What Makes a General?

You have to ask what you want the purpose of a republican military to be?  Protect the existential integrity and freedoms of the nation and people?  Or project power and influence, defending economic prerogatives?  The later category of strategic purpose doesn’t belong to republics, but rather to empires.  But America has to pretend to not be an empire, because of those darned people and the darn media.  So our military is forced to serve dual purposes, our leadership manic-depressively keeping up with this unspoken schizophrenia.