A friend of mine said just the other day that he feels pretty lucky that he served primarily under Reagan. He says they were put on alert a couple of times but there were no big deployments while Reagan was in the White House.
He did end up in Riyadh for a few months when Bush Sr took over but no nation building games.
W's biggest mistake was Rummy. He was pathetic under Ford and tried to bring his same nonsense back into policy including the if you don't wanna be in just leave policy. Of course back then in Rummy 1 all you had to do was walk off 31 days and turn yourself in somewhere else. That was a major discipline and morale breaker that carried over into about the mid Carter term. IIRC it got stopped and if you walked it was bad time tacked on to the end of your EAOS.
I served then too...and feel the same about serving our country when we had an administration committed to the defense of our citizens...
Ain’t that way no more.....