My military experience was in the Air Force rather than the Army, but I'm pretty sure there's crossover in this case.

It sure appears to me like your opinion is informed by shallow media depictions rather than reality. You seem to be conflating three entirely different concepts: political will, basic training (aka boot camp), and military as a job.

The purpose of the military and how it is deployed is a political question, not a military one. So comments about feeling proud (or not) of young soldiers dying in conflict have nothing to do with the military per se - they are completely about politics. The military doesn't get to pick and choose which conflicts they engage in. Their responsibility is to be ready and capable of handling any conflict they might feasibly be involved in - and then executing when they are involved.

The military is a giant organization, a bureaucracy with many, many moving parts. To be able to operate with any degree of certainty and efficiency, they've developed systems where strategy and basic codes of conduct are determined and refined at high levels in the organization and are balanced tactical decision-making conducted further down in the organization. It's an incredibly difficult balancing act since it requires a level of autonomy and trust at fairly low-levels of the organization. To achieve this, we've developed two basic groups of personnel:

* The enlisted corps. These are "individual contributors" of the organization - the experts at performing particular tasks.

* The officer corps. These are the "leaders" of the organization - generally *not* as competent at task execution, but with a broader, higher-level responsibility (including unique legal responsibilities).

The training for the two groups is different - officers are generally required to have college degrees and have additional education in management, military doctrine, and history. Enlisted personnel are trained (initially) to be cogs in a giant machine - executing their specific assigned tasks completely and efficiently.

The popular media representation of the military often focuses on the enlisted basic training experience - where kids out of high school have to be taught how to be the cog in the machine - to execute orders without question, without being the 20% problem child that gums up the machine. It is intentionally a "break you down before building you up" experience. At that age and education level, you frankly don't have much to contribute to the organization except following orders.

But it doesn't stay that way. Once you get on the job, you start gaining experience and expertise. Even if you aren't an officer, your contributions start to extend beyond yourself (just as with senior engineers who don't move into management). You never reach the point where you can say "f*ck off - I'm not going to follow that order", but every junior officer is highly encouraged to seek the input of their more senior enlisted personnel. Still, at the end of the day, the commander is the commander. They have to keep the train rolling (and have certain unique legal responsibilities), and have to develop their own systems for motivation and problem solving. Operational context and commander personality have a lot to do with how folks are treated, but nobody other than the most junior enlisted folks are generally treated like "robots".