This is a somewhat belated comment, but I've not been able to catch up on the boards for some time.
Real-world UN Peacekeeping missions aren't entirely military operations. They're mostly military, but you have police forces and entirely civilian specialists deployed under the aegis of UN Peacekeeping as well. This is one reason we refer to country contributions as "personnel", a general term, rather than talking about soldiers in particular.
It's also a very different sort of military training. The average soldier from any given army is going to do an absolutely terrible job if thrown into a Peacekeeping operation without sufficient training. That should be obvious, and I assume most people realise this. Basic training teaches us how to shoot some other guy in the jungle, it doesn't teach us about dealing with civilian populations, it doesn't teach us how to take care of refugee camps, and all that sort of stuff.
This is changing. Increasingly, this sort of thing is being incorporated into exercises that even regular grunts get, in recognition of the fact that military forces do need to deal with these sorts of situations, as well as things like disaster relief and so on. But a friend of mine likes to joke about how he got killed and had to respawn three or four times...when his unit was first introduced to Peacekeeping stuff in a week-long simulation exercise.
Because the first instinct of a conventionally-trained soldier is to shoot first...
So the "military-but-not-military" tag does make sense. I've never considered it to be a problem. IST's military in the sense it has a rank structure, it has standards of discipline, and a certain institutional culture. But other attitudes and ways of doing things can indeed be totally different from what we'd consider a military, in conventional terms.
It's also possible to have military stuff in a school setting without it being too weird. Uniformed groups like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts are worldwide, as are things like the St. John's Ambulance Brigade. But in many countries, there are student uniformed groups directly associated with the Army, Air Force, Navy and so on - so you could be marching around in a junior-sized version of an infantryman's No. 4 camo uniform at age 12. It doesn't change the high school experience that much, in my opinion. Granted, I've never attended an American high school.
-- Acyl
Real-world UN Peacekeeping missions aren't entirely military operations. They're mostly military, but you have police forces and entirely civilian specialists deployed under the aegis of UN Peacekeeping as well. This is one reason we refer to country contributions as "personnel", a general term, rather than talking about soldiers in particular.
It's also a very different sort of military training. The average soldier from any given army is going to do an absolutely terrible job if thrown into a Peacekeeping operation without sufficient training. That should be obvious, and I assume most people realise this. Basic training teaches us how to shoot some other guy in the jungle, it doesn't teach us about dealing with civilian populations, it doesn't teach us how to take care of refugee camps, and all that sort of stuff.
This is changing. Increasingly, this sort of thing is being incorporated into exercises that even regular grunts get, in recognition of the fact that military forces do need to deal with these sorts of situations, as well as things like disaster relief and so on. But a friend of mine likes to joke about how he got killed and had to respawn three or four times...when his unit was first introduced to Peacekeeping stuff in a week-long simulation exercise.
Because the first instinct of a conventionally-trained soldier is to shoot first...
So the "military-but-not-military" tag does make sense. I've never considered it to be a problem. IST's military in the sense it has a rank structure, it has standards of discipline, and a certain institutional culture. But other attitudes and ways of doing things can indeed be totally different from what we'd consider a military, in conventional terms.
It's also possible to have military stuff in a school setting without it being too weird. Uniformed groups like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts are worldwide, as are things like the St. John's Ambulance Brigade. But in many countries, there are student uniformed groups directly associated with the Army, Air Force, Navy and so on - so you could be marching around in a junior-sized version of an infantryman's No. 4 camo uniform at age 12. It doesn't change the high school experience that much, in my opinion. Granted, I've never attended an American high school.
-- Acyl