It's also possible that DoD is using its ranges but not publicly announcing routes to them.

Which would be a good situation for private address ranges.

They have 14 /8 blocks though - wow.

It's much easier and nicer to use globally unique addressing if you've got it than to set up multiple NAT's just to allow different sites to re-use the same private IP space.

I worked at an ISP in a previous job where we ran out of RFC1918 space, and were squatting on UK MoD/DoD/other IP space for internal traffic because we simply had no more IP's to assign within RFC1918.

It was a bad situation when one of those ranges we were squatting on suddenly became used and customers were unable to reach certain services...

Let's see, according to

https://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-add...

it looks like 6/8, 11/8, 21/8, 22/8, 26/8, 28/8, 29/8, 30/8, 33/8, and 55/8 are allocated to organizations that are part of DoD. That comes to ten /8 allocations. Am I missing some?

Dang. I thought as one of my last actions as the DISA.MIL Technical POC in 1995, I had successfully turned 22/ back into the NIC, so that it could be re-assigned to someone else who needed it. When we swept that address space repeatedly, we sure didn’t see anyone actually using it.

Dang.

At current prices .mil selling off 22/8 would net them at least 2 F-22s. Not quite the same as selling off tsla stock, but...

There's nothing crazy about v6's model -- or at least nothing that isn't also crazy in v4, since v6 uses almost exactly the same networking model that v4 does.

Have you tried implementing ipv6 in a medium to larger network?

Even folks like google with more money then god and more experts by far than anyone else likely has had some struggles getting their GCP offering alone fully IPv6 enabled.

After enough years I've learned that anyone who says IPv6 is simple probably hasn't actually tried rolling it out?

Note I haven't explored IPv6 in Azure, perhaps Microsoft has had an easier time going full native IPv6 in their offering there.

Or what about getting 1 or even a few static IPs from your ISP? Oh right - also a nightmare. There apparently are both plenty of IPv6 IPs but at least in the US can't even get 5 static ones for home use.

I didn't say it was simple, just no harder than v4. In many ways it's easier in practice because you don't need to also use NAT on top.

I've got a static /48 from my consumer ISP here -- it sounds like your complaint about that is more about US ISPs than IPv6.