Headscratchers / Rainbow Six Siege

• Do FBI actually allow foreigners in their ranks? Seemed to me only right that national security falls within its citizens' hands. While I can see why Fuze, born an Uzbek, is in the Spetsnaz (Fuze is registered as a Russian Citizen), I can't see reason in the FBI recruiting Ash, whose nationality remains Israeli.
  • No. Apparently a full US citizenship is required to join the FBI. While they do recruit foreign experts, these people do not become fully-fledged FBI staff, what more becoming an agent or operative.
  • According to her profile in game, Ash is a participant in a US-Israeli law enforcement exchange program, which actually exists [1].

• Why is someone who uses chemical weapons allowed on a CTU team? I mean shouldn't Smoke be arrested or something? I'm pretty sure chemical weaponry is illegal.
  • It's illegal to use it against someone covered by the Geneva Conventions, sure everyone on Rainbow Six is covered but they're currently just actually training against each other (maybe this is just some insane live fire exercise for Rainbow, or in a simulation). The gas charges are actually meant for the White Masks (Terrorist Hunt) who AREN'T covered by the Geneva Conventions (because they attack civilians)
  • Gas weapons have been used in hostage situations prehaps most notably the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis. Of course that ended up as a massive failure with most of the hostages killed by the gas.
    • And in that case it wasn't a gas grenade used by the soldiers, but gas pumped in from canisters.
    • The game tends to have the operatives doing that support should be doing like watching surveillance feeds and such. But the example is more about the precedent of using gas in a hostage situation.
  • In the book, Rainbow is a "black" operation that required a lot of rule-bending and basically operates only in the most extreme cases. Smoke probably gets a pass based on the team just being so far outside what would be considered normal.
    • That and in an organization like Rainbow, an operator's gear is going to be checked out and authorized before deployment by their CO. Being a secretive black ops unit, Six would be the one to sign off on Smoke's weapon and kit, and they're the one who would approve of the use of his unspecified gas. That and its not clear what's in the gas itself; it could be an incapacitating agent rather than something strictly lethal, which isn't necessarily banned.
    • While Rainbow is "blacker than black", they still have to play by the rules. In the original novel their assault on the Horizon execs was predicated on them not being caught by the Brazilian authorities, since what they did pretty much amounted to mass murder. Even if we were to buy that Rainbow is operating under looser standards than they did under Clark and Chavez, an operator using chemical weapons on the OpFor is probably still a no go. Having said that, this version of Rainbow isn't very realistic in terms of how it operates as an organization (see the below point about how Cavi's application would've been thrown in the trash), so we can probably chalk Smoke's beauties up to an Acceptable Break from Reality.
  • Smoke's Elite skin reveals that the chemical inside his grenades is "Arsa Cyclopentadiene", aka "Arsole", which in real life is a non-lethal irritant that causes skin rashes and eye irritation.

• Would an elite police unit like BOPE actually allow a criminal to join? Especially one that has made it clear that they're only joining to avoid jail time?
  • I wouldn't be entirely surprised, honestly. US Law Enforcement has recruited a lot of criminals over the years, albeit primarily in cybercrime. Also, the US hired a known mafioso to run the NY Docks in WWII, so the precedent certainly exists.
    • The same thing also frequently happens with counterfeiters/forgers (see: Catch Me If You Can.)
  • It should go without saying though that even if Cavi was allowed to join BOPE, there is no way she'd ever be allowed to join a unit like Rainbow. Her psych profile alone would cause her to be rejected on the spot.
    • It should be noted that Rainbow has already had a defector (Gabe in the Vegas series) and then had a second defector in the form of Deimos, who murders Harry in the run up to Season 8. Then beyond that Walker becomes the Big Bad of Ghost Recon Wildlands and Aaron Keener becomes the Big Bad of The Division, and it seems these super-elite units in the Clancy universe really struggle to recruit loyal people.

• Why is Team Rainbow comprised of quite a few police tactical units? I understand many of them worldwide have counterterrorism training, and the maps indicate that the team will mainly operate in urban environments, but their counterterrorism functions is in addition to police duties, isn't it? And I don't recall domestic units being trained for black operations, which are what Rainbow was formed for. Military special operations groups have been doing a lot of counterterrorism since the War on Terror began, with a lot adding counterterrorism to their main functions, and typically have more experience in intense combat situations and high-stress environments, on top of having very frequent deployments. So why did Six decide to add so many agents from domestic units onto the team? Wouldn't Germany's KSK be a better fit for the team than the GSG 9? Wouldn't Japan's Special Forces Group be better suited for the job than the SAT?
  • It depends on the national police forces. GSG9 is trained in counter-terror operations (and was founded specifically due to the lack of a German police force capable of handling terrorist threats) and many national or state SWAT and tactical police units recruit retired military. Since Rainbow is basically given a blank check and free reign to recruit globally, they could also be pulling highly elite or unusually capable officers from these national police forces. It's not like they're drawing dozens of operators from a national police force, but two to four of the very best of the best of organizations with thousands to tens of thousands of members.
  • While Rainbow under Clark and Chavez recruited nominally from military SpecOps, the roster in the previous games did include some members from law enforcement units (Santiago Arnavisca was recruited from UEI, the counter-terrorism unit of the Guardia Civil, and Gerald Morris from the ATF). When Arnot took over the unit at the start of Siege, it's possible she wanted Rainbow to focus more on hostage rescue and CQC as opposed to general counter-terrorism on a larger scale as seen in previous games (note that Rainbow prior to Siege had several dedicated Snipers whilst in Siege the only operator who fits that role is Glaz). Law enforcement agencies would have teams that were trained to handle those kinds of situations so it makes sense she would recruit directly from them as opposed to from the military.
  • It's not clear that the roster from the game is all of Rainbow. Since all the operations excepting two are in buildings, it's possible that we are seeing only the selected slices that are taking on these missions while other R6 operatives are out doing other stuff. With that in mind, police forces spend a lot of time raiding buildings, so they are a natural place to look for this sort of work.
• I honestly can't believe it took this long, but has there ever been a proper ending to Outbreak's storyline? It just showed up, had us do some operations, then just left us with nothing to indicate the aftermath.
  • Given that Rainbow took out most of the roaches, VIP's with information on the virus were extracted and the capsule that contained the virus was secured, it's reasonable to assume they were able to contain the Chimera virus (even if the city of Truth or Consequences was lost). On the other hand, the upcoming Rainbow Six: Quarantine appears to be Outbreak reworked as a standalone game, so perhaps Rainbow's initial efforts were unsuccessful.
  • Operation Chimera is mentioned in Thermite's rewritten bio, in the past tense. So we can conclude that it happened in the canon and was contained successfully.
• The Road to S.I event. Is Ubisoft just dropping all pretense of realism here when it comes to narrative? I know it's being done to promote the invitational, and I can even buy the idea of a Tournament-style training program and using simulated ammo that somehow doesn't cause serious bodily harm even when fired at point-blank range. But having the finals in a packed Soccer Stadium with thousands of spectators? Did Ubi forget that Rainbow is supposed to be "blacker than black?"
  • In the book Rainbow Six, they debate on leaking the fact that there's an multi-national CTU operating as a means of deterrence. By the next book (set 2-3 years later) Rainbow is actively training a fellow CTU, specifically Spetsnaz. I suppose in the Siege Universe, you could explain it off as a PR message: both to discourage the White Masks, and to possibly draw funding. Perhaps the audience is made of government officials and members of the operators families. Perhaps even other members of their original units. This is a bit of a stretch for me too, truth be told.
    • I do recall the part in the original novel about taking Rainbow from "black" to "grey" as a means of deterring terrorists (Ding say something to the effect of "There's a new sheriff in town, and the word on the street ought to be 'don't fuck with him'"). These plans got shelved though after the PIRA ambush, but from The Bear and the Dragon onward, the general public is aware of Rainbow in the sense that they know there's some kind of international CTU but that's really all the information they have (they're occasionally referred to as "The Men in Black"). The games have adhered to the "blacker than black" idea (to the point that the terrorists knowing who Rainbow is in the Vegas games is treated as a big deal) up until Siege. I could accept that Harry wants to take Rainbow from "black" to "grey" but there's ways to do that without staging a tournament in a soccer stadium.
    • Public audience aside, the team members could be competing/training/demonstrating under their own CTU's banner while Rainbow is still somewhat of a secret. Some special forces do perform mock exercises in full view of the public.

• In the Bomb mode, there are two bombs set to go off, so how does defusing one lead to the attackers winning? Wouldn't the other one still be able to go off?
  • The Doylist reason is that they were copying the Bomb gamemode from Counter-Strike, but due to Tom Clancy's rule that gamers can't play a Terrorist they flipped it into a training scenario with the attacker as the good guys. No Watsonian reason is ever given, but its possible the defuser hacks into one of the bombs and uses a connection between the two of them to hack the other one.

• What ended up happening after Ash confronted Kali in the locker room at the 2021 SI? Did things escalate into a brawl between the two sides? Did cooler heads prevail? Do we just not know one way or another?
  • There was never follow up from the specific fight, but subsequent seasons have suggested a significant rift is growing between Rainbow and Nighthaven. The Year 7 CGI "Sisters In Arms" revealed that Ela, Pulse, Smoke, Finka, and IQ left Rainbow to join the Nighthaven PMC. What that means has not (of writing) been revealed, but they are teasing a future showdown.