First off, the fact that they had Giant Ant mounts is awesome. I hadn't seen that yet!
Anyway, yeah, the military is a bit bugged. Sounds like you have it worse than usual, though, since I can usually get my military up and running pretty well. Honestly, I have more problems with the bugged health care leaving my injured military in limbo than I do with the actual military.
Do you have an arsenal dwarf? If you do, are they doing stuff other than the arsenal dwarf job? My military usually lags a little bit behind what i want them to wear, but I haven't had too many problems getting them to equip decent equipment?
Also, the crash might be due to a large dagger. Apparently the knife skill causes the military screen to crash. If that's not fixed in 31.04 I'll switch the skill over to Sword skill to prevent that.