I don’t think military experience should be a deciding factor for leadership in our republic... but respect for the military certainly should be. And an understanding of our history. No dem has either of those... and many repubs are also similarly lacking.
Theoretically? Sure.
But the fact remains that our list of US Presidents with no military experience is short and undistinguished.
Indeed, I would delete John Adams, John Quincy Adams and Franklin Roosevelt from that list, since they all played important roles in wartime, before becoming President.
That makes the no-military experience list a rogues' gallery of undistinguished Presidents:
Sure, you can correctly argue that Harding & Coolidge were great for the Roaring Twenties, but then you'd have to claim that today's world more resembles the Twenties than any other decade.
And even if that were true (it's not) we can also recognize that failures in the Twenties lead to world-wide economic, political and military crises in the Thirties.
Surely we would not want to repeat that!
Bottom line: only nine of 44 Presidents had no effective military experience = 20%, and few of those had highly successful presidencies.
By contrast, 2/3 of our Presidents were former military officers, including nearly all of the most successful.
So who do we have today?