That said, for all the splashy thank-you-for-your-service it's a shame but no real surprise that veterans are getting shafted, behind the scenes, by one of the largest bureaucracies in the world.
However, my point concerns public perception, which is to a significant degree the focus of the OP. Specifically, the author made the claim that veterans are perceived as being an unexotic cause in public consciousness - whereas I think the opposite is true. I think their cause is a popular one in America.
For comparison, this is how I personally perceive a few of the various underclasses he mentioned :
The rural poor in Appalachia? Unequivocally unexotic : lower income whites often appear to be more scorned than pitied. Inner city youth? Periodically exotic. Veterans? Unequivocally exotic, in the sense that I perceive their cause to be one of the most popular in contemporary American society.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/108...
It's all PR, of course: the veterans end up as broken husks that are left to rot as soon as they get home-- a very convenient political issue that is stored safely in the bank for whenever a distraction or stirring election platform is needed.
To answer your question: it is Starship Troopers that you are watching.
"Militarism has intellectual consequences" - is probably true, but the British and French (and Dutch and Prussians and Spanish et al) were doing it for 500 years, a period which gave us the birth of The Royal Society, Proust and Voltaire, Leibniz, and so on. The Islamic Golden Age happened under an expansionist empire. The Romans weren't short the odd intellectual as well... I'm sure someone more familiar with Asian history can give many examples too.
"It's all PR, of course: the veterans end up as broken husks that are left to rot as soon as they get home" - while true, this is nothing new, either.
http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2015/11/paid...
There's some veneration in a distant way for the RAF following the war, and the Sun newspaper runs its own pro-military campaign, but it's not something that comes up too often in political language. "Poppy day" is becoming more politicised in worrying ways, though.
The canonical anecdote is that the returning soldier was spat upon and accused of killing babies. I have never actually known any Vietnam veteran who claimed to have experienced this, nor any former protester who admitted to doing it.
Nevertheless, the military leadership decided that this should not be happening. And so the Pentagon started dedicating more of their budget to the manipulation of public opinion. They have essentially produced the current state of public opinion through four continuous decades of advertising.
It is occasionally revealed that the "thank you for your service" portion of a sporting event is sponsored directly by a hefty cash payment from the military.
You can see how the federal government actually feels about its veterans by how it treats those no longer able to turn their assigned cog in the war machine. Not only are disability claims routinely reduced or denied outright, but the medical care that veterans get is often far inferior to that available in the nearby non-VA facilities. The vets find that for all the cheerleaders they see shaking pompoms on the sidelines while they are in the game, they are still completely alone with a traumatic brain injury after time runs out and everyone goes home.
Part of me wishes it really was like _Starship Troopers_ (the book), and that veteran amputees would hang out near recruiting centers without their prostheses visible, talking loudly about all their VA, disability, and pension problems.