Correct. Assuming of course that the person actually did/does serve.. because we'd be real pissed if someone was not truthful about that. In any case, banners are assigned by the staff, not something you can add yourself.
Generally speaking, the LEO tag requires proof (unless we already know). I should think the reasons for that are fairly obvious. Usually I ask for a 'proving shot' with an LE ID sent (with the explanation that once viewed it will be scrubbed entirely from the server and no record kept).
I seem to recall there was once a guy on 'the old place' that faked his way into an LE banner for a very short time before being quickly discovered. I'm not sure if I ever knew all the details; I think it was maybe when I'd just become a mod, or had happened not long before, and I wasn't privy to the whole deal.
For the Military banner though, the potential consequences of imitation aren't quite as severe (though it would definitely make the person a real piece of shit), so we would generally take that on someone's word.
I'm not sure if this will make much sense to folks who don't know how the forum works at all, but I wanted to actually answer the question of unique custom banners.
Pretty much not going to happen, but this is specifically because to add a banner we need to add a usergroup. For instance, someone with the military banner is in the primary usergroup of 'registered users' ,which determines how the forum is displayed to them, what they can or can't see, etc, and the secondary/additional usergroup of military. If someone was in the moderator or vendor usergroup, that's what would determine that they see the appropriate extra controls and such, but putting a user in the military usergroup just adds the banner and nothing else.
Now, the reason that this would be a major problem to have various additional usergroups for different individuals to have different banners is that when doing things like minor upgrades and/or certain maintenance and such it then sometimes requires some attention to manually modifying of qualities of the usergroups.. or it's just less likely to cause various problems the less usergroups there are. So, it's basically because we'd rather make sure the forum works right that we can't be giving various people custom banners.
This thread turned into a total mess. This is the help section so the simple solution was just to delete everything after my explanatory post and close it.