The electorate isn't able to express meaningful opinions on the role and size of the military, thus support of the institution itself has become political.
But that policy flows from the civilian political realm. Military leadership doesn't decide which missions to take on. Congress and the President do. The military won't decide the fate of this election, no matter how contentious it gets. The civilian bodies will.
Speech gets swamped by mass propaganda. I don't see how it's possible to look at say the run up to the Iraq war and think that antiwar had a meaningful voice. When it comes down to it, the warmongers are just better funded, better connected, and take advantage of basic human nature.
Since it seems impossible to prevent the military from being used for elective wars, or even to simply downsize it, discouraging general support for the military makes sense (when voice fails, try exit). I'm not asking you to agree with my arguments above, but you don't get to make a unilateral call that this isn't a political viewpoint.
Democracy is a closed feedback loop, and thus causality works in both directions. Given the very few bits of input a person has into decisions, it's likely that most influence flows the opposite direction.
> The people have spoken, and they want war
I see where you're coming from, as usually I vote third party or abstain to avoid thinking I support one candidate that differs only by an epsilon of cultural preferences. But when one of the choices is responsible for the deaths of a quarter million Americans, it's a little different.
And yeah, that national response is the job of the executive branch. So very roughly 150k americans are dead now because Trump was in office. Somewhere around there.
But it's a silly digression anyway. If you don't think NY is a good example, then pick Oregon. Or Canada. Or Germany. The point is that lots of large-scale responses of the form a "typical" democratic administration would have taken have very clearly been effective. While the US response, nationally, has not.
You seem to be considering "freedom" as equivalent to irresponsibility. Being a leader means convincing people to do work they don't want to do, like wearing masks during a pandemic. We don't even need to debate whether the federal government should have implemented a national mask mandate. Simply having a president that recommended wearing masks instead of encouraging indignant irresponsibility would have saved tens of thousands of American lives, no laws required.
Trump gets called a dictator because he unilaterally picks nonsensical ideas and then barks them at everyone to get done, while accepting no feedback about how things are actually working out. This is the behavior of a dictator, regardless of how much power he actually wields or how effective he is. The latest example is his hissy fit over losing the election - there's no basis in reality, yet he's continuing to push it anyway. Seeing someone acting like the law does not matter sets off the fascist alarm bells.