There is no US military that's a defensive force. It is a war crimes machine.
You might think you are defending the idea of a peaceful defense force in the US but that's never existed and probably will never exist. So we all read your posts as if they were talking about the US military that exists.
I both acknowledged and specified the difference.
> You might think you are defending the idea of a peaceful defense force in the US but that's never existed and probably will never exist.
Let me ask you this instead: What do you see as an alternative? Abolishing the entirety of all military force, or electing officials that do not abuse the existing or reduced scale military force for unjust causes? Or some third option?
They are both zero percent likely to happen. So why hypothesize and carry water for either idea? Like, "the US military should have peace beans that rainbow blast everyone into loving each other" is as cromulent a position as "if the US military were defense only, they'd be really good actually".
> They are both zero percent likely to happen.
You didn't provide a third option.
> So why hypothesize and carry water for either idea?
If all possible ideas are completely unrealistic, why comment at all? What could they do better?
The problem is that it is defense + war crimes. And there is no credible just defense option.
The matter of fact is that war is messy especially guerrilla warfare which is the only war that basically exists today and in that context what's an acceptable ratio? 0 means surrendering or being stepped on ask Ukraine but is it 1/5, 1/10? Ideally you have zero but to have total disregard of the service members life doesn't cause there to be less war or civilian death. Just more onesided brutal wars. These are hard questions but to paint the people that fight in wars in democratic societies as just souless sellouts is reductive and its the type of thinking that leads to mass murder by political groups. Souless people don't feel PTSD for what they did they are souless. PTSD is incredibly common in the services because we don't want empathless murder machines. Because when it comes to wining wars (wining a political objective ultimately) generally speaking civilian deaths don't help political goals which is what the elected officals ask the miltary to do. But most importantly the elected bodies are the ones asking for invasion.
I think these are hard questions that good solutions from the miltary side of things don't exist but most importantly I really think we as a society need to have more serious talks and rational conceptions of how war and conflict works. I can't recommend On War by Clauswitz enough, but acoup also has a great primer on it [1]
[1]https://acoup.blog/2026/02/13/collections-against-the-state-...
Its difficult to name a war in which the American miltary has killed, even close to the number of civilians as its opposition. WW2 germany? Japan (remember china). the USSR? the PRC today. North Viet Government? North Korean? Afganhstan? (yeah the Tailban killed more civilians) All of these war/conflicts the US kills far less civilians. Is that ideal no civilian dies but the conduct of the opposition in this war maximizes civilian causulty often but no one says anything about those and people led with the Armed Service is just all murders.
You are simplifying the horror of War to some ideal where people don't have to die. It just doesn't exist and just comes across as Russian anti-liberal rhetoric. The structure of our miltary and its actions are not poor or unprofessional espeically when you look at literally any other peer nation.
Any nation that commits war crimes is evil. What is this nonsense like, some amount of war crimes is fine actually as long as we're not in the top 10 war crimes last?
Also, even still, I think the US would make that top ten list. Let's take some examples from your list.
North Korea -- a brutal dictatorship that has killed countless people in North Korea, and inflicted significant suffering on South Korea. Disgusting and reprehensible regime. Truly evil.
The United States -- imperialist nation that has caused incalculable damage to Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Guatemala, Indonesia, Cuba, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Congo, Chile, East Timor, Angola, El Salvador, Grenada, and Nicaragua.
Wait I'm not done.
Libya, Iran, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, Haiti, Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan.
And you'd think that's it but let's keep going.
They've also hurt Ukraine, Palestine, Hawai'i, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Mexico.
Then, you know, there's The United States, where the indigenous people were killed. 95% of their population eradicated in the run up to the Declaration of Independence, and 50% of the remaining population in the 1800s.
Woof.
Need me to continue with more? These are all places where the US military ...
Oh shit, wait. I haven't even started on nuclear warfare and testing. Or testing on minority troops.
Ok. I think I got it out of my system. American Samoa. Sorry had one more. Whew.
Now you see why I don't play the moral relativism game, and simply say any war crimes is an unacceptable number of war crimes. Because if you hold up American military history against any single nation, the sheer quantities just don't stack up. Tens of millions of innocents dead, either through direct or indirect action. And it's continuing. North Korea is evil AND the US military has uncountable war crimes. Both are bad. Trying to compare two countries like this forces you to juxtapose a small but intense evil against a staggeringly large sustained but maybe less acute evil.
So no, you are probably right, I probably am over simplifying. I'm sure Pinochet's victims would love to hear how it was actually ok because the US soldiers who installed him were professional and had good structure.
Read more history. Understand the US place in the world. I'm sure there are many upstanding, kind, loving, wonderful soldiers in the US military. The institution, however... the institution has hundreds of years of imperialist violence.