if you believe that the president should be selected by majority vote of the people of the nation, then the majority of the people of the country elect someone, then yes, people who maybe didn't vote for that person then have to abide by the decision of the majority and maybe even do things to make the chosen candidate president even if they personally didn't vote for that person.
it's called democracy and it's not spineless and i certainly hope it's not something foreign to the reasons you served in the military.
the electoral college is based on a quite peculiar notion that the president shouldn't be elected by the people of the country, but rather by the states with a strange allocation of electoral votes. if you believe that that rather imperfect idea of democracy is the only thing that makes sense, then fine, go ahead and oppose the idea of a national popular vote.
but please don't call abiding by majority vote "spineless". it's anything but.
in the example you give, california would merely agreeing to abide by the will of the entire nation in an election where the people of california had a say in exact proportion to the number of californians who voted in that election. if californians were outvoted, then there's nothing odd or strange or wrong with california's electoral votes going to the winner of the nationwide majority candidate.
alternatively, if california's electoral votes go entirely to one candidate, should orange county complain if they voted for the republican and the state went blue? should san francisco complain if they voted for the democrat but the state went red?
the real question is should the nation be broken into chunks and we have elections for president at the chunk level rather than have one big election at the national level. personally, i think the idea to conduct a national election as a weird aggregate of state-level elections is a silly concept whose time has passed and that has proven itself to be defective.
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