Brads_Forum_Username wrote:They're likely written by people who've never been to a military academy and are instead drawing off of experience at your typical civilian college (which, to be fair, is how Starfleet Academy is portrayed half the time).
Maybe that's your cue to cause trouble at the RMC and spice things up a bit!
Only foreigners call it 'the' RMC.
You're probably right that the people writing Academy stuff haven't done their research, but I don't agree that the Academy has bee portrayed as a civilian college. When it's come up in DS9, Voyager, the new movie or even flashbacks everybody is wearing a uniform, they have things like 'Red Squad', they hold the rank of 'cadet', the school is run by commissioned officers, they have battle simulations like the Kobyoshi Maru. Heck, in Star Trek 2009 they even deployed the cadet wing into a rescue operation, which I'd argue takes the whole military thing a step past us. While we haven't seen things like inspections, room standards or a cadet-driven chain of command, if they leave it out of these new Academy books then they're missing the mark, big time.
To take the comparison a step further, it's interesting that the Academy has been portrayed as a four-year program. A number of modern-day military academies (such as RMC Australia) are more like finishing schools, in that students get their academic degrees at a civilian university before doing one or two years of military education. Canada, the US, France and Britain all (I believe) have 4 year degree programs. It's not uncommon for RMC cadets to go on exchange to other academies for a semester and France and the US are the most common destinations for this reason. (RMC Canada differs from the US in that we have also have post-graduate programs, while Westpoint does not. We've also got a lower suicide rate.)
