Affiliate & Advertising Disclosure
Last updated: 2026-08-11
Short version: this site makes money two ways — display ads, and affiliate commissions on some gear and service links. Neither one costs you anything extra, and neither one has ever moved a rating. We'll tell you to skip a product we'd get paid for. That's the whole point of this place.
The part most sites bury: an advertiser cannot buy anything here. Not a ranking, not a better verdict, not the removal of a criticism, not a quiet nudge in the sort order. Ads pay the bills and that is the entire extent of their influence. If you ever catch a rating moving with our revenue, tell us and we'll publish the correction.
Display advertising
Most pages here carry display ads sold by Mediavine, an advertising network. They run the auction that fills those slots; we don't choose the individual ads, and we find out what ran the same way you do.
- They get nothing about you from us. No email, no account, no MOS, no rank, no installation, no review history, no verification tier. None of that has a code path to an ad network, and it never will. What the auction sees is a page about a military job and a browser.
- Their partners do set cookies. The networks bidding on those slots drop their own cookies and can use them to recognize your browser elsewhere. That is how display advertising works, here and everywhere else. Any site running an ad network and telling you otherwise is lying.
- Ads never touch the content. They cannot influence a rating, a ranking, a review's visibility, or whether we publish something an advertiser dislikes. You will see them inside articles and review feeds — that's placement, and placement earns the money. It buys no say in what those articles and reviews say.
- Use an ad blocker if you want to. We don't detect it, don't gate the site behind it, and won't nag you. You can also switch ads off outright from Cookie Preferences in the footer — visitors in the EU, UK, EEA and Switzerland are asked before anything loads at all.
What's an affiliate link?
When we recommend a piece of gear — boots, a ruck, a watch, a multitool — the link to buy it sometimes carries a tracking code. If you click it and buy, the retailer pays us a small percentage of the sale. You pay exactly the same price you'd pay otherwise. That commission is how the Gear Locker pays for itself.
Money never touches ratings
This is a load-bearing wall, not a slogan. Our MOS reviews, ratings, and rankings are generated from verified service-member submissions and government data. No advertiser and no affiliate relationship can influence them. To be specific:
- Affiliate links live only in the Gear Locker and clearly labeled spots. They are never mixed into MOS reviews, ratings, or rankings.
- No brand can pay to change a verdict, move up a ranking, or get a better score. Not for any price.
- We recommend the cheaper option — or no option — when that's the honest answer, even when we'd earn more on the expensive one.
- Every affiliate link is marked so search engines don't treat it as an endorsement (
rel="sponsored nofollow").
Sponsored gear reviews
Sometimes a company sends gear to a verified service member to review in the field. When that happens, the review is clearly labeled as sponsored, the reviewer keeps the gear, and we don't edit their verdict — neither does the company. If the gear is bad, the review says so. A free sample buys a fair test, not a good review.
Who we work with
We participate in affiliate programs run through networks like CJ Affiliate and AWIN, and directly with some gear brands. The ones currently live are Amazon Associates, Bookshop.org, NordVPN (through CJ), Propper and Bizee (both through AWIN) — if that list is out of date, the error is ours and we want to hear about it. Being in a program has zero bearing on whether we recommend a product. Plenty of brands we link never paid us a cent, and plenty of products from paying brands get panned. As an Amazon Associate (where applicable) we earn from qualifying purchases.
Advertising
We run third-party display advertising through Mediavine. The networks bidding on those slots set their own cookies, and some of them use those cookies to recognize your browser on other sites — that is how display advertising works everywhere, and we're not going to dress it up as something gentler. What we don't do is hand them you: no email, MOS, rank, installation, verification tier, or review history is ever passed to an ad network, and nothing you write here gets attached to an advertising profile. Ads stay visually distinct from our editorial, and no advertiser has ever moved a rating, a ranking, or a verdict. See our Privacy Policy and Terms for the full picture.
Questions
Think we got something wrong, or a link looks off? [email protected]. We'd rather hear it from you than have you doubt us quietly.
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