Artistic License Military / Video Games

• [PROTOTYPE]:
  • The Marine Base Commanders wear the scarlet and gold shoulder chevrons of a First Sergeant (on the utility uniform, no less), are always saluted and addressed as "sir", and, when they are given names, have varying officer ranks.
  • There are also errors in the equipment used by the Marines. They use UH-60 Blackhawks, M2 Bradley APCs and AH-64 helicopter gunships. These should be UH-1 Venoms, LAV-25s or AAV-7s and the AH-1 Super Cobra respectively. Even though one could handwave this by saying they are U.S Army attachments, they are all specifically stated to be Marine vehicles, including by the Marines themselves.
  • The final battle takes place on-board the USS Ronald Reagan, a US Navy aircraft carrier operating about a mile off the coast of Manhattan and launching Apache helicopters. In real life, the Reagan is part of the US Pacific Fleet, and wouldn't be involved in an operation on the East Coast. Aircraft carriers also don't operate that close to land, not only because they don't have to but also so they have room to change speed and orientation for flight operations. AH-64s would not operate off a carrier, because the Navy has more than enough of its own aircraft that it needs the space for.
  • The US Government deploying the US Marines to Manhattan is this by itself, as they are mainly used for overseas operations rather than, say, first responders to a domestic operation such as the occupation of Manhattan to neutralize the threat. It would make a lot of sense if the US National Guard were to be called-in as the first responders, due to its proximity, and it would remove the aforementioned asset issues, like the Marines using Apaches and Bradley's. And as well as their incorrect use of combat uniform (the Marines wear US Army Combat Uniforms instead of the two MARPAT-pattern uniforms that they wear in real life).
• The Aircraft Carrier level in Crysis is incredibly groan inducing to anyone who has ever served in the US Navy or knows anything about Naval Ranks. The fact that none of the ranks or uniforms make any sense points to a blatant case of not even bothering to skim the Wikipedia article. The Carrier CVN-80 being named the USS Constitution is also unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future, being that the original ship bearing that name is still in commission. (CVN-80 has since been announced to be the next Enterprise.)
• The detail in the aircraft carrier environments in Army of Two is pretty insanely detailed, and gets a lot of things surprisingly correct, and most of the minor changes for gameplay can be ignored. However, at the end of the level, the players are desperately searching for a lifeboat to get off the carrier...despite the fact that you run past dozens of lifeboats clearly visible in the background graphics. One wonders if they game designers simply didn't know what they were (the large pill-shaped things around the lifelines) or just ignored them for plot purposes.
• Madou Souhei Kleinhasa is an eroge set in a fictional military, so the usual "no fraternization between officers and enlisted" rule gets ignored in some scenes. Roze and Llun also have ridiculously long hair, even by the standards of this page: Llun's hair goes almost to her hips, while Roze's hair is long enough to drag on the ground.
• Command & Conquer: Generals
  • China's military in this game is a stereotypical communist army using human wave and/or heavy-handed tactics alongside equipment from the Cold War that would be hopelessly obsolete in real life. The real Chinese military is much more modern and would play similarly to the USA faction in the game, hence why realism was sacrificed for gameplay variety. It's largely for this reason that the game is literally Banned in China.
  • The basic Chinese infantry unit is called the Red Guard and carries a bolt-action rifle. Real life Red Guards were a radical student group formed by Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution that ended up going out of control and had to be put down the the army. China in general does *not* have a good memory of them and they were never a part of the military proper. And actual Chinese soldiers use the QBZ-95 assault rifle in real life.
  • The basic USA infantry unit is called Ranger, US Army Rangers in real life are not basic infantry. Being under the umbrella of the USSOCOM, their combat prowess are more closer to commando-level operatives such as Burton, and the three CIA agents.
  • In the second USA mission for Zero Hour (Defending the Docks), the US Navy is shown employing PT Boats as escorts for battleships and aircraft carriers. Except, going by the model they are using, they should be fielding their own (modernized) PT Boats rather than the one that looked way outdated (that, and the gunner is that of a GLA Rebel instead of a Ranger).
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert Series
  • Given the Narm Charm, it's hard not to expect this of Command & Conquer Red Alert 2. Prominent general Carville is wearing insignia from an ROTC Cadet uniform (badges worn by student soldiers before they graduate college).
  • The basic infantry for both the Allies and Soviets are equipped with only submachine guns rather than assault rifles. On the Allied side, we have GI's whose standard issue weapon is a machine pistol and an LMG as a deployed weapon, while on the Soviet side, we have conscripts issued with a PPSh-41 submachine gun. Only Boris and the Guardian GI is armed with a proper service rifle, an AKM (which fires tank piercing rounds) and an M16A1/A2 respectively.
  • Given every female character in all of the games is intended to be a Ms. Fanservice, the nature of their uniforms should obviously be considered less-than-accurate. In the opening cutscene for the Allied portion of the Uprising Expansion, a female officer clearly has to modify the way she walks just to avoid flashing the camera.
• Resident Evil
  • One of the most notorious errors in the entire series is that Jill Valentine is listed in the manual for Resident Evil 3: Nemesis as a former-Delta Force, the top secretive anti-terrorist unit in the U.S. Army. At the age of 23. Two problems here: 1) the Unit (as it is often called) recruits only from the most experienced members from the Special Forces^note As in, United States Army Special Forces, more commonly known as Green Berets and Army Rangers, neither of which admitted women to their ranks at the time of writing (much less in 1998). 2) Even if one assumes that women can be Berets or Rangers in the RE-verse, becoming a Delta operator takes somewhere around ten to twelve years; Jill would have to be at least 32. Later games dodge this by simply listing Jill's skills and abilities without going into which branch of the military she was trained in, while the novelization states that Jill learned her skills from her father, a cat burglar.
  • Chris Redfield, meanwhile, is stated to be former U.S Air Force, where he served as a pilot. However, background material from the first game also states that he served as a "marksman", which would be under the purview of a dedicated ground-service branch such as the Air Force Pararescue service, and it would be extremely unusual for someone to have combat experience as such while also serving as a fixed-wing pilot. Chris is also stated to have experience flying VTOL's, which during the era that Chris served would have only consisted of the Harrier Jump Jet, which were exclusive to the Marines.
• Half-Life: The Hazardous Environment Combat Unit were originally only called "soldiers" or "the military". This is retconned in Half-Life: Opposing Force, where they received their current name and are established to be US Marines, but this new characterization ended up creating new problems.
  • The HECU medical personnel are referred to, both in-universe and out, as medics. The U.S. Marines, which make up the HECU's foot soldiers, do not use medics. They have corpsmen, who are actually from the Navy and have been specially trained to work and fight alongside the Marines.
  • Although they're identified as marines, HECU soldiers deploy various types of military hardware that are not used by U.S. Marines in real life, including U.S. Army's M2 Bradley IFVs and AH-64 Apache helicopters, as well as U.S. Air Force F-16 fighters. The Marine equivalents of these vehicles would be the LAV-25, AH-1W Super Cobra, and AV-8B Harrier II fighter respectively.
  • Averted with their individual uniforms, the HECU uses a white-and-grey camouflage with a green vest. While the US Military never used that kind of uniform ^note At the time the game was made, they used the M81 Woodland or the Three-colour desert, this gear was a prototype developed in the 90s for urban warfare program called Operation Urban Warrior◊, showing that Valve did a little bit of research. That begin said, US Marines don't wear berets. A Maroon beret, used by one of the models, would indicate they are from the Army's airborne troops.
  • Many times, the HECU troopers refer to themselves as "soldiers", which is a huge Berserk Button for US Marines, who insist on being called "marines" rather than soldiers. Even the drill sergeants, who are supposed to literally drill the corp's internal culture into the new recruits, refer to them as "soldiers".
  • The boot camp tutorial of Opposing Force deserves special mention. Despite being a corporal (and thus having gone through basic), Shephard is still initially with the other recruits when in reality he'd be well past basic and specialization school. Boot camp is also depicted as being in Arizona (instead of either Parris Island or San Diego) and Shephard is randomly selected for advanced training for the HECU, which is conveniently also located at boot camp. In reality, such a special division would be located at an entirely separate base and Shephard would have applied for such rather than being chosen out of the blue. All of that isn't even mentioning the other oddities present, such as regular drill instructors training both the recruits and the HECU (as opposed to trained officers as in reality) or that Shephard seems to be the sole Marine running through training and completes it in less than an hour.
  • Black Mesa does away with most of the errors Half-Life and its expansions had with regards to depicting the HECU as US Marines, but still features the Apache as their attack helicopter of choice.
  • Black Mesa: Blue Shift shows the HECU using CH-47 Chinooks to airlift various equipment into the Black Mesa facility, including several LAV-25s and an M1 Abrams. The Chinook, like the Apache in the main game, has never been utilized by the real-world Marines (who instead use the CH-46 Sea Knight), and while the most capable Chinook variants boast a 14-ton payload limit that would plausibly allow them to carry an LAV-25, they definitely couldn't do the same with the 60-ton Abrams.
• Escape Velocity series
  • The original game had a major become an admiral. That's not even trying.
  • EV Nova may have an example with General Smart, a Federation officer who defected to the Rebels and is now in charge of their space navy. The Federation Navy appears to use US Navy ranks (the two named Federation officers, Krane and Raczak, are a commander and an admiral respectively), so the only two ways to resolve it is by having the Rebels use Army or Air Force ranks (given that the Rebels are of Federation extraction and do not have a secessionist goal, this seems unlikely), or that General Smart could have been a marine officer before defection (outside the USA, it is fairly common for marines to be a branch of the navy but use army ranks, and just because the Federation uses US ranks doesn't mean it is organized like the US military — some of the references to Smart seem to call him a General when he was still a Federation officer).
• Justifiable as it's more a way of keeping score, but in the X-Wing games, your character's rank is a function of their game score. So if you perform well enough (or use exploits and other tricks to pad your score), your character can be a general being ordered about by fleet captains (about equal to a colonel) or even fighter lieutenants in the early game.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • In the games set in America, the army should technically not be allowed to go after the player character. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 forbids the use of the US Military as a law enforcement agency.
  • When you go to the LHD-069 amphibious assault ship in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the "sailors" you run into are merely the game's stock military troops, wearing green (not even a color palette swap to blue). Even then it would still be incorrect for the time period, as the sailors would be wearing the classic dungarees. On a more minor note, there is no LHD-069 either — only eight Wasp-class ships with the LHD designation were ever built, the USS Wasp (LHD-1) being the only one in service at the time the game is set in — but the series as a whole loves to reference the number 69, so what other hull designator would it be?
  • Sgt. Martinez in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories apparently has a lot of free rein, and doesn't report for any kind of daily duties, work, etc. during the part of the story he's still on active duty. He is also able to fly an attack helicopter, despite being a non-commissioned officer.
  • This is averted in Grand Theft Auto V, the first main game in the series to reintroduce the military after they were cut from Grand Theft Auto IV and its episodes, as their presence here is appropriately enforced. Generally, the military won't come after you if you're not near Fort Zancudo. Take a police chase to the vicinity of the base, or trespass or begin causing trouble in there, and you can bet that you'll be perforated by machine gun fire, tank rounds, and a few air to ground missiles for good measure.
• In Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, an army of Russian mercenaries (of 1000 strong) made a landing on an American soil, bringing with them are Russian-made military hardware, which includes three transport helicopters, and one attack helicopter (which is loaned to Liquid's FOXHOUND unit). In real life, this is considered a huge breach of national security, and emergency measures will be employed to strengthen said security.
• Valkyria Chronicles
  • Welkin's unit in the first game is very forgiving of uniform alterations; includes older, more experienced troops answering to a rookie commander younger than them; and includes numerous individuals who struggle or refuse to work properly together. It's also a civilian militia activated on short notice under Gallia's Universal Conscription laws. The enlisted armed forces are much better about it, wearing uniform and addressing each other according to rank.
  • The second game focuses on a class at the military college, and while the player's unit is explicitly the dumping ground for applicants that scraped into admission but fit nowhere else, there's generally a lot more discipline.
  • While all three games have the player in command of a platoon-sized unit (15-30 people), the game always refer to them as squads (8-12 people). This is a mistake by the English translators: in the original Japanese the player's unit is correctly referred to as shotai (platoon).
• Freespace inverts its capital ship classifications from the historical norm. In Freespace, cruisers are the smallest capital ships, corvettes are the next level up, and destroyers are the heavy battleship units. In Real Life (circa World War I – World War II era), destroyers were and are considered escorts and fragile speedsters, cruisers were still fast but eat destroyers for breakfast, and battleships were the heavy hitters. And corvettes were basically an upgraded yacht with guns, whose size and capacity is still outranked by the next class up, frigates (who likewise are outranked by the bigger but still just-as-fast destroyers).
• Star Trek Online:
  • Using rank as a synonym for Character Level (from Lieutenant at level 5 to Fleet Admiral at level 60) results in a lot of Outranking Your Job and means the player is frequently taking orders from people they outrank by several grades, as well as resulting in a ludicrous Marissa Picard-like situation where you apparently went from junior officer to 5-star in eighteen months. It also inconveniences the developers in the event they ever want to raise the level cap again: the increase in rank cap to fleet admiral resulted in jokes that the next expansion would make you President of the Federation.
  • Miral Paris is a Starfleet security officer, which according to the game's conventions means she should be wearing red coloring on her uniform: red is for security and tactical personnel, as well as commanding officers and admirals. For some reason they have her in yellow, which is for operations and engineering specialties (though it included security personnel in the Star Trek: Voyager timeframe, which was when her mother served as an engineering officer; this is possibly a misplaced use of Generation Xerox). Season 10 makes the same error in the opposite direction by putting Sarish Minna, Deep Space 9's operations officer, in a red security/tactical uniform. Possibly the devs confused the term "operations officer" with the post of "strategic operations officer" held by Worf in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (for which he wore a red uniform).
• In Criminal Case: Pacific Bay's eighth case, Colonel Spangler wears the insignia of a four-star general.
• Sabre Ace: Conflict Over Korea's North Korean campaign has you flying as a Soviet pilot attached to the North Korean air force from the first days of the Korean War, but this state of affairs didn't begin in real life until April 1951.
• Phantom Doctrine features randomly generated operatives (both men and women) from various intelligence services and special forces branches of the armed forces as available party members. The game is set in 1983 and the random generation can occasionally create combinations that couldn't exist at the time, like female US Marines or female Navy SEALs.
• Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number: The Colonel says that he's being promoted to Lieutenant General when he returns stateside. However, Lieutenant General is a three-star rank, and the rank after Colonel would be Brigadier General, a one-star rank.
• Muv-Luv Alternative: Besides apparently discarding fraternization regs (expected from an eroge series), American TSFs designated F-15E and F-22 take part in the Military Coup arc. Just one problem: the Americans are from the US Navy's Pacific Fleet, and those are names of Air Force birds.^note Traditional air forces mostly aren't used in Muv-Luv because taking them into battle in a theater containing Laser-class BETA is suicide, so the names of real-world USAF aircraft are given to US Army mecha—appropriate since the Air Force was part of the Army until 1947.
• Time Crisis games featuring the military run afoul from this.
  • Time Crisis 3 has the Zagorias Federation Army whose infantry platoons are issued only with pistols, with submachine guns being normally reserved for officers and elite operatives. Even cutscenes are guilty of this as their troops (in true Red Alert 2 fashion) are equipped with submachine guns with nary an assault rifle in sight.
  • The Hamlin Battalion in Time Crisis 4 is referred to as a rogue unit within the US Army, yet, much like the Zagorias' Armed Forces, have their grunts be equipped with pistols, and their officers and elites being issued with SMGs. The US National Guards are an even egregious case, as they are equipped with pistols as their standard issue, and the occasional assault rifles that they carry are not something like the US Armed Force of any branch would ever use; the G36 rifle (namely the G36C variant).

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