Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six - Team Rainbow

Team Rainbow

Rainbow Six describes Rainbow as an international counter-terrorism operation hosted by NATO and funded by money funneled through the U.S. Department of the Interior.

The base of operations for Rainbow is located in Hereford, England (at the time, home to the SAS), due to the United Kingdom being one of the most accessible countries in the world and having one of the world's foremost special forces units. Most of the characters in Rainbow are American or British, however the NATO countries of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada, and the NATO ally of Israel have at least one representative each.

Clancy describes the structure of Rainbow as having one Director, who oversees the entire operation, and one Deputy Director, who is second in command. Rainbow is portrayed as the "blacker than black" operations, and it works off of its very own intelligence service which has intelligence contacts all over the world. In the book, when Rainbow is called upon for help from another country's government to deal with a terrorist situation, usually only one of the two teams will be sent, but in some situations both will be sent. Both teams have an officer (O-4 or equivalent) as team leader and a senior NCO (E-9 or equivalent) as second in command. Not including the team leader, each team is made up of eleven men. Rainbow also has a standard-issue weapons kit. It consists of a Beretta 8045 Cougar semi-automatic pistol (referred to as a "Beretta .45 automatic") and a suppressed Heckler & Koch MP5/10 submachine gun (mislabeled as MP-10) for each soldier, with an M60 general purpose machine gun for each team's support gunner. Each team also has two snipers, each with a custom rifle of their own choosing. In Dead or Alive, Rainbow uses the more conventional Heckler & Koch MP5SD3 submachine gun and Heckler & Koch MK23 semi-automatic pistol, with the Knight's Armanent Company M110 Semi-Automatic Sniper System having replaced Remington M24 Sniper Weapon System. When not using the local police's camouflage they utilize a light blue and/or black pattern, leading to their nickname "Men of Black".

In the video games, Rainbow is portrayed differently. John Clark is still the leader for most of the series, but he is supported by a set of other key staff and advisers who vary from game to game. As of Rogue Spear, there are around 30 Rainbow operatives. This includes members from NATO countries and from non-NATO countries, along with six female operatives. For each mission, a maximum eight operatives can be deployed and can be split into a maximum of four teams. Weapons, uniforms, and equipment are less standardized, and are instead chosen to suit the operative and the mission, so it is more common to see assault rifles and large-caliber handguns.