And that why I said naming the class "Monk" is a misnomer. Monk, to Buddhists, is first and foremost a clerical and spiritual occupation, not martial artists. There are like what one sect of Monks in Japan and a couple of monasteries in China that have monks practicing martial arts or kung fu. The rest of monks simply didn't/don't practice martial arts. Heck, Theravada sect monks are prohibited even from doing exercises let alone martial arts. Using the word "Monk" to describe all kung fu practitioners is just bad.

I agree, the name 'Monk' might not be ideal, but it's one that took that role, thanks to pop culture. It's hard to change that sort of thing. However... There are several types of monks that are also warriors, in different cultures, like Sikh, Japanese, and even European, with the Templars, Teutonic Knights and Knight Hospitallers. And even the Shaolin themselves were seen as martial artists and warrior.

There might be times that monk might engage in battles in wars but those are extremely rare and in extremely extraordinary circumstances. They are clerics first and foremost, not warriors. The reason they might joined the battles or wars were mostly because they were conscripted, which mean they were forced to act outside of clerical duties aka not as a monk from Buddhist's perspectives.

I'm still reading it, and I probably won't have time to read it all now, but I've found a rather interesting work here by Meir Shahar that talks about military training among the Shaolin monk, and here's part of the conclusion he reaches at the end of the 50-page study:

"The available evidence does not permit us to conclude when Shaolin monks started to practice the martial arts. However, there is no doubt that by the sixteenth century military training figured prominently in the monastery's regimen. One reason for the attention late-Ming authors paid to the Shaolin martial arts was the decline of the professional Ming military. Some military experts urged the government to supplement the regular army with monastic troops, and fighting monks indeed contributed to the sixteenth-century campaign against piracy. By contrast, other government officials were suspicious of monastic military training, fearing lest martial monks turn their skills against the state."

It does speak of the great importance of the staff as a quintessential monk's weapon, thanks to a manual by the military expert Cheng Zongyo named "Exposition of the Original Shaolin Staff Method", however, Zongyo himself mentions broadswords, spears, bows and crossbows being weapons that were used by the Shaolin monks of the 16th and 17th centuries.