#milwank

https://archiveofourown.org/works/31052024

yeah, sure. i don't have much experience with SF, but this is what i know/can guess at:

1) teams sizes are based on the missions they do. larger teams for larger missions, smaller teams for smaller missions. the "official" unit size is rarely what units actually are. and then there's floats, like snipers—my limited understanding is that snipers generally are not part of a team the way cougar is in "the losers"; they're specialists that are moved around according to need.

so the higher ups would assess the mission and say "we need a bigger team for this, call up one of the 12-man jobbers," or the mission brief would be handed down to the unit CO, who would do an analysis and say "my team can do this, but i need xyz additional personnel." if five men was all the losers needed to accomplish their mission objective, then that's how big their team would be.

full disclosure: my pals and i are all really horny for supersoldiers with big guns

we also intellectually get off on military stuff, especially esotericism and jargon (and esotericism and jargon from other fields, too—a bunch of competence kinksters), and somehow the term gained traction in our chat. 

I think I saw @tiender use it first a couple years ago, to describe the sort of armchair-general approach to seeking to write military fiction with a high degree of verisimilitude—a problem that’s exacerbated when then trying to map IRL military norms, terms, structures, &c. onto a fictional space army to make it more convincing and satisfying. Even if it’s just a circle-jerk pursuit between ~intellectual~ exhibitionists and voyeurs with a .mil kink.

As with all wank (e.g. fandom wank, which includes the self-pleasuring self-righteousness of antis), it’s more a statement about the masturbatory element of engaging with the content, rather than passing judgement on the content itself.

For example, I’d describe Republic Commando as milwanky, though the content is not. Karen Traviss served in the TA and Royal Navy, so while what she writes may not be wank (born from her lived and professional experience, it’s gonna be p accurate, if a little dated), and I can’t speak to whether or not writing RepComm was a competence-kink-scratching exercise for her (lbr if there was any wanking going on, it was in the direction of Kal Skirata—sorry for that mental image), *reading* it is a milwanky experience, at least for me. It’s just hott. It makes me want to pull out a WIP and just start rubbing out some commandos doing commando things, be it kicking-in doors or fucking with extreme prejudice. The resultant fic would be milwank. 

imo, like masturbation, it’s hard for milwank to be *bad*. Bad milwank is a contradiction in terms. At the risk of completely overdoing the dick metaphors in this post, milwank is either solid enough that it’s there and I’ve mentally rubbed up against it (ideally, I’ve really enjoyed it) or it’s not there. “There was no milwank,” I might complain after backspacing from a Clone Wars fic with average-to-poor military worldbuilding. Translation: I didn’t intellectually get off reading this and no amount of cute clones could make it worth my time.  

Reading a book on logistics in the Falklands War? Good for milwank. Massive meta about the how the GAR is an organizational clusterfuck? Milwank. Smut where you can smell the blaster polish? Milwanky. Trying to follow a lengthy #MilTwitter argument thread about doctrine that’s 75% acronym by wordcount? “What a bunch of milwank.” A gif from a boot blog with a spotter humping his sniper? #milwank.