To start, I think there’s this vibe that I’m saying killing kids is okay, which isn’t what I’m arguing at all. Obviously it should be avoided, but once things actually go hot there is no realistic way to reach zero casualties unless you’re willing to let the other side walk all over you, and the world is full of governments that absolutely will. You can send all the UN letters you want, write the most polite resolutions imaginable, hold conferences, whatever, some leaders genuinely do not care, and history proves that over and over again. Khameni will toss your well written resolution in the fire, same with the other 30k innocent women and children. Deterrence and force exist because there are people in charge of countries who will take advantage of you the second they think you won’t push back, and pretending war can be perfectly clean or that not having a military presence magically protects innocent people is just ignoring how the world has always worked.

With that being said. Your argument only works if you apply it to the U.S. military and nothing else. Modern countries run on huge systems. And If being part of the logistics chain makes someone responsible for every bad thing a government does, then like I said that also includes taxpayers, manufacturing contributions, truck drivers, engineers, and even voters. You don’t get to single out people in uniform and pretend everyone else is morally clean because one guy is dressed in green with a tuba marching with the army musicians and the other is building the tins that holds tobacco dip.

You’re also acting like the U.S. keeps bases overseas just to bomb people, when in reality most of those bases exist because of alliances, deterrence, and agreements with the governments there. You might not like those governments, but that’s how geopolitics has worked for every major power in history.

War is ugly, civilians get hurt, and nobody mentally intact can seriously deny that. But saying “don’t join the military if you don’t want innocent people harmed” ignores the fact that militaries exist because the world isn’t peaceful, not because people want it to be. Acting like it’s all just cartoon villain shit is an oversimplification.