@halexandra64: Really enjoyed your piece, as well as your ZAM review! I also think this other ZAM piece on why the Division is a weird Tom Clancy game is valuable to this discussion.
The operational concept of the Division as a government entity simply seems to be a direct action one, so why are they "deep undercover" (a highly expensive and unnecessary measure) ? Why do they have to scrounge for basic warfighting equipment while having state-of the art maps and communications? Why do they exist at all when there's a number of law enforcement and military agencies and units that could easily perform the same role?
Most of the Clancy sub franchises started with a reasonable level of plausibility. Team Rainbow is a international counter-terrorism unit backed by NATO designed to deal with incidents involving multiple nations that has parallels in some real life task forces. The 'Ghosts' of Ghost Recon are pretty much just a renamed Delta Force. And while it's stretching it to have Sam Fisher infiltrate places on his own, the Splinter Cell games (at least the first three) acknowledge the importance of signals intelligence and the emergence of information and cyber warfare.
A game more successful at communicating the Division's supposed purpose would focus on a Green Beret-esque role of fostering relationships and providing training and resources to residents of the various communities. They could even use the silly undercover conceit to offer a little more personal and emotional narrative for the player character, as spending years embedded in a neighborhood may complicate your decisions when your government orders put you at cross-purposes with the people you've lived with for years. To me, that'd be a more interesting game.
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