Well maybe this army isn't all that occupied with an ongoing popularity-contest but mainly concerns itself with making sure that corporations do not get a foothold within their territory.
The concept of winning "hearts and minds" is relatively new, only the US & friends try to do it, or so they say, and it hasn't worked at all. It's not the truth that is the first casualty of war, it is civilians. Look at Iraq today... Daesh takes over, screws over the civilians. Anti-Daesh militias (backed by us in the west) defeat Daesh, then screws over the civilians. Amnesty just released a report about it, it's a pretty horrific read, but this is the nature of wars - it's only in fiction that you try to make friends with everything around you, sadly.