Official "closest thing they've got to an actual military man" Preciprick here: I'm just a cadet and a service academy candidate with a healthy dose of being a military dependent for my entire life.

I have many things to say about modern war and how people want realism. I've kind of picked up a lot on the whole military society and how it operates, outside of what people typically think of (people think military realism means that this army dresses this way and uses this gun, but when it's really about a whole myriad of other things.) Some of the things that I'd say are positive, some aren't. A lot of it isn't what is expected. When I talk to my dad about joining the military, the discussion isn't really "hey, you might die" but rather "this is what you could do for housing when you join and get a BAH." I find as a whole that a lot of military RPs that aren't run by people with experience in the matter tend to shift towards the blisteringly, frustratingly warped view of the military that movies and TV show. Even if they are billed as "realistic", they don't show the parts where everyone sits in their barracks for twelve hours and watches Netflix because they're on standby or something.

But at the same time, the actual military (now in peacetime mode) consisting of mostly hanging out and getting yelled at for putting your hands in your pockets isn't fun. When the military - a supposed bastion of adventure and danger - is a 9-5 job in an office with the sole difference being you wear cammies to work, nobody wants to join. Even when there's a war on, nobody wants to play Desert Storm and roll into towns with bigass tanks to find smoldering wrecks of OPFOR armored vehicles from the previous day's airstrikes and a bunch of naked dudes who took off their uniforms and surrendered without a shot being fired (or with poorly aimed, meager resistance that couldn't possibly hurt you.) That's disappointing and anticlimactic. Outside of initial invasions, a lot of these wars have been occupations and the people I know who have deployed often say that exciting things like firefights are rare, disappointing (shooting off a round every few minutes at a guy two kilometers away and never hitting anything, or massive firefights ending up with one wounded friendly and two enemy combatants maybe being dead but nobody knows for sure), and just nothing like TV. That's not fun, but at the same time Rambo is frustrating because that's past the point of believability.

Don't get me wrong, heroism and excitement and danger and tragedy all happen. It just always seems to happen to someone else, if you know what I'm saying.

Nobody's really able to get a balance between the two, and then there's just the community that RPs as a whole not really being the type for more authentic military things because a lot of them are younger and gravitate to kawaii animu highschool or some shit, or want to do D&D online, or want to play with numbers. Nothing wrong with that, it just doesn't create a big community for military settings to draw on.