They did the meme!
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Because its an obvious military target, and we live in the modern era with missiles that means they can technically hit anywhere they want without care of where its buried.
Its a question of caring about the morals/ethics of protecting civilians from the consequences of war, or simply only caring about the logistics of "making it easier for us to get to work."
I honestly don't think anyone in the ME is asking this.
When Smith was arguing with Murray about understanding that war means kids being buried alive under rubble until they finally starve to death and die; Smith failed to understand that as a man who's morals stem from Liberalism, he was the only one not advocating for that. Liberal morality isn't Universal, and there's no more clear evidence of that than Middle-Eastern wars.
You asked why a military building should be away from a city, I gave you an answer.
Specifically choosing to use those buildings because they are civilian, instead of simply the laze and ease of the US building near places they live, is a moral evil regardless of what label you want to assign to it. Its always a moral failing that puts the lives of civilians at risk for your own war purposes, and anyone (no matter what country) that does so is telling you everything you need to know about how pathetic and uncaring they are about those lives.
I didn't ask why a military building should be away from a city. And this explanation doesn't make sense. You're inferring that an administrative building is built in a city to cause civilian deaths. No military does that. They put administrative buildings in cities so that administrators can go to work more easily. That's certainly not similar to a strategy where you intentionally disguise ammunition dumps, bunkers, launch sites, sniper positions, mortar positions, and emplaced machine gun or artillery positions as non-combatant structures like hospitals, schools, or religious buildings. One is just a military building being used by the organization, the other is an attempt to use mercy as a weapon against the attacker, and to falsely claim civilian deaths for propaganda purposes. These concepts are simply not related, nor are they morally equivalent. One is a tactic to intentionally endanger civilians by using offensive ROE as a weapon, and the other is nothing more than civil engineering.
If you want to call it a "moral failing", then you need to accept that this is a "moral failing" that every single military on earth has. I can't think of a single military force in human history where a standing, peacetime, military organization made sure to place all military owned structures, vehicles, equipment, animals, and personnel outside of all non-military populations. Not one. Even going back to the Raid on the Medway in the 2nd Anglo-Dutch War. The situation gets worse in the ancient world, or with tribes, or with militias, because the active militaries are typically embedded with the population, or literally standing guard surrounding it. And then there's castles! Whole populations of entire towns held in military fortifications.
That is literally what I said the US did. They did it for a lazy reason, but its still a moral failing because regardless of how you slice it its a building of military importance that is within range of considerable civilian destruction. Its not intentionally shielding, but its involving them regardless.
Those who use them as an actual meat shield are committing a greater scale moral failing, but its the same scale with a 2/10 and a 10/10 on it.
It is, because the modern world is built on not having actual "hot" wars often enough that they rest on their laurels and don't even care to think about it. Those that are embroiled in such wars often, like Africa, South America, and the ME jump the ship hard enough to simply hide behind civilians anyway.
Also already acknowledged. Pre-modern war had lines where you had to get through to actually commit direct warfare damage. You aren't getting to the civilians behind the walls without, you know, breaching the walls.
Now that we have technology that render those points more moot, its a lot more important where you place your target in expecting retaliation.
In WW2 the British bombed the civilians of French cities to "target those working for the Nazis". How did they know which buildings housed these "collaborators" is lost to history. 🙄 Nor has it been explained how carpet bombing is accurate enough to avoid non-targeted buildings. (hint: like Iran's missiles? It hits random targets within a wide area.)