Making a difference in the branch of government that is about destroying lives in other countries.
There's also a question of intellectual maturity. Consider that Noam Chomsky has spoken many times about good things that were done with DoD funding, as well as about how no one can rightly condemn others for not being in a pristine moral position because no such position exists (pointing to his own career at MIT as an example). If the deepest and most trenchant critic of American militarism understands this, I think internet commenters who fancy themselves critics of American militarism can be expected to understand it too, at least in this corner of the internet. If you want to condemn others or blare with ideological megaphones, please do so elsewhere.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11928952 and marked it off-topic.
I question the need for 'defense'.
(It's as absurd as it sounds, and yet that's essentially the US strategy for defending from terrorist attacks)
Random applications of overwhelming force too have situations in which they're appropriate. Fighting terrorism is not one of them.
I guess that's what a culture of militarization does to you: You start to confuse the police and the military.