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Welcome the euphemism treadmill. Erasing the moron-retard distinction is bad because it makes it harder to talk accurately and precisely about intellectual capabilities.
Warrior euphemism talk started, as I recall seeing it, with the cringey Wounded Warrior Project stuff, though I'm sure it has earlier roots.
Was "retarded" or "retard" ever used as a specific technical term allowing fine distinctions in the way "moron", "imbecile" and "idiot" (in increasing order of retardation) were? I am not an expert, but I think "retarded" was the first turn of the euphemism treadmill after idiot/imbecile/moron became un-PC, and "retard" has never been anything except a schoolboy insult derived from "retarded".
I don't think the euphemism treadmill applies to warrior/soldier though - the people talking about "warriors" think that both "warrior" and "soldier" are both strongly positive descriptions that you wouldn't want to euphemise.
Mentally Retarded was the standard terminology from roughly the 40s through the early 2000s. I don't know that the shortened retard was ever formally used, but it was a simple shorthand so I'm sure that it was used by professionals informally.
It's the same dynamic, though with a different valence. The normal way we talk about the euphemism treadmill is that you have a perfectly good word for something (retard, negro, sodomite, secretary, rape victim) that acquires negative connotations over time because of the thing described, and a new euphemism is introduced to shed those negative connotations while still describing the thing (special needs, african american, homosexual, administrative assistant, rape survivor). In this case, it's not that soldier had negative connotations, it's that it had insufficiently positive connotations. Soldier was never a negative term, but chickenhawks needed an even more aggressively positive word. "Heroes" is often used for maximal positive connotations, but everyone knows it's stupid.
Warrior gets traction with these types because it pushes the positive connotations of soldier further, but eventually it will just take on the same connotations as soldier, and they'll need a new euphemism.
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