As you go back in time every generation had some practically insurmountable and very clear enemy and 'evil' to overcome. I think this is fairly self evident if we look back before the 20th century. But going beyond that in the 1920s you had the rebuilding and reconstruction following WW1 followed shortly thereafter by the great depression. The 1940s goes without saying - WW2. In the 1960s you had the civil rights movement when people had clear and well defined purposes in getting rid of literally racist laws which had one rule if you had this skin color, and another if you had this skin color - and there was this little problem of a constant fear of nuclear annihilation due to the cold war. The 1980s are where things start to calm down. You had the end of the cold war as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall, but life started becoming pretty fair and pretty safe.

By the 2000s? We certainly don't live in anything like a utopia, but we also live in what is undoubtedly the safest time ever. And while there are still many issues in society, they're becoming ever more difficult to pinpoint in terms of precise solutions. And I think it's safe to say that there will never be a time without issues in societies. People are different and often don't get along. Stick billions of them on a planet and even in systems we could describe as utopia, we'd find a way to not get along.

So the point of this is that I think many people want to find an issue or an enemy to fight against. Augmented reality for military use is hardly controversial and something every single nation around the world will be applying to military purposes. But when you need to find an enemy, any enemy, just to give your life some sort of meaning -- tech that will be applied to help soldiers perform more effectively in combat, which does include killing the enemy, makes a soft target. Whether it's really a logical or reasonable thing to protest against is secondary to the issue that it's something to protest against.