This is why the Western militaries are going to lose their next major war. They simply are no longer serious about warfighting; as the Z-man observes, they are more interested in posturing than victory:
Way back when the Bush administration launched the invasion of Iraq, the prevailing assumption among those who were in charge was that it would be a cakewalk. The people would embrace us as liberators. People who had some clue about how the world works knew it would be an ugly mess, as is the case with all wars. War is, by definition, the ugliest of human activities. It’s purpose is to kill and destroy.
Inevitably, stories turned up about abuses. One essential way to prepare soldiers for war is to dehumanize the enemy. Men, even trained killers, are not going to kill people they see as sympathetic. There’s no way to finely calibrate the mind of a soldier so in every war there are abuses, even when care is taken to avoid them. That’s why things like the Abu Ghraib prison incident happened. War is and always will be an ugly business.
That knowledge should lead Western governments to use their technological and economic advantages to avoid getting into wars with the barbarians on the edge of civilization. Instead, they start wars they never intend to win, so they can preen and pose about their virtue and morality, when something terrible inevitably happens. It means some guy in uniform gets to be strung up in order to please the vanity of our rulers.
Remember, most militaries that suffered catastrophic defeats had been previously successful. The US military can’t even claim the same. As for the virtually nonexistent militaries of the Great Britain, France, and Spain, they can’t even defend their own borders.
If the USA is foolish enough to go to war with North Korea, things may turn out very, very differently than everyone is expecting.