It's personal to me as well...& I agree with you completely:  As Americans we are duly bound to support and defend those whom we enlist to carry arms into harms way on behalf of our notions of liberty,

…& yet I hold fast with my previous sentiments.  We are carving pieces of the same pie, you and I.  But notions of liberty and national defense are a bit of a stone’s throw from sustainable income viability for the hierarchal players rollin’ them bones.  As faithful citizenry, do we support the people in harms way (certainly) …or are we waving banners in support of those who decide to send them to the bloodtheatre for sake of ambiguous calculations of profits and losses?  Yes, I know it can/has been said that no one is cash profiting from this war, …that it is motivated by purely honorable intentions.  If this is true, …then cool.  But if not, then why not shelve the banners and get down to the heart of the matter; …if for nothing else than in exact & actual support of our troops.  If twenty years from now, it is determined that lives were spent for naught, …what then? 

Say we are shop owners with colorful jars of established spiders as pets for sale, & we toss several young carpenter ants inside each jar to feed the spiders daily.  We need to feed the spiders to preserve our business interests & we see the ants as expendable to a far greater human cause.  Although we are incapable of bearing in mind the injustice, it doesn’t mean it is right that we choose to target the ants as fodder to…the web, the spiders, our notions of profit, the proposed keepers of the spiders as a pets, or to the concept of a marketable item of any conceivable kind…for sake of some maintainable fascination of one sort or another.  It’s silly, but relative to a degree.

A red-tailed hawk swoops down out of the sky with a poetic silverstreak of tempo and agility, swiping down upon the doomed twilight of a chipmunk.  Talons purchase flesh deep as grassroots…while hawkwings & a good headwind flight the little fella off to its death.  Murderous, grisly, sad to some extent…& yet the hawk, a perfect killing machine, only takes what it needs to survive; …not one bit more….  How many lives…before logic and benign sensibility serve both liberty & defense with the sum total of all human knowledge…over proceeds & prestige?