yes it's helping the imperial machine.

I dunno, is it? It'd be doing what the imperialist machine wants at a purpose that it thinks helps it, but personally I'm not sure having a populace with absolutely no clue what's actually happening actually benefits it in the long run

i.e. say you lie about all the deaths being heroic/good/they died getting sucked off/whatever, you convince a new wave of baying hogs to enlist, they all go die too, rinse repeat. it's what the U.S. would want but at the same time I do not think it is benefited long term by simply throwing its population into a meat grinder when there's no chance of that yielding any tangible benefit aside from all the newly ground meat