There's definitely a garbage-in, garbage-out problem. Prior to the Korean War, the United States adhered to the best traditions of Enlightenment moral rationalism and heeded George Washington's warning to avoid unnecessary foreign entanglements. If someone signed up for the military, he knew that he would only be fighting when it was necessary to defend America and her freedoms. So he knew (a) he was unlikely to be in much personal danger himself (America doesn't come under military threat every day, or even every decade), and (b) if he was in going into combat, it was as part of a clearly defined mission with clearly defined objectives, benefits, and justifications.
Since that point, America started fighting a series of nebulous wars with vague geopolitical rationales... to install allied regimes in geographically central areas, to prop up capitalist elites, and just generally to show everyone else in the world that if you ******** with us, there are consequences. Since opportunities to fight these sorts of wars come up frequently, we fight more of them, and when we do fight them the fight is more or less constant (because propping up regimes and social structures is harder than defending one country from another country's army). In WWII, iirc, the average soldier was in a combat engagement once every 200 days; in Vietnam, he was in an engagement once every 14 days.
When American foreign policy was a beacon to the democratic world, the most noble and intelligent people in the USA were eager to serve their country. Since that policy has become a cynical calculation about how many warm bodies we need to turn to bloody pulp to gain a certain amount of power, only the insane, the antisocial, and the belligerent see the military as a vocation that they would be at home in. During the Iraq War the Army even had to drop their IQ standards and educational requirements.
100
100
150
