THE MILITARY vs MILITARISM

It was recently brought to my attention that out of my (understandably partial) list of social institutions that need to be remade along an open-source, user-directed structure, the military was notably absent.
I should now like to expend a few words in regards to this subject.
We can start, as we always should, by asking of any given thing, 'what is its role', what purpose does it fulfill? Further, what is its original intent, and how has its contemporary incarnation deviated from this supposed ideal?
And so, as to the issue of the military, we can state quite confidently that its original purpose is defense. It is the structural manifestation of the verb 'to defend'. This definition and understanding allows us tremendous flexibility in our further analysis and in the formulation of alternative expressions. To defend is not equivalent, either morally or technically, to attack. Defense, as understood philosophically in martial arts, entails any set of actions designed to unbalance or immobilize an opponent which proceed from a position of focused equanimity. True defense then can never consist of motivations based on revenge, loss of face, anger, righteousness, or any other debased emotional state. It must always remain a direct response to an immediate and grave existential threat, not merely "...the continuation of political activity by other means." (Clausewitz)
The military serves the purpose of defense by defending human life, not by extending government policies via force through the world. The military, above all other institutions, must uphold universal rights, not serve as the means of extracting economic advantages for elites. Of course, the current situation is exactly the opposite of this idealized perspective. Today's industrialized militaries are no longer in the business of defense (except in the most literal financial sense), but are engaged in an expansive form of corporo-political imperialism, and have been ever since the end of the second world war. The modern military is less concerned with upholding the law and maintaining the integrity of national borders than it is with trying to reshape the world forcefully to a set of dominant ideologies. Interestingly, despite its almost inconceivable material and technical superiority, contemporary armed forces have repeatedly been 'defeated' by small, decentralized guerrilla armies. When i say defeated, i mean only that they have, through their tenacity and idealism, managed to avoid domination, by bleeding away popular support in the aggressor country until continuation of the war becomes politically impossible.
These historical circumstances should be a clear indication that the 'grand narratives' of politically based warfare are wholly without merit, merely symptoms of the sickness of imperialism, dressed up in the dangerous garb of national pride.
So the problem is not, as some on the left have framed it, simply the military, but rather, as with so much else in the world, the ideological addition of those three little letters, ism, to the end of it.
A strong and properly organized military (both structurally and purposefully) is something deserving our support and respect. Militarism, on the other hand, should be condemned and rejected to the utmost by every aware thinking and feeling human being on this planet.