My one complaint, 3 years in the making....

[RAbbi_74]

It's technically neither, but that attack helicopter I saw at  the one Unidad base was a Cobra.  Some variant of the AH-1 Cobra, the grandpappy of American attack helicopters and one of only two pure attack helicopters to ever serve in the US so far.

What it is not in any imaginable way, shape, or form, is a F###ING APACHE.

Source:  Spent 12 of my 22 years in the US Army working specifically on AH-64 APACHE attack helicopters, first the AH-64A for 3 years, and then the AH-64D.  

Look, I could even get some player mixing it up and thinking the MH6 knockoffs are actually OH-58 knockoffs.  Weedeaters look like weedeaters, you know?  But Apaches and Cobras do not look at all alike, if you're paying any attention whatsoever.

FAQs:

- "But RAbbi, it has that thingy on top the spinny thingy, so it must be an Apache--isn't that what that means?"  NO.  Do pushups.  First, the AH-64A Apache never had that, just a small ADS on top of the big spinny thingy.  Second, while the AH-64D and AH-64E *can* have that, it's not necessary to have that.  When the AH-64D was first fielding to the US Army, about 3/8 of them actually fielded the Longbow Fire Control Radar (FCR) system.

- "But RAbbi, isn't it just a game and therefore irrelevant detail to an obvious work of fiction?"  NO.  Do flutter kicks, numbnuts.  Tom Clancy himself is rolling over in his grave at the suggestion that such an oversight was committed in his name.  Attention to detail was a huge theme in all of TC's work.  The details had to be so right, that people who spent a career doing it for real could think that he did too if they didn't know better.  A SF soldier mistaking a Cobra for an Apache is pretty much unthinkable.  It's not even that they're trained on aircraft recognition (maybe, maybe not--I don't know), but that they're not the type to call a helicopter a Cobra or Apache unless they KNOW it is, and would otherwise stick to what they DO know:  "It's a helicopter."  

- "Aren't you being a bit picky here?"  NO.  Laps, go!  You don't stop until it make ME puke, crackhead!  Lack of attention to detail is, despite whatever statistics you may have read, the single biggest contributor to the deaths of otherwise decent men in combat.  More than hygiene, more than that the enemy was apparently just pretty good at what he did, etc.  This isn't Call of Battlefield, god dammit.  This is not ArmA.  This is video gaming's pinnacle of give-a-damn about reality and realistic scenarios.  Hey, remember in 2008 when Russia invaded parts of Georgia to protect pro-Russian rebels in South Ossetia?  Did that sound familiar at all?  Cuz that was the scenario in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon, to within a couple months.  Are the people who mix up Apache and Cobra attack helicopters really gonna nail that sort of prediction?  No, they are not.  KEEP RUNNING TIL I PUKE!