House I grew up in, you addressed strange civilians as Sir or Mam.
Military I was taught to address officers by their rank or as Sir or Mam.
Enlisted were Airman or in my case Sargent..
My favorite retort to someone that calls me sir, "don't call me sir, I work for a living.".
I still use "Mam" for civilians. even girls young enough to be my grand daughters.
public setting only.
I was trained as one of those Gung Ho SAC trained killers.
I didn't crawl through jungles, I crawled over 20 kilo ton Nukes.
Focus was the same, "carry out the mission".
If a person is physically capable of carrying out the mission, I don't have a problem.
I have a problem with reducing the standards to accomplish some BS political agenda.
That applies to all of society.
With increases in technology and the need for military members learning how to operate and maintain complex weapons, communication and many other systems (e.g. nuclear power engineers in the Navy), there are way more officers serving now than there used to be compared to enlisted. All pilots must have a college degree, as do almost all other officers. There are too many candidates with degrees from higher education to justify commissioning officers without those credentials.
I worked in a high tech career in the Air Force, and my unit had about half civilian/half military personnel. We also had about a 3:2 ratio of officers to enlisted. Kind of sucked for the enlisted, because there were so few of them to do the extra duty jobs (cleaning, etc). Almost all the civilians were officer equivalent pay grades. Given the fact the military needs to compete with civilian industries for manpower, promoting well educated and experienced people requires they be in the officer ranks and high GS pay grades to provide competitive compensation.
Within the work area, we officers called the enlisted, civilians and our peers by our first names. The enlisted called most non-enlisted by rank+last-name or Mr/Ms+last-name for civilians.
We had to be cognizant of visitors or being in other areas so we didn't use the less formal means of address, but it created a much better work environment given the mission we supported.
Were we in a combat situation, a less personal scheme would have been required. It's hard to knowingly send someone you treat as an equal into a dangerous situation or hold them accountable if they fail to do their duty.
How to address others is covered in Customs and Courtesies training. It's a process of teaching the chain of command, the force structure, and the proper way to give and follow orders. If someone upsets that structure and those customs, you can count on discipline, security and authority at each level to be negatively impacted. They are introducing a concept that has absolutely nothing to do with how the military functions, and that's critical in combat roles.