No Stupid Questions

Because the average American is much more likely to bump into American military personnel than people from countries that use 24 hour time. It's really as simple as that.

Lots of good answers here, but I don't see anyone mentioning the minor differences between military time and 24 hour. With military time, they don't use a colon when writing it, and they always verbally say the leading zero. So a time using a 24 hour clock is written 06:00 or 6:00 and said verbally as "six o'clock", but with military time, it is written as 0600 and said verbally as "Oh six hundred hours".

That's it. That's the only difference. Though many Americans do indeed incorrectly call any 24 hour clock "military time". I myself used to say it incorrectly when I was a kid because my parents said it incorrectly.

Given how they use different systems to measure almost everything than the rest of the world, I'd say I'm OK with them not using the 24h format, I'd expect them to use something like the 27 American hours, divided in 109 minutes of 31 seconds each.

Its because in America most people's only experience with it is when the movie says "meet here at 0700 hrs." Really isn't much deeper than that, we also call "ranger green" "ranger green" whether an army ranger is wearing it or not, despite it really being "just a shade of green." Sometimes things are just called things.

Just remember, civilian Americans aren't the one who named the time system that includes "Oh Six Hundred Hours" Military Time. It was the Goddamned Military. And when the Goddamned Military fucking tells you what something is called, you fucking call it that. No questions.

So we could flip our clock displays to 24 hour time and meet at 14 o'clock, but we'd still be civilians and unworthy to use Military Time. So why bother? Working 9 to 5 is bad enough, working 9 to 17 sounds too fucking exhausting.

It’s called genericide. They encounter the 24 hour measure of time primarily through the US military and its service members so all 24 hour time generally gets called military time.

Similar to why facial tissue is often Kleenex or adhesive bandages are Band-aids in the US.

Here in California, I've heard both "military time" and "24 hour time" used interchangeably for writing the time as "03:45" or "16:20". That said, I've heard -- citation needed -- that proper military time does not use the colon, such as "1600", pronounced as "sixteen hundred hours".

As for why the public might refer to this generally as "military time", it may just be that that's the most common, well-known use-case in the States, outside of the sciences. I personally use 24 hour time on all my devices, but I've come across many people who prefer clockfaces or AM/PM, probably out of habit.

I spent 20 years in the US military. I had to quickly learn "military time" in order to function, as we were taught 12-hr time growing up in school. I was surprised when I traveled the world and discovered that everyone else uses "military time" (read: international time) as well. I guess Americans just really wanna do their own thing.

I exclusively use military time nowadays. If someone doesn't understand the time I stated, I'll correct it to 12-hr time on the spot, as converting is super easy. Just count back 2 hours and drop the 10's digit by one; e.g. 1600 = 4 PM. 2200 = 10 PM. Etc.

Let’s go out to eat, I made reservations for 7.

Are we having breakfast or dinner?

Without context, tough to tell. That’s why 24hr is superior.

Local or Zulu?

The average American is likely to have more interaction with American service men and women than Europeans. Most Latin immigrants I know use the 12 hour clock. While the 24 hour clock is preferred in many countries, they are not the countries that immigrate to the US in large enough numbers to influence us or expose us to the 24 hour clock like our own military does.

Oh wow. That explains a lot. I always thought that when Americans said “military time”, they meant Zulu time, that is 24h time UTC.

TIL it’s just sparkling 24h local time.

Because that's exactly how we see it. It IS a completely foreign concept. The general public does not use 24hr at all. The only time we ever hear it, is when someone in the military says it.

Note Zulu Time (mission time) is equal to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) everywhere in the world.

For the people where 24h time is normal …. Is that a more recent development it’s the ubiquity of digital clocks, or would people have also used 24h time with analog clocks, despite them not having a way to display that?

—- looking around, realizing I still hav analog clocks all over because I wanted my kids to be familiar with them. That boat sailed

It is literally a foreign concept to the vast majority of them (only other countries use it widely in everyday life) and the military is one of the very few contexts in which they will experience it.