Can I just bring up how some of the World Building in RWBY makes no sense? My main gripe being "The Great War" and Atlas development to present day.
So let me get this straight...
Mantle (Atlas) while not the direct instigator of the war though the Great War fought on Mistrals side and lost yet somehow post war they still were allowed to have a military and the abillity to have Huntsmen folded into it...
Why? You think Ozpin would have barred any country in the aftermath from having military because a centralized system of Huntsmen is less susceptible to Salems manipulation of having one of her covert agents seizing control.
The worldbuilding in RWBY is pretty bad, yeah. I notice that some fics & rewrite projects tend to focus waaaay too much on it to the point where they're basically creating a whole new Remnant and forget to actually do characters or the story, like uh...RWBY Alternate I believe? (Aside from the extreme attention to worldbuilding, I also remember that it died some years back.) But while I wouldn't go as far as they have, it definitely could use some fixing. Aside from the ideas I've floated myself re: things like the SDC/Faunus conflict, making the Branwen Tribe an
actual tribe with its own interesting history, culture & customs rather than the most generic bunch of bandits imaginable would be nice, and so on.
As far as militaries go, that only Atlas bothers to still have a military is definitely one of the most nonsensical things in the setting as far as I'm concerned. An advanced society without a military only makes sense if they've been at peace for a long time, like how the Old Republic got ~1,000 years of peace between the New Sith Wars & Ruusan Reformation and the Clone Wars - then sure it's fine to demilitarize, but the situation in Remnant is about as far from such a state of affairs as can be imagined. Canonically, since time immemorial humanity is supposed to be under constant threat by the monstrous Grimm, who are as plentiful as weeds and to whom negative emotions are a magnet - something everybody will go through at varying points in their lifetimes unless they've all been lobotomized, and which are especially likely to cluster up when humans are packed into cities (as they may well have to for their own protection in Remnant). It would be suicidal to
not have a standing army on hand to fight off the Grimm and to instead contract protection out to the mercenary Huntsmen, even though they are by definition superpowered elite fighters trained in special Academies so there can't be that many of them - certainly not enough to always be there when you need them.
What if there are more Grimm attacks ongoing than there are Huntsmen nearby? Are they supposed to prioritize the targets to defend, potentially leaving neighborhoods or districts to die at Grimm hands if they don't rate as sufficiently important in their own eyes? (Who decides what's important anyway, the government of the Kingdom they're contracted under? What if the Huntsmen themselves disagree, say they decide to focus on saving the neighborhood where their leader's wife & kids live over a power plant or the city hall, who's going to make them follow orders without an army?) Or should they risk stretching themselves too thinly by trying to defend everything? If they fail and die, they'll end up succeeding at defending nothing. Etc, etc.
Jontron puts it better than I can. Conversely, you'd think the Kingdoms would also have army guys capable of doing mundane guard duties and such instead of having to contract even the most basic of defense jobs to the Huntsmen so that the latter can focus on the big flashy jobs instead of wasting their time and potentially not being where they need to be in case an emergency happens. If the job can be done by 20 armed men + a machine gun, then surely we should get 20 armed men + a machine gun to do it instead of wasting an elite Hero Unit that could be deployed elsewhere, right? And would it not make the most sense to have those 20 guys with a machine gun be a regularly trained standing force with a fixed base rather than militiamen who might not all be present & available for duty when called up? Again, etc., etc.
The way the Atlas military is set up has the best of both worlds. They've canonically got regular ('fodder' if you will) forces plus Huntsmen as special operatives. You can use the weaker but more numerous regular forces to quickly respond to Grimm attacks & protect civilians until an evacuation can be pulled off or help arrives, they can fight the Grimm off entirely if possible and contain them for a Huntsman or four to deal with later if not. The spec-ops Huntsmen would be the people sent in to deal with overwhelming threats, and prioritize destroying Grimm once they're on the scene while the regular guys assist in evacuating civilians (and then themselves) in the background. Loads of settings have a divided 'fodder' and 'elite' armies (Imperial Guard/Space Marines from WH40K, clones/Jedi from SW, UNSC Marines/Spartans, etc.), and anyway there should be no need to involve random superpowered mercenaries in matters of national security when you can and should just integrate such supermen into your system right out of their Academy.
(Speaking of which and on the subject of iffy worldbuilding, I'll add that the Academy system doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you think about it either. Are these academies private institutions? Because private combat-training institutes churning out supersoldiers with little to no accountability, and certainly no obligation to serve the kingdom they're from, seems like an idea that would go sideways fast - you're basically just hoping these freshly graduated young men & women with all sorts of asskicking superpowers won't screw with everyone else, become warlords, etc. out of the goodness of their heart. There should be
many more cases like Raven, and apparently there are in side materials like the novels or Eddy Rivas' RWBY-themed D&D campaign, though I don't pay attention to either. Are they public institutions? In that case it
really doesn't make sense that the Huntsmen aren't recruited by their respective kingdoms as soon as they graduate, so as to perform the public service of being specialized Grimm exterminators.)
Everyone should be copying the Atlesian example, but they don't because...well, I've never seen any satisfying explanation as to why, the closest is 'pacifism became popular after the Great War' (OK, I could buy that if the chronic & existential threat posed by the Grimm also disappeared with the war's conclusion, but they didn't so...) For whatever reason, the Atlas military is generally portrayed as either inept or evil (or both) and everyone else kinda just does fine for many years on end without armies. I can't think of any reason why this should be the case besides the writers believing 'armies bad, mercenaries gud' out-of-story in line with the rest of their politics, because it certainly doesn't make any sense in-universe.