"In a war for democracy, you couldn't have generals acting like Prussians"
This may be a wished for state but by no means a necessary one. Since America is the first and only 'true' democracy to field a powerful military it seems we want to or need to identify our civic and martial selves too closely, possibly as a means of reassuring ourselves that we fight the good fight or maybe just as a means of encouraging a 'free' people to surrender that freedom for the sake of a 'just' cause - whatever, the point is a democracy and the force it expresses in defense of its beliefs are not identical - in many ways the military expression represents a suspension of those ideals it is asked to defend - and it's hard to see how a viable defense could be mounted any other way. Of course, the line is blurry, not fixed - it's right that we ask our military to be a harsh but necessary force for 'good' and act accordingly - but that admonition is as much rhetorical as practical and therefore must be applied discretely otherwise one will be led into a false assumption like you've made here, Mr Ricks, thinking that a democracy and the military raised to defend it are and must be one in the same thing. The sage of the first democracy, Plato, understood there was often an unnatural balance between the disparate needs of the state and the state itself - his philosopher King, an admirer of Sparta, would have ordered children to march to war with their fathers so that they could learn this most vital of trades - now, would that amount to an enlightened albeit extreme acknowledgement of cruel necessity, or the ramblings of a barbarian?
