We need to shrink the military till

it's small enough to drown it in a bathtub.

There, I bet that got some people's attention. Apologies for the Grover reference. Even worse, in this context, I actually believe it.

Honestly, U.S. taxpayers, for some reason, are footing the enormous bill (in both blood and treasure) of securing an international resource extraction economy, making sure these resources are sold on the global market rather than used for and controlled by the local residents. We have our meddling little (not so little) fingers in every corner of the planet, influencing other governments' behavior, or even outright installing other countries' governments and training proxy militaries that take over when our troops move on to the next "situation".

Since all of this is done in our names, ultimately as U.S. citizens it puts a price on all of our heads. What goes around comes around.

I see very little defense in our Dept. of Defense. It's pretty much all offense. The bad guys we supposedly need to kill are for the most part just sick of our troops and diplomats treating their countries as our own, which we do to an insane degree.

Respect for the military? Well, for the most part, I don't respect the jobs the military is tasked with. There are exceptions, but they are exceptions, not the main function of our military.

It's very difficult to speak honestly about feelings towards the military. In my case, it's sure to offend many, though it's not my intention. Glorifying military service by extension serves to glorify military activity, and is very actively used for that purpose by a massive corporate media empire that is itself at the heart of the military industrial complex.

Seems to me we need the freedom and the courage to talk about this, as our society has become overtaken by the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about.

We need a real jobs program at home, we need the money we spend on the military to retool our economy to avoid catastrophic climate change (also the U.S. military is apparently the single greatest polluter on this planet) and to lift so many of our citizens out of poverty, we need to respect other cultures and other forms of governing and managing resources.

None of this is relevant to the story cited in the OP, which seemed distasteful to me just on a human level. But the OP went on in this direction, asking broader questions about our military mindset, and I think it's a brave and necessary question. K & R.