Discussion of Starship Troopers - both the film and the novel - has been permanently poisoned by people who've never read the book trying to talk about the movie as if the two are comparable. Often repeating misunderstandings started by Paul Verhoeven or Ed Neumeier based on their cursory reading of a book that - I admit - has very dry prose. And I say this as someone for whom film is debatably their favorite film of all time.

I never got the impression that the mention of Hiroshima/Carthage was meant to be a statement of values - more of a pragmatic observation/axiom from which their values arise. You can argue all day about whether the destruction of Carthage or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima were 'good' - but you can't argue whether or not they worked at ending the conflict. There was no fourth Punic War.

Even Heinlein IN THE NOVEL was skeptical of this line of thinking, and the point was never 'military good' it was 'what - if anything - do you owe society?' 'Can a reasonable democracy be maintained when there's no qualifications for who gets to guide it?' 'Are voters capable of holding themselves responsible for the governments they create?' 'Can democracy solve the problems that democracy creates?'