At the end of the day, it should be balanced.

Even someone like me, who's spent his entire life in a military environment, doesn't want to wade through the thick alphabet soup of military equipment. A general descriptor is fine, but a lot of times people who're really "digits" end up posting five paragraphs about the effective range of an MLRS or something. While sometimes that's pertinent, if you look at a lot of goods works of fiction (and nonfiction written in a narrative manner), that doesn't happen a lot. I don't need to know that an M4 has an 880m/s optimum muzzle velocity using the M855A1 round. Maybe that's pertinent if someone's trying to shoot out a dude a kilometer away (and even then the description could be less thickly technical and rife with jargon), but otherwise it reads a lot better if it isn't clunky and overdone.

And that's a lot of what happens in these things. It ends up just becoming a showcase for who can read the most numbers off of Wikipedia. I've been guilty of that in the past, and I can guarantee that people just skipped over reading that, just as I do now. It's not fun, it's a lecture. Everyone is trying to be more realistic and they only think of that as gear and maybe tactics and how they talk. But that kills things.