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[Iton Ibrukrithzam]

So, something I've been seeing since started learning about the military, but haven't figured out just yet.  Sometimes my militia commander will get an unhappy thought about being relieved from duty, and my engravers will engrave scenes of him being demoted.  But generally I take a dwarf at embark with combat skills, enlist him as my commander and never let him go.  Why is this happening?

[Fishbulb]

If you have your squad set to train or whatever with fewer than the maximum number of dwarves, they'll cycle on and off duty periodically. This is good, because it gives them time to do things that give them happy thoughts and avoids the "enraged/depressed by long patrol duty" unhappy thought. Also and independent of this, at the start of every month your military will go off-duty for a blip while their orders for that month are handed out.

I think the consequences of this are twofold. Whenever a civilian dwarf without significant military skills goes on duty, he gets an "unhappy about the draft" thought. And whenever a military dwarf without significant civilian skills goes off duty, he gets an "unhappy to be relieved from duty" thought.

So the worst-case scenario is to have a militia full of dwarves who have no military skills — recruits — who also have no civilian skills — peasants. They'll just hate their lives.

The good news is the problem solves itself eventually. Dwarves who make it through boot camp without going Private Pyle lose the "unhappy about the draft" thought because they gain military skills, and eventually they become legendary fighters and stop going off-duty at all.

In the meantime, a good tactic if you need to minimize unhappy thoughts is to draft only skilled-but-useless migrants, like that high-master beekeeper who's been camped out in your statue garden since the spring. He'll be unhappy about going on duty until he skills up to pretty minimal levels, but he won't be unhappy about going off duty.

[Nan]

From my experience and testing, I can say even novice civvy skill is enough to prevent the monthly unhappy thought about being relieved from duty. I never actually experienced that problem because I'd always get my military to either chop wood or forge their own gear, thus getting them at least novice in some civvy skill. One game I neglected to do that, and I noticed they were all getting the unhappy thought.

Technically, a novice skill could rust away to dabbling causing the unhappy thoughts to come back, but the dorf should be legendary long before that happens.

[Iton Ibrukrithzam]

So I need a civvy skill, then?  Perhaps something awesome, like my militia dorfs knowing how to forge epic weaponry?

[Garath]

half of my militita has superfluous skills (cheese making), the others are trained in stuff like masonry in their free time

[Blue_Dwarf]

Pump Operator is the skill we usually use, because you can simply build a few pumps in the barracks and let the off-duty dwarves use them.

My army of pump operators have been pumping for years, and they have pumped themselves some nice muscles

[Garath]

great idea, i never though of a pump without anything to pump but air

[Fredd]

plant gathering is good also. Specially when the caverrns are breached, and stuff starts growing everywhere

[Ihmhi]

I train my military dwarves with pump-operating first. Once they're legendary in that and really strong, I disable it and switch them off to haulers. When they're off-duty, I have additional haulers.

I use the pumps to get them up to an acceptable level of Strength and Endurance, and then their military training will maintain it from there. But if you have a large portion of squads off-duty or you don't want to risk them losing even a little strength, then having them operate pumps year-round is good. Remember, you only need to cover about 90% of your dorfs - if you have 10 guys you want to train, build 9. There's almost always at least 1 or 2 guys who are exhausted and won't pump anymore, and then the next guy in line will take it.