There have been some really great posts here, articulating the needs of the patrons of this site. Schmedlap especially, you must have been Aristophanes in a previous life. Or at least one of his assistant librarians.

I'm about 8 months away from my accreditation as a librarian, so please bear that in mine, but here are my thoughts:

I'd recommend against buying into one of the commercial database providers right now (like JSTOR). I've used them before, and they are still at a loss at the moment to get a lot of the emerging literature properly sorted out and catalogued as members of the military community might like. I know COIN isn't a new discipline, but for a lot of information management professionals it is. If there was a buy in to one of the major vendors, EBSCOHost would probably be the best as I've found they just have more on militaries and conflict in general. It speaks to the point made earlier about how civilian universities tend to generally muck up information regarding the professions of SWJ's users.

That being said... there might be a vendor out there who does get it right: I'm not true part of the profession yet so I haven't had a chance to go to the conferences and conventions where all the sales-librarians rack up their clientele.

A quick, dirty and free workaround would be librarything. Its a generally neat web 2.0 tool, but tends to be more suited to an individual user. Still, if immediacy and money is an issue, it'll work.

Overall, it sounds like what people want the most is a subject guide, a resource which lists off the basic reference sources, perhaps something along the lines of this. It was made by my colleague/professor Joyline Makani and integrates a lot of the web 2.0 and functionality features mentioned by Schmedlap. The format was developed by springshare who are one of the leading vendors on web 2.0 integration into online libraries.