07: Early Military

Unless you're extremely lucky or have embarked someplace without other civilizations nearby, you're going to run into some kobold thieves. This isn't really an issue, to be honest, but you may also run into other things that interrupt your dwarves and their progression to a healthy and sustainable fortress. In this case, it's easy to deal with, just set your soldier on them. Press s and...what? No military??

Alright, so pressing m gives you the military page, complete with uniforms, equipment, and positions. The schedules can also be accessed here, but I'll get into that at wave 3, when I talk of The Sorting. Here and now we're only interested in getting rid of whatever is bothering the dwarves, be it kobolds or badgers, bears or camels. So create a militia commander. It'll ask you which uniform, and you'll want metal armor or leather armor; it doesn't matter because you probably don't have either, yet. The point is to get to the next screen and choose the dwarf we labeled Captain. He'll equip himself, when we tell him to go kill that thing out there, which we do by leaving the military screen and pressing s for the squad screen. Select his squad with a, then k for kill, and here you can choose your method of selecting the enemy, which I'll leave for you to explore on your own.

Did you know you can follow units around the map? I like to follow the thing about to die, so I can see the approach of the axedwarf. Also if it leaves the map, you can immediately tell your guy to stop chasing, as he'll go to the last known point of the baddy's location before realizing that it no longer exists.

Now there are a couple of other things to do, which we'll talk about here instead of during The Sorting. Go back to the military screen and press u for uniforms. You want a uniform for melee units and one for archers, which is somewhat what is listed. Kind of. The uniform "Leather Armor" has the dwarves looking for leather shields or bucklers. I don't know about you, but I don't ever use leather shields. So instead I highlight the shield/buckler and change it to "any material" with M. Actually, for archers I only allow them bucklers, and melee I only allow shields. But, I don't really care what kind they use so long as I'm not making any specifically for them. Once I do, eventually, I modify the uniforms, but for now....

You can make any number of uniforms; in the end, I usually have five uniforms. One for my elite squad, usually steel entire, one for secondary melee, one for elite archers, one for the rest of the archers, and one I call "fodder" but I'll get into that later, too.

You now must assign the correct uniform to your soldier, so press e and then U. Select the squad, go to the right and highlight the correct uniform, and press shift+enter. Yes, there is likely only one squad member, but I don't know whether those blank spots somehow retain the old squad loadout.
So yea, fear not. Once The Sorting comes, all will become clear.