Deterrence was proved to be a failure?
I suspect our survival of the Cold War, the history of Switzerland and Sweden as well as a lot of other examples beg to differ.
Victory as commonly defined is often a form of failure. The harm done to the own country by warfare is often greater than the harm done by not going to war (if there's any of the latter at all).
(The foolishness of the 2002-2011 Iraq conflict is a good example: pretty much nothing was gained but the busting of a few stupid fantasies. Thousands died, ten thousands were crippled, trillions of dollars were spent - for no real gain.)
The military shall -in the event of war- achieve the minimal net damage outcome for the country, with political efforts to the same end in parallel.
The mission for the government as a whole is to avoid damage altogether, to maximise the benefits of the population. The details are tricky from a philosophical point of view, but it's quite obvious that in our age you cannot really be better off with "winning" a war of choice than choosing not to go to it. You don't get to annex fertile lands or gold mines any more these days, not even oil fields.
This leaves wars of necessity, which again are only meeting the criteria if they're the least terrible alternative. To choose a more terrible alternative than a less terrible one is folly/incompetence, thus you gotta choose the least terrible (again, determining this is tricky detail stuff). Obviously, if the least terrible alternative is the only one that should be used, war can only be the way to go if it's the least terrible way to go.
After all, war is a terrible alternative, thus it's in the context "of war or not war" pointless to cover the "most beneficial" line of argument that applies to many peacetime policy outcomes.
So what's the military's purpose in peacetime?
Support the policy in its quest for good outcomes by making war and sovereignty violations less likely. This can be pursued by putting a hefty risk premium on all foreign aggressions. This risk premium is the visible and widely known probability that an aggression would fail to overcome the resistance (at costs that appear to be acceptable to the aggressor's top decisionmakers).
That may be no fool-proof method, not 100% reliable - but then again only fools look for such methods in a world of mortals.
To consider a combat-experienced officer corps the way to go, the best scenario, equals the wish for a country's involvement in warfare in at least a 20 year intervals. That's a wish for a periodic failure of the government to keep the country out of a great mess.
It's not even close to a good idea.
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