do you treat criminals the same?

“Criminal” is a mich more wide group of people in the relevant sense. It includes people who are deemed such simply because of being of a “wrong race”, to people who do sabotage against the genocidal machine, to people who, indeed do some of the stuff that soldiers are very guilty of (strangely, you don’t seem to say that we should be ecstatic about people like Epstein and Maxwell).

A much better question would be “do you treat cops the same?”, but the military is still much worse.

The way you see military, many of whom are from low income without many means of survival,

Poverty draft is a myth. The USian military is mostly from well-off backgrounds.
Furthermore, if you can sign up for kidnapping and torture of foreigners for oil, you can find a different job.

A criminal will steal or murder for similar reasons a person joins the military

So, you think that we shouldn’t speak ill of the likes of Epalstein and Maxwell, on the grounds that they were simply doing what the military does?

But yeah, if one intends to do kidnapping, torture, and murder for money, they can at least keep it to the Imperial Core instead of to foreigners.

So do you think they deserve humiliation and degradation?

These people that sign up to contribute to the most awful things that can be done deserve significantly worse.

Both are forced into making morally wrong choices

People who sign up for the USian military are not forced to do that.

but instead of anger at the system that creates these situations, you insult the people. It’s reactionary.

Do you think that insulting cops and ICE thugs is reactionary? Do consider that they do much less evil than the military.

So I see belittling them online as counterproductive to any type of coalition

If they are actually dependant, they understand why their former colleagues get such ire and would die with the victims and against said colleagues.