This is kind of tangential, but I recently played CoD: Ghosts (2013) for the first time and there was a lot of cool space war in it. I found however that its level of... not realism, but feeling real made me depressed. Space was supposed to be for peaceful exploration and we want to put a bunch of meat head killers or killing tools up there. It made me feel profoundly sad that there is now an official military branch dedicated to this stuff even though it was going on before to various extents.
Very little of what a modern military does is “meat heat killers with killing tools”. Critical things like tracking space junk and ensuring the safe launch of rockets is the job of the military. You just might not have noticed because it’s not a meathead with a gun.
That's a job that could be done by a civilian agency. You also may be missing the point that the military does much of that support role stuff in preparation for using lethal force, which they are not shy about.
> That's a job that could be done by a civilian agency.
So could all of the military if you want to go down that path. There is nothing special that makes something “military only”. Cops are civilians as are secret service and members of the CIA and they kill people on and off US soil.
