"An Interest in Protecting Human Life"

A Navy sailor's wife was pregnant with a baby which had a fatal birth defect; they opted to end the pregnancy with an abortion at five months, and wanted the Navy to pay for it. Ccoverage for the procedure was denied. She then filed a lawsuit claiming an armed forces health plan owed her $3,000 for the procedure.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled today that U.S. armed forces medical benefits should cover abortion costs only when a mother's life is at risk, a decision that the judges acknowledged was "callous and unfeeling." They said that they were not judging the "wisdom, fairness or logic" of congressional legislation that limited abortions under military medical plans.

I pulled all of the above information from various AP sources. I think it's pretty straightforward, and I'm not particularly interested in debating the morality of abortion in this space.

Here's what interests me:
"The government argued that refusing to cover such services 'furthers the government's interest in protecting human life in general and promoting respect for life.'"
We're talking about the military here. Soldiers learn all sorts of useful skills during their time in the service, but the main thing that they learn is how to kill people.

I'm not a pacifist; I know that war will always be with us; I also know that in war, all kinds of people--soldiers, the elderly, babies, pregnant women, children--die. So it strikes me as strangely incongruous to link the military to "protecting human life." It tries to protect some lives; it tries to protect our national interests and our way of life. And it does that by killing other people, not by "protecting human life in general."

Does this strike anyone else as odd?