> I think that’s just another symptom of how some military programs lost a lot of legitimacy in the minds of some of my generation who were coming of age around the war on terror.
It's not just your generation. I'm in my 50s and this opinion isn't rare in my age group either.
I'm in my 50s. All my friends have similar feelings to yours. We have endless wars, bombing, drone strikes with no goal other than vaguely stopping terrorism. We are in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Africa now, Pakistan. We kill militants and/or terrorists that wish us harm, and we annually bomb a number weddings and kill a lot of innocents.
We don't have a strategy or goal or even clear enemy. We just do it because we are powerful. Of course there are people that want to kill us, blow up our airliners. But it's not clear we are doing anygood.
We have to set actual goals, not just being there and bombing targets of opportunity, saying sorry when it goes wrong. What's our goal? We don't have one.
You might be just too young to remember it in real time depending on where in your 50s, but people slightly older than you got really jaded with the US military due to the Vietnam war around the time you were born.
It's not just your generation. I'm in my 50s and this opinion isn't rare in my age group either.