The American public and its political leadership will do anything for the military except take it seriously. The result is a chickenhawk nation in which careless spending and strategic folly combine to lure America into endless wars it can’t win.
A people untouched (or seemingly untouched) by war are far less likely to care about it,” Andrew Bacevich wrote in 2012. Bacevich himself fought in Vietnam; his son was killed in Iraq. “Persuaded that they have no skin in the game, they will permit the state to do whatever it wishes to do. to do.
Source: The Tragedy of the American Military – The Atlantic
I think this is a very important point, possibly the most important point in the article. Those men, women, and students who actively protested the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were largely those who cared a lot about the lives and wellbeing of those in *other* countries. Their numbers would surely have been much higher had the average American personally known someone who had a significant chance of becoming a combat casualty.