On this point, I usually whip out my hobby horse.
What if we ditch the current (that is, post-Napoleonic) definition of "military" for a while, and return to the classic one? What if "military" in the minds of our Starfleet heroes refers solely to the ground combat forces, and is the opposite of Navy (and, later on, of Air Force, Space Force, Starfleet or whatever)?
That is obviously not what the writers would have been thinking, but it would solve our problems with onscreen dialogue. For one, when Archer and Forrest worry about the interaction between Starfleet and "the Military", it could be seen as simple interservices rivalry, perfectly analogous to the current Navy vs. Army one.
It would make less sense for Archer or Forrest to pretend that United Earth Starfleet was a nonmilitary, that is, noncombatant, organization: its starships were heavily armed, and Archer had a contingent of heavily armed soldiers aboard his own ship from the pilot episode onwards. The MACOs were not unwelcome because they were heavily armed troops, then (nothing new about that) - but because they were from "the Military", a rival organization.
This also solves our problem with Picard's statement in "Peak Performance":
Two ways to interpret this.
1) Picard thinks that Starfleet is a peaceful organization, therefore wargames are naughty and undesirable. As we have seen, many people have problems with this, since Starfleet indeed does combat, and nobody else seems to do it.
2) Picard thinks that Starfleet is a naval organization, and therefore doesn't need to do the mindless drills and ridiculous make-believe exercises that are typical of the Military, that is, of the ground forces. Its time would be much better spent doing exploration than practicing what the Starfleet officers can already do perfectly well, that is, fight. And this indeed is what we see on screen: Starfleet fights, and Starfleet fights well, but it isn't a ground combat organization and its attempts at that field are amateurish.
So, a twofold argument for the idea that Military means Army in the 24th century, just as it did in the 19th and before.
To add a third, semantic point, back on the United Earth we have Military Assault Command and Starfleet Command. Two organizations of a parallel semantic standing, not superior or inferior to each other; excellent grounds for the interservices rivalry argument. By Kirk's time, the service might indeed be "combined", and any reference a Starfleet skipper would make to "the Military" would be a derisive one to a relic of history, even if there was no derision of the art of combat in the statement.
Timo Saloniemi
