I would also add:
- US military pay is not great compared to the private sector, even with the pay increase under Trump.
- The US military still has never gotten rid of the multiple layers of stigma it got after Vietnam, and they bank on the younger gens (post 9/11) not knowing much about it, or how the US military acted there, or how it echo'd into the civie world.
- The VA was utter shit for decades, and even Trump's attempt to clean house has not completely unfucked it.
- Most branches are becoming what amounts to social clubs for Harvard, Berkeley, and Yale grads, when you hit the positions that make the big decisions; it's why the US military went Woke so fast.
- Many military procurement programs focus more on feeding funds to certain congressional districts and companies, than on if the gear or what-have-you will actually do the job intended, and is worth the taxpayers money going into it.
- Who gets punished for what is now becoming even more political, and the military has become a 'one mistake and you're done' culture when you get above NJPs, because no one wants to risk their career to help someone else who has made a mistake, which is part of why the military is having retention problems.
The US military of today is not the same organism that freed Europe twice. We let WW1/2 go to our heads militarily, wanting to relive that glory, and we've been paying for that with 'forever wars' (Korean pennisula), or humiliating defeats by people we could have beaten militarily, but who understood the power of PR and social warfare and modern American squeamishness over casualties (Afghanistan, Somalia, Vietnam).
But the US military cannot admit such to itself, and thus cannot reflect on what they should be doing to change this. They have their own mythos they have to believe in and hold to, have to believe that many, many soldiers lives were not wasted in bungled foreign adventures (even if history shows otherwise), and many of them are so hooked to the 'status quo' in the military they will resist anything that might suggest the US military needs to do some serious soul searching about it's own nature and history in the modern world.
They hold to the mythos of George Washington Crossing the Delware, of the Battle of the Bulge, and of Leyte Gulf and martial prowess/courage winning the day/war; they try to ignore the Tet Offensive, Mogadishu, Bay of Pigs, the retreat from the Yalu, and the many, many times our military has been used on US soil against US civies or citizens because of political demands (1920's aerial bombing of 'black Wall Street' Tulsa protestors, Wounded Knee, the Sand Creek Massacre, Kent State, etc).