Any large standing military will typically oscillate between a wartime footing where aggression and risk-taking are rewarded versus a peacetime (garrison) footing where avoiding politically embarrassing mistakes is rewarded. The problem is that when the next war starts the careerist officers who were promoted during peacetime produce disastrous results. It then takes several lost battles until they are replaced with competent warfighters.

For better or worse, US leadership is now attempting to place the military on a permanent wartime footing, largely on the theory that a major regional conflict with China is coming at some unpredictable time in the next couple decades. They think they're going to have to fight WWII again with China now playing the role of Japan. Some level of occasional human rights abuses are seen as an acceptable "cost of doing business" to maintain a higher level of readiness and combat effectiveness. (I am not claiming that this is a good policy, just trying to explain the current thinking within the military-industrial complex.)

I agree with you here, that maps to my understanding of what they're intending to do as well.

I'm of the opinion that standing militaries are almost never justifiable at scale. A country may need a skeleton crew keeping some semblance of military infrastructure functional, but we should never need a military scaled up for a fight during peacetime.

We need a populace that is healthy and skilled enough to enlist with basic training should a war break out. We don't need to fully arm up and constantly be on the lookout for war.

That's a quaint idea but the notion of having a small cadre of experienced professional personnel who could rapidly train up new recruits in wartime stopped being relevant in the 1980s. The complexity of equipment and doctrine has increased so much that it now takes years to train people. Too long to wait in a crisis.

Its into quaint, there have been plenty of times in history where countries either (a) didn't exist as they do today or (b) didn't have standing militaries.

The standing military the US maintains today only dates back to WWII, and is exactly what Eisenhower was warning us against.

Equipment complexity is theoretical at best. I'm not aware of a war between comparable militaries since WWII. My expectation is that if or when that happens, equipment ceases being the determining factor pretty quickly in favor of boots on the ground and logistics. History, at least, supports those being the deciding factors.

If the war is prolonged, you can't go around treating people like eggshells to be crushed, or morale will suffer.

Unless your target image is how Russia conducts war. Beats (their own) soldiers, puts them in cages, ties them to trees for days, and so on. In Ukraine we see the difference in practice. If the cause is just, you don't have push your soldiers at gunpoint into the fray, like Russia does.

And if the war is not prolonged, what's even the excuse to do that in the first place?

I'm not arguing that it is a "good" or "right" way to approach war, only that the mindset is common among the military when fighting a war they believe to be an existential fight.

You're technically correct, though arguably the situation is much worse than "war time". Due to the US having ushered in a "time" of lawlessness such legal discrepancies as war and peace have very little meaning.