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[GlyphGryph]

I always got that feeling from the movie too. The government just wanted the bugs stuff and needed to get them out of the way, so they whipped the population into a fervor.

[Flying Dice]

In all honesty, the novel was a better critic of itself than the movie was. For one, it was outright stated that the Federation and Bugs were at war because they wanted the same real estate. If anything, the movie was a critique of the blind patriotism protrayed in the movie, which was itself quite different from the Federation in the novel. The two driving forces behind military service in the novel were a) the prestige, voting rights, and warm fuzzy feeling, and b) the concept of "The galaxy exists, and if we don't own it, someone else will" that comes up in WH40K, whereas in the movie it was "RAHRAHALIENMENACE".

Incidentally, regarding the kinetic strike, I seem to recall that the novel version was something along the lines of a Bug ship/ships jumping into Sol and boosting an asteroid up to substantial speed. IMO, the movie just couldn't/didn't try to portray the political system Heinlein created for the novel, and instead decided to go with standard pseudofacist good guys. Not to say that the system itself didn't have fairly visible flaws (Corporal punishment solves crime? Only military veterans should be allowed to vote, because nobody else is capable of properly understanding the power of government?  ), but blind patriotism certainly wasn't one of them, either in-universe or in a meta sense.