It seems that pretty everyone but anarchists believe that without the soldiers dying our freedoms would be taken away. We are only free because people risked (and gave) their lives so that others can be free. Such a claim is capable of being verified by looking at the empirical evidence. Yet, since statism is a religion, ignoring what's staring people right in front of their eyes is one of the main requirements of statism. One way to test the claim that soldiers fight for freedom is to see if people are more free after a war or less free. If after (and during) every war, freedom is eroded more and more it takes ignoring evidence to claim that soldiers are dying so that we can be free. The evidence unfortunately reveals the opposite: Soldiers are dying so that you can be less free. As Randolph Borne observed, "War is the health of the state." As the great historian Robert Higgs showed in book, Crises and Leviathan (among many other articles and follow up books), the power of the state increases during wartime. The more wars, the more people's freedoms are taken away. Most people do not want freedom and will gladly sacrifice it for the illusion of safety and security. It is during wartime when people are scared and are willing to give up their freedoms to a bunch of tyrants that promise them safety in return. Price controls have been instituted to a greater degree during wartime. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus because "this is wartime." During World War I, President Woodrow Wilson created the Espionage Act which made it a crime for newspapers to write articles criticizing the war and for regular folk to speak out and criticize the war. People could be thrown in prison for up to 20 years simply for speaking out against the war, and many were victims of the Espionage Act. During World War II, FDR instituted rent control, price controls. The reason that one's insurance is covered by their employer is because of price controls FDR created which prohibited employers giving their workers a raise. In order to induce workers to not quit and find other employment, employers instead of paying people a higher income added some amenities as a benefit of work, such as paying for their workers' health insurance. As employees understand, having one's insurance be tied to their job ain't really a benefit since it makes it more painful to quit one's job if they have to lose their health insurance with it. The Iraq War created the Patriot Act, the NDAA, the Department of Homeland Security, the NSA, and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
While many "emergency measures" considered necessary during wartime, many of them remain permanent, such as rent control, employer paid health insurance, the Patriot Act, and numerous other measures. Not to mention that soldiers are paid with taxpayer dollars, and taxation is compulsory. War is just another wasteful, bloated government program, where the taxpayers are left the bill.
Saying that war is about defense is contradictory on its face since not all wars can be defensive. If all wars were defensive there would be no wars. A universal application of of "only use violence in self-defense" leads to the conclusion of universal world peace. If everyone would only use force in retaliation that means no one is initiating force and if no one is initiating force there is no force used to retaliate, which means force ceases to be used at all. In other words, if all wars were fought in order to defend freedom that means there would be no wars of aggression and if there are no wars of aggression, no defensive war is possible. In other words, at least some wars, on one side must engage in aggression and not defending liberty. Of course, people seeped in propaganda like to believe that the other side is the aggressor and that "We" are the defender, but this is unlikely to always be the case. Likewise, wars are not fought, at least large scale wars like we see in the current day, because some non-governmental person decides to attack some stranger thousands of miles away. Rather people are lied to by the state, naively believe the state exists to protect their interests and are either drafted or voluntarily enlist to kill other people who are drafted or enlisted as a result of being told the same lies. War are a government creation and are just politics at its most openly destructive. Wars are not defensive, but committed by agents of the state for political gain. All wars restrict freedom to some degree (as explained above), at the very least by forcing people to pay for the racket that is war. So next time you meet a soldier, have the balls and respect to be honest with him and say, "Thank you for killing people you don't know and never met for a paycheck. Thank you for being willing dupes and useful idiots to be manipulated like chess pieces. Thank you for taking away the few freedoms we have, under the guise of wartime emergency. Thank you for being a hitman for the state and being a political parasite instead of getting a real job that actually benefits the masses by creating something to improve people's lives instead of getting paid to destroy homes and kill people from far-off lands."