toughs are still as maverick as they used to be, they now work under Tagon, who encourages this behavior. Besides, they're mercenaries and not a military unit, which justifies it. Schlock is special forces in the mercenary company and is arguably twice as much maverick as everyone else.

Western Animation

• Ensign (later Lieutenant Lower Grade) Beckett Mariner of Star Trek: Lower Decks is a deconstruction of this sort of person. She's been in Starfleet for years, so much that she could have been a captain of her very own starship. However, she hates the red tape and bureaucracy of Starfleet and the Federation so much that she decides to do things on her own and fights tooth and nail to not be promoted. This has frustrated her higher-ups greatly. However, between a 10-Minute Retirement and her own promotion by someone who wasn't going to play her games anymore, she has started to wonder why she's doing such things. She eventually admits that her behavior is the result of losing a friend, Sito Jaxa, to a covert mission and then going through the Dominion War, which led to severe PTSD that caused her to intentionally hobble her career so she'd never have to give orders that cause a subordinate's death.

Special Forces (all branches)

Anime and Manga

• Teana Lanster at the start of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS. Unlike most examples, the series went for a far less positive potrayal of this type of character. Teana's Maverick nature almost caused a friendly fire incident during their second mission and her adamant refusal to listen to the advice and orders of her superiors required several officers to beat the idea into her head that being reckless just for the sake of personal pride is a quick way to get you and your comrades crippled or killed. It was only when Teana toned down the Maverick nature of hers did she begin to be truly efficient in battle.

Comic Books

• Snake-Eyes, G.I. Joe (Reloaded continuity), is pretty much insane—and the most dangerous man alive. (In other continuities, he's simply the most dangerous man alive.)

Films

• Deconstructed in Pacific Rim. Most action films portray disobeying or contesting orders as a positive trait, but the opposite happens early on in the storyline when Raleigh and Yancy ignore Stacker's orders for them to stay in the Miracle Mile outside of Anchorage. Instead, they venture 10 miles out to sea in order to save a small fishing boat, which gave Knifehead the advantage of deeper water. Coupled with their cocky attitudes, this ultimately leads to Yancy's death and Gipsy Danger's destruction. It also marks the end of the Golden Age of the Jaegers, eventually leading to the Pan Pacific Defense Corps only possessing three Jaegers when they attempt to nuke the Breach.
  • It's specifically mentioned by Chuck Hansen that one of the main reasons the Jaeger Program had been decommissioned was because of mediocre and reckless pilots. Chuck's contempt for Raleigh stems directly from his maverick and Screw This, I'm Outta Here tendencies, which he believes have hurt the PPDC in the past and could possibly do it again in the future.

Literature

• Holly Short from Artemis Fowl is like this. Infamously, when her final exam to join LEPrecon was interrupted by a terrorist plot, as her instructor was yelling at her for rescuing him rather than getting backup, she shot him with her paintball gun and repeated what he told her at the beginning of the exercise: "Shoot me before I shoot you, you pass."

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40,000:
  • The Space Wolves (Space Vikings) are this to the rest of the Adeptus Astartes, mostly the Codex Astartes-following Ultramarines which causes no end of Jurisdiction Friction. Even more so since the Armageddon Wars, when they took it on themselves to protect civilians and veteran Guardsmen from the Inquisition, who would exterminate any potentially touched by Chaos.
    • Among the Space Wolves, the Blood Claws are the younger troops who have yet to fully master discipline, seeking only to close with the enemy and grab themselves a trophy.
  • The Astartes also have a tendency to be this in the wider Imperium. Each Chapter is its own organization with its own rules (even the Ultramarines and their descendants) and a law unto itself, and they'll do things the Marine way even if they're supposed to be working in concert with the Guard - if unaugmented humans can't keep up, they'll be left behind. Many Marines also display a level of unconcern for collateral damage and allied casualties that even the Guard might find disturbing.
  • Averted for the most part in the Imperial Guard: if a Kommissar judges you to be impertinent, cowardly, heretical or doesn't like your face, they can (and will) execute you on the spot.
    • The Catachans, however, are an entire army of Ramboes (via the jungles of Predator) and as such have a special rule; before starting the game they roll to see whether an attached commissar has suffered an "unfortunate accident" miles away from the front lines.
  • According to Ciaphas Cain (HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!), Sentinel pilots are this, as they spend a lot of time operating independently behind enemy lines, leading to mysterious vox failures when receiving orders they don't agree with. Cain himself regularly has to deal with these guys, notably Trooper Magot, Psycho Lesbian and perennial discipline problem. Not that Cain himself has much room to complain as he tends to ignore his own rule book on a regular basis too.
  • The more organized forces of Chaos tend to have this problem: they try to have tactics and carefully planned-out strategies, which are screwed up when their troops decide they should get into combat right now, think they're better at running the show, or hear the gods speaking to them.

Video Games

• Army of Two somewhat takes on the Black Hawk Down example; the first mission is set back when Rios and Salem were Rangers, and their initial awe at the sight of Phillip Clyde whooping ass with his bare hands and freerunning is tangible. Unlike the Delta operators from Black Hawk Down, he's very condescending to them and rather homicidal.
  • In fact, their awe lasts all of five minutes, after which they join the same mercenary company but refuse to work in the field alongside him. (In contrast, according to the Blackhawk Down book the Deltas sometimes helped out the Rangers on-base, i.e. teaching techniques, or in the case of one Ranger building him a custom machine gun grip.)
• Axton in Borderlands 2 was a former Commando in the working for the Dahl Marines. Emphasis on "former" because he was facing the firing squad due to his Glory Hound ways and his preference for doing things that were "awesome" instead of following orders. The incident that got him kicked out involved a mission to protect a dignitary from terrorists — only he allowed the dignitary to be kidnapped by terrorists, trailed them back to their hideout, and blew it up, with the dignitary still inside.
• Command & Conquer: Renegade has you playing Captain Nick "Havoc" Parker. It's right there in the title and his Call Sign. The man is mouthy, Hot-Blooded, rebellious, and loves a good fight, but he's intelligent, motivated, totally loyal to GDI, and cares deeply about civilians, to the point of stealing a hovercraft to go free them when he hears about a NOD camp full of them rather than wait for reinforcements like his commander wanted. He gets put in the brig every so often, but they keep him around because he's effective to the point of being the setting's Master Chief.
• British Commandos sergeant Jack O'Hara (AKA "the Green Beret", AKA "Butcher"), from the Commandos series. He was sentenced to fourteen years of hard labour after striking an officer. His sentence was suspended upon volunteering for the commandos. According to the tutorials, he is violent and undisciplined but is more of a nightmare for the enemy than he is for his superiors.
• A minor example only: in Crusader, aside from their armor, Silencers are given free rein to use whatever equipment they deem necessary for an upcoming mission. As they are Silencers, their judgement on what they need is generally considered unimpeachable.
• In Mass Effect, the Spectres are considered above all authority but that of the Council, and Shepard still manages to be a Military Maverick. Hell, one of the two alignments is called Renegade. And even playing the Paragon side of things, you end up defying the Council and conspiring to get your ship back so you can save the day. And that's just the first game. In the second one, you can get in double the Bunny Ears Lawyering and maverickiness between the Council and the Illusive Man.
  • Jacob Taylor, one of your squadmates in 2, is a former Alliance soldier who's only working for Cerberus because the Alliance refuses to get involved in the colony attacks due to red tape. Despite Cerberus being Mildly Military at best, and Shepard's squad being an extreme Ragtag Bunch of Misfits, he acts the same way he would at the Alliance and is the only squadmate who makes it a practice to salute.
• Though the players only see the units after they go rogue, FOX, FOXHOUND, and Dead Cell are considered maverick units.
  • Illustrated repeatedly in The Last Days of FOXHOUND.
• Rainbow Six as of Vegas and onward stopped being soldiers who did everything in their power to keep the peace while minimizing the body count of civilians to having to shoot cops just to stop them from detonating a bomb and ultimately throws the guy off the bridge anyway.
• Razing Storm has Shin as the team's maverick. He tends to wind up alerting enemy presence, wrecking jeeps, and getting his friends killed because he gets too far out into the open.
• The Republic Trooper player character's Dark Side options in Star Wars: The Old Republic often trend towards this; s/he is still a highly effective commando, delivering critical victories to the Republic — but not in the way your superiors, or conventional doctrine, would suggest. By far the most extreme example is in the quest "Subtle Maneuvers", where the player is called on to attend a Senate subcommittee hearing which has been called by an Imperial mole. Mission Control wants you to wait until the Senator has finished haranguing you, at which point you can testify and present evidence of their treason — or you can respond to his first statement by shooting him.
  General Garza: Ah, Major. You have truly crossed the line this time. I don't even know where to begin. [beat] What made you think you could gun down a senator in the middle of an official hearing? This is the Republic! You are not above the law!
  Trooper: Don't talk to me about laws — you break them left and right!
  Garza: I've bent the rules a few times in my career, certainly — but I've never killed an unarmed public official in the middle of the Senate Tower! You may think you can get away with anything, since there's a war on, but don't think there won't be consequences for this.
  Trooper: I'm your ultimate weapon, Garza. There's no one you could send to stop me.
  • And what's worse is that the Trooper is right about Garza breaking the law. Many times she's ordered you to do unconventional things such as suffocating civilians that may have been injected with cybernetic implants. Or wanting you to take serums of a disease that can turn people into rakghouls.
• Captain Titus in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. Instead of rigidly adhering to the Codex Astartes, he views it more of a guideline on how to act, instead of it being utter law. This goes against the popular concept that the Ultramarines view the Codex Astartes as sacrosanct, and compared to most Ultramarines depicted, he's the one who deviates from it the most. He's also a Captain and doing this.

Real Life

• Truth in Television: Special Forces units do tend to be laxer on the rules. Partly because as elite units their superiors let them get by with more — which is as much because special forces tend to recruit soldiers who are self-disciplined and don't need micro-managing, yet are capable of using their initiative, as out of respect for their capabilities — and partly because they're often assigned covert missions where traditional military behavior can be detrimental.
  • Mark Bowden's book Black Hawk Down goes into detail about how this could cause friction with more conventional units. The Army Rangers at Mogadishu in 1993 practically idolized the Delta unit (reputed for extraordinary autonomy and flexibility) as the top rung of the special forces ladder, but company commander Captain Steele was concerned that Delta's "cowboy" ways would rub off too much onto the younger Rangers (not to mention that he thought that "they could be comically arrogant") who needed discipline, while a Delta sergeant first class had an even lower opinion of the Rangers' basic competence, and of Steele in particular. The movie would allude to the tensions with the "this is my safety sir" scene and then the Delta SFC's Expy arguing with Captain Steele on the battlefield nearby other Rangers. (The movie version left out that the real Delta who inspired the "safety" scene defied Captain Steele in full view of other Rangers, without the immediate urgency of combat as an excuse.)
    • According to the book it was worse than that; both Captain Steele and the Delta SFC generalized the Rangers as having been young and inexperienced and seemed to see the Rangers as not adopting the deeper understandings or self-discipline. Egregious examples would include Rangers unknowingly firing on Delta positions at least twice without checking first, and a trio of Rangers attempting to imitate how he was taking cover, apparently not understanding that he was doing so only because he'd found a spot where the cover let him fire with impunity. Unfortunately, one of those Rangers would be mortally wounded while in this position due to being exposed.
• There is a story about a regulation for "Green Berets" (United States Army Special Forces) in Afghanistan to wear regular uniforms and to shave after a photo came out of a topless Green Beret in a keffiyah on the scene at an averted assassination attempt. Not only would it make them more visible, but the shaving cost them street cred in a country full of traditionalist Muslims...so when one of the brass ordered a team to regularly send photos of themselves with their (changing) radio frequency to show compliance, the team simply kept sending back the first and only clean-shaven photo, with their latest frequency Photoshopped in.

Other/General

Anime and Manga

• The Bleach character Rukia is a hardass by human civilian standards, which is why it's a surprise when her fellow shinigami reveal that, by their standards, she's a traitor who deserves execution. It turns out that sharing her power like she did is illegal, even if she was doing it to save lives. Successive scenes show that her temper often made it difficult for her to tolerate the Gotei 13's aristocrat leaders or do What Must Be Done. Fortunately, shinigami with her level of spiritual power can't be discarded so easily.
• In Heavy Object the protagonists Qwenthur and Havia — a civilian student studying Objects and a radar analyst — often ignore or disobey orders in order to take down enemy Objects. They're a massive headache for Frolaytia, their commanding officer, and during reassignments were even bigger headaches for other commanders. The only reason they haven't been kicked out of the military yet is that their government is terrified they'll defect to another supernation.
  Putana: Teacher, we’re disobeying orders, aren’t we?
  Qwenthur: If we pull it off, it’ll all cancel out in the end.
  Putana: Is that the Lost Angels way of doing things?
  Qwenthur: No, it’s more like a summary of my entire life.

Comic Books

• The Ultimates: Captain America called on all military personnel to ignore their orders from above, take a weapon, go to the site of the Chitauri alien invasion and start firing. Screw the Rules, It's the Apocalypse!.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Many Space Marine chapters interpret the Codex Astartes differently and go their own way about implementing it. Then there's the Space Wolves. Who do not give half a damn about what the Codex has to say.
  • The Space Wolves themselves have their own take on the problem, due in part to their method of recruitment (a Wolf Priest selects a badly-wounded warrior from one of Fenris' many clan wars, and the recruit is made aware that he has been chosen to make war on the Emperor's enemies for all eternity). Where other chapters only use veteran Marines in melee assault teams, Space Wolves give their newest members a sword and a boltgun and point them in the enemy's direction, viewing it both as good training and an opportunity to remove the weak and unlucky. The survivors can then move on to become Grey Hunters and Long Fangs (Tactical and Devastator Marine equivalents), while those whose enthusiasm for melee combat never abates can get a bike or jetpack to continue on their chosen path.

Video Games

• While they're only students of a military academy, Class VII in The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III breaks so many military rules that their homeroom teacher ends up getting headaches from their acts like not staying put in camp and actually stealing a military robot while tailing him and his friends in his mission given to him by the government, disobeying their other instructor's orders just so they can follow him, and even tailing him to a casino when he's gathering information from jaegers. He even calls them out on it by the end of the first chapter.
  Rean: If you were actual soldiers, you'd be in front of a court-martial right now!
• Eiger from Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall is an extremely by-the-book ex-soldier. This gets her into hot water when she forgets the "ex-" part, and that her new team consists of one hacker and professional anarchist, an ex-cultist on the verge of cyberpsychosis, and a street-fighting shaman, all of whom have not only never even read the book, but think the book is best used as toilet paper on general principles.
• In the Nintendo Wars titles where he features as one of the controllable Commanding Officers, Grit of the Blue Moon army^notewhich, like the rest of the Wars World armies and COs, does not make much of a distinction between the various military branches; he's as much of a naval and air commander as he is of infantry and vehicles is perhaps the most easygoing characters in the franchise. His commander-in-chief Olaf is always chewing him out for being lazy and unmotivated, and, by Grit's own admission, he is largely uninterested in matters regarding whose borders are where. Nevertheless, his indirect combat proficiency is peerless, and, when he gets serious, he'll fight just as hard as any other CO against would-be invaders.

Real Life

• The Military Order of Maria Theresa was created by the eponymous monarch during the War of the Austrian Succession to be awarded to Austrian officers who showed "initiative" in battle leading to victory. This was specifically intended to encourage commanders in all branches (usually the Army, but sometimes also the Navy) to take risks, as the Austrian commanders kept losing battles for sticking too closely to doctrine and too conservatively to orders — in other words, the award was intended to create military mavericks. This eventually led to the (untrue) legend that an officer had to disobey orders in order to earn the decoration.
• An old Prussian military anecdote states that a Major was given a mission to complete during the Franco-Prussian War and was able to complete it, but in the process bypassed a greater opportunity that presented itself. The Crown Prince learned of it and gave him a tongue lashing for ignoring a possible advantage. The Major retorted that "His Majesty made me an officer to obey my orders", and the Prince replied back, "His Majesty made you an officer to know when to disobey your orders!"

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