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Hello there and a Happy New Year to all my readers. I hope you’ve had (or are still having) a wonderful Christmas/Holiday season. I myself am still in holiday mode, so this post will be a bit shorter than usual.

Today I’m going to look back at the year we had in Military Realism and see what we can learn from the articles which you enjoyed, as well as those which were a bit more niche. Whether you’re a Hollywood action hero about to embark on a lone wolf rampage or a screenwriter looking for that je ne sais quoi to give your military story a bit more authenticity, I hope there was something in my year’s work for you. There will be more to come, of course, in 2026.

I’ll also try to unpack some of the lessons for me, as a blogger, and give you a peek behind the curtain of the creative process:

As always, please subscribe and comment below, and any donations to the cause are greatly appreciated.

Bullets hit the target

By a country mile, my most popular post in 2025 (and ever) was Magical instant bullets, which explained how “hitscan” rules in video game shooters work, why they’re unrealistic (TL;DR, because bullets aren’t lasers) and why game designers can usually (but not always) get away with this kind of compromise.

It’s pretty hard to miss this post since I updated the layout of my Home page to pin the three most popular posts above the weekly list. I hope you like this new design, please let me know if you don’t (or leave a comment below).

For any action heroes reading this in their fictional universes, there’s probably nothing new here. They’re all expert marksmen, after all, despite never showing any other traits of a successful sniper¹. They know how bullets work. Their film directors, however, tend to ignore this point, with bullets travelling from barrel to target instantaneously; we’re used to seeing baddies framed in the sniper scope who drop the instant the trigger is pulled.

One advantage of getting way more views on a post is that you get better feedback on what works and what doesn’t. One reader made the very valid point that the GIF I made² was dizzying to watch. They were right, and it was probably even worse on a mobile screen. I’ve since become a lot more discerning about long GIFs. To be fair, that was a particularly bad example, with 1990s graphics of a spinning orbital platform above a bright Earth.

Creators looking for more information on how bullets work could check out my ballistics series (wound ballistics, intermediate ballistics, internal ballistics, and external ballistics) which ran intermittently throughout 2025. They were perhaps a bit too niche of an interest, but spawned a very popular spin-off topic, which we’ll talk about next.

Silence and speech

When I wrote about intermediate ballistics, a reader suggested a follow-on in more depth about silencers in movies vs. real life. Silencers: not very silent was the second-most popular post of 2025, with ten times the views of all the rest of my ballistics series put together.

The lesson here for heroes is clear: a silenced weapon, even a pistol, is still very loud. There’s an utterly ridiculous scene in John Wick: Chapter 2 where the hero and villain have a shootout with silenced pistols in a subway station. Quite apart from the sound of bullets hitting masonry (which is completely unsilenced), the filmmakers show a complete misunderstanding of what silencers can do to reduce the three components of weapon noise:

The resulting scene has since been updated by internet heroes to show what it would look like with realistic silenced gunshot sounds:

I sometimes wonder whether the more complex aspects of weapon and explosives engineering are too dull for a blog, but this post was extremely popular despite a long detour through decibel mathematics and the distinctions between sound energy levels and [perceived loudness. And lots of graphs of same: this is something which is much easier to depict than talk about. Check out the post, if you haven’t already!

This article was also the first (and, so far, the only) one which I’ve narrated. A reader suggested that I include audio narration in my posts, and I started with silencers. WordPress has a built-in player, after all, so you can listen to my dulcet tones and pedantic rants while you clean the house or walk the dog.

I must admit, though, that it’s a bit of a slog, and I’m still experimenting with how to record and edit these voiceovers properly. I’d love to get your feedback:

• Is narration worthwhile, i.e. would it make the blog easier to follow and keep up with?
• What about sound quality—do I need a better mic and recording setup (almost certainly yes, but whether I do will depend on the first answer)?
• How should I deal with pictures as I narrate: a quick reference to the online blog so you can look it up later, or a laborious description of the point of the image?

The next most popular post was in a very different category to the first two.

Speaking of neutrality

I’ve been writing increasingly about Ireland and Irish defence policy (or lack thereof). In 2025, I did a two-parter on Irish “neutrality” where I argued in favour of it one week and against it the following week. This drew unfavourable comparisons to Boris Johnson from certain quarters, but I dealt with this criticism by rising above it:

This worked about as well for me as it did for the Democrats in the United States. Anyway, I do think neutrality is a complex issue which is misunderstood by people from all political hues in Ireland:

Other posts this year on the same topic include:

• Three locks for the price of one (Ireland’s absurd and “triple lock” on military deployments)
• Stand still so I can shoot you (the challenge of shooting down aerial drones)

And the most popular of all, and third most popular post of 2025 (drum roll please):

• Ireland and the Defence Industrial Complex (the challenge of fostering dual-use industries for a so-called neutral state, and why it’s important regardless of one’s military stance)

This post was popular with people who have an interest in Ireland’s defence industry. This is far fewer people than are interested in video game shooting, because it got about one twentieth of the views of my most popular post (see above). It’s a burgeoning area, though. Since I wrote the article, the Irish Defence and Security Association have expanded their membership even more:

This topic admittedly has less relevance to Hollywood action heroes, except maybe for the uncomfortable realisation that a small group like The Expendables³ could take over the country without too much effort. Please don’t tell them; we’re far too busy tying ourselves in knots over the “triple lock” and the difference between “military” vs. “political” neutrality⁴:

Looking ahead to 2026

Let’s take a step back before leaping forward. This year was a great success for Military Realism Report, with more than ten times the views in 2025 compared with 2024. When I adjust for the fact that I only started mid-way through 2024, it’s more than 6x growth.

This is obviously very gratifying, and I’d like to keep this momentum going in 2026. You can help by sharing these articles in your own network and subscribing (link below!) so that you never miss a post.

With that in mind, I’ll finish with some New Year’s Resolutions and a look ahead at the editorial calendar⁵ for 2026:

• Resolution: Science fiction weapons. Some of my more successful posts in 2025 have compared weapons in science fiction films and video games with their potential real-world counterparts. There’s lots to still unpack, from explosions in space to the weapons of Warhammer 40k.
• Resolution: Get the balance right. In 2025 I veered between in-depth analysis (e.g. my five-part ballistics series) and reflections on current events (e.g. Russia’s nuclear-powered cruise missile). To achieve the latter, I sacrificed the former, e.g. leaving an 11-week gap between intermediate and external ballistics). This year I’ll try to plan and sequence my longer, spread out “analysis” pieces a bit better, while going for shorter “hot take” pieces which might even occur out-of-sequence. Let’s see.
• Resolution: Keep half an eye on neutrality. Related to the above, I’ll keep banging my hobby horse drum about Irish neutrality. It’s important to me and to a small but growing number of my countrymen and women. But I won’t let it overwhelm the blog, since I realise that the intricacies of Irish defence policy may be of little or no interest to my global readers.
• Resolution: The way we fight and cultural differences. With little or no sign of peace in Europe⁶, and tensions rising in the Pacific, the prospect of war looks closer than it has before. I’d like to spend some time here talking about military capability in history and fiction vs the “here and now”.
• Resolution: Nuclear weapons. If the threat of war is here, then the threat of nuclear war can’t be too far behind. This year saw the topic explored in Kathryn’s Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite (which I reviewed in two parts here and here). I’d like to explore some of the awful implications of nuclear war without the hyperbole we’ve gotten used to.

That’s some of what I’d like to do this year. As always, thanks for your support. Your comments and encouragement have been a great motivator for me in 2025, so please keep it up for 2026. I’ll leave you with the awful AI-generated picture for this page which WordPress suggested. The actual banner image came from ChatGPT and is better, don’t you think?

Thanks for reading and please remember, if you haven’t already, to subscribe using the link below. Please also share this article with a friend and help me get even better reach in 2026! See you next week.

Cover picture: Generated with ChatGPT. Prompt: “Can you please generate a new year’s resolutions banner image for a blog article? It should have traditional new year imagery, be able to show white text on it, and reference military matters, particularly in TV and film. Use some of the recent content from this website as inspiration: https://militaryrealism.blog/ Thanks!” (with a follow-on question about style and what text to use).

1. Patience, calmness, an instinct for self-preservation, teamwork, and the willingness to camouflage one’s shiny rippling biceps. ↩︎
2. Of gameplay on Unreal Tournament’s “Facing Worlds” map, where I used the sniper rifle to kill enemies at a distance using the “magical” instant bullets of the post’s title. ↩︎
3. Admittedly, their ability to break the laws of physics would be a great help. Their lack of good administration, which I mentioned back in February, might be a hindrance. ↩︎
4. The first is a stance taken during wars which is enshrined by the Hague Convention and depends on mutual recognition from belligerent parties. The second is a makey-uppey platitude which allows Irish political leaders to sound off about international issues without actually doing anything difficult or unpopular. ↩︎
5. This is a very glorified term for a note I keep with ideas that come to me in the shower or which you, dear readers, suggest to me. ↩︎
6. At the time of writing (31st December 2025), a Russo-Ukrainian peace deal looks close but not close enough. Let’s hope I’m proved wrong after this is published. ↩︎