I did not know about Confucianism's disdain for soldiers and the military. Could someone go more in depth about it for me? Why did they feel that way and how did these beliefs effect warfare? Were soldiers not respected then? Seems like it would be a terrible drag on moral.
There are two ideas in Confucianism that could lead to an anti-military bent. First, there is the idea of a 'natural political order' in the world, with the King/Emperor on top and the peasants on the bottom. The people at the bottom owed allegiance and obedience to their betters, while the people at the top owed to the bottom a responsibility for their welfare.
When this order was broken, it was known as disorder or chaos: this is characterized by 'kings not being kings', and 'officials not being officials'. How can this happen? Through military force, of course. So in a sense, soldiers are the enablers of chaos. Similarly, a non-virtuous ruler can hold onto power through military force, which similarly breaks order.
The second idea concerns that of the 'virtuous ruler'. Confucius states that those who 'first cleansed their hearts could then organize their families' and so on up to 'those who first managed their states could then unite all under Heaven'. So Confucius sees virtue as naturally and inevitably bringing to the individual ever-increasing states of responsibility, ideally with the most virtuous being King/Emperor.
But what is the process by which virtuous people get to become Emperor? Confucius here refers back to the example of Lord (later King) Wen of Zhou, who ruled with virtue by observing ritual, creating order and generally being benevolent. Despite the fact that King Wen was still nominally subservient to King Di Xin of Shang, Shang officials and citizens flocked to Lord Wen's domain and eventually formed the basis of Zhou's strength, which the dynasty then used to defeat Shang under King Wu.
This is almost certainly 100% Zhou propaganda (plenty of Shang armies were left to resist Zhou even after conquest), but Confucius used this example to argue that people naturally 'gravitate' towards virtuous rule, and so with enough virtue one would eventually claim all under heaven (the same reasoning of Romance of the Three Kingdom's Liu Bei). As such, military conquest is a 'lower' form of dominance compared with
hua or 'moral rectification'. Idealist Confucians were pacifists in that they argued that 'moral rectification' was the way to achieve the submission of peoples, and so soldiering in such an environment was positively detracting from the work of
hua.
It's easy to overestimate how Confucianism affected the Chinese military, though. Truly idealistic Confucians were really only found in the bureaucracy, and even there people were more using the language of idealistic Confucians as a means of winning policy debates rather than actually believing in the whole theory itself (there's a saying that Chinese governance was 'Confucian with a Legalist [e.g. Machiavellian] core). For example, arguments during the Western Han against the militaristic policy of Emperor Wu utilized the concept of
hua extensively as a means of restraining the Emperor, but in reality focused more on the practical troubles of fighting the Huns, e.g. logistics and cavalry issues. A lot of the anti-military ideas floating around in the Imperial Courts were more concerned about the potential of border garrisons to revolt than any abstract Confucian ideal.