A few disorganized points for the OP, and welcome to New Eden. Things can be fairly frakked up around here but there's real beauty under the scar tissue.

1) There's a lot of peeps in this game who can slay in a pure militia fitting with not a single skillpoint spent, so don't get sucked into the better gear mindset. Yes it makes a difference but your skill, intel & tactics make a hella more difference and are a a lot cheaper. If you're doing things right you should be dripping with ISK in fairly short order.

2) Gank means a lot more than tank in this game, so if your skillset is good enough to ameliorate incoming fire i'd lean towards getting more damage on them. Best bang for the buck here is prolly advanced weapon with the best damage mod you can fit(they don't scale linearly). If you're specced into Ammarian assaults the SCR is a no-brainer, otherwise the CR/ACR hits hard out to medium range and has nice fitting stats. RR is the long range beast at the moment. Remember before investing too much that CCP can and will most likely nerf things right out from under you.

3) You live and die by intel. This means profile dampening for defense, both the passive skill and modules. If you're running solo it's worth thinking about an advanced/proto scanner.

4) Maintain focus on getting you specific role skills up, anything left over put into the core passive armor/shield/fitting/biotics skills. Remember that it take as many sp to go from lvl 4 to 5 as from lvl 0 to 4.

5) Imo it's worth investing a little bit, once you've got a solid STD/ADV main role, in an uplink scout. Militia suit is fine for this - those uplinks will earn you lots of juicy warpoint and more importantly allow you to help out your team or even turn the tide of battle. Given that you're military you'll prolly see the bad **** coming before many of your teammates do and your uplinks can pre-emptivly save you team from a redline if that suits your playstyle.

Happy hunting, Cmdr o7

are you looking to join a strong minmatar corp? CARBON 7 welcomes ALL minmatar brothers/sisters with open arms. i love helping new players. look me up if you join and id be happy to help you along.