Hardly, the vast majority of jobs in the US Army are non-combat. You shouldn't paint with such a broad brush, many who serve do so out of a sense of duty to the nation, to escape a bad situation including poverty or get out of a dying town, and/or to gain access to higher education through the use of tuition assistance and GI Bill programs.

Many people also turn to crime in an attempt to escape poverty or a dying town. Certainly we can have empathy for desperate people making difficult decisions, but it doesn't absolve them of moral agency or place them above scrutiny.

moral agency? scrutiny? these Soldiers were likely lied to by recruiters desperate to increase recruiting numbers in the longest war the US has fought. I suspect the churn in personnel was enormous, and the pressure was on. Sure, likely the details were buried somewhere in 30 pages of paperwork that each Soldier signed...and likely would have been caught if there were a lawyer looking of it. But these Soldiers don't have lawyers when signing up typically. I guess re-enlistees could have consulted JAG, however this isn't the norm. Recruiters are usually trusted. Somebody in the recruiting chain of command should have been been monitoring the numbers. They're the ones who should be at fault, not the Soldiers who've already served in good faith based on promises that weren't supposed to have been made.

first, blaming the economically disadvantaged foot soldier or mess hall cook or tank mechanic for the contemporary crimes of the political and economic ruling class has got to be the most morally reprehensible thing i've heard on this topic, and carries nearly psychopathic levels of non-empathy.

Economically disadvantaged members of U.S. armed forces are not in some special moral category. Whatever their motives, they voluntarily joined an organization that initiates force against others on behalf of the political and economic ruling class. They aren't solely responsible for the aforementioned "contemporary crimes", but they aren't innocent either.

and oftentimes, they pay with their lives.

guess that isn't enough for you.

To start, I agree with what you're saying.

What I struggle to reconcile in my own life is the difference between this logic, and the logic of a businessman who believes he cannot compete without polluting.

Do we accept "well, my business is unlikely to success, and so my family will starve" as a reason for shitting in the world the rest of us live in?

Or do we say, "there are alternatives, and yes, while your business may fail, we'll all be better off"?

How do you get to enlistment age in modern western society, where every second movie and video game is about military guys blowing things up and massacring wave after wave of lemming-enemy, without thinking that the army is there to kill people? If you're in a non-combat role, you're still there explicitly to support those in a combat role.

Maybe some people don't limit their horizons to what you can learn from video games.

That's a razor-thin demographic you're talking about there: worldly people that don't understand that armies are about killing others.

Some of them get out of extreme poverty or are able to go to school afterwards by enlisting. It's not as simple as that.

That is a pretty flat take on what exactly is happening. If you've never had to view military service as a "good" path out of poverty then it might seem as simple as that but surely if you sat and thought for a few minutes, you might be able to conceive of a situation in which someone might sign up for reasons other than the one you've given.

This is laughably ignorant.