Training people can be harder when the trainees have to unlearn bad habits or knowledge. Ask anyone who has tutored previously self-taught students an artform or craft.

In some ways, media exposure can help to introduce broad concepts, and sometimes there are excellent examples in media (My Cousin Vinny and Legally Blonde have been used in some US law school course curriculum to show how the parts of the judicial system are supposed to operate, iirc), but oftentimes preconceived notions can hinder training for the real thing.

To add to this: taking territory is the easy part.

The hard part is holding it, because you don’t just have to worry about staffing the front line, but maintaining security in the occupied regions long enough for non-state actors to cease hostilities and accept the invading force as the new legitimate authority- which may never fully occur- all the while dealing with resistance fighters.

This means orders of magnitude more personnel, funding, and equipment for an unknowable length of time across a much larger area than just the line of incursion.

It’s taken them two years to fail to take the land, and now have an incursion into their own soil to contend with. so I’m skeptical they’d manage to keep it permanently.

The better we understand the nervous systems of other species, the better we can understand our own through comparison and testing, which in turn can lead to more ideas for medical treatments- or augmentation, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Not to add to the whataboutism, but don’t forget how the US firebombed Tokyo.