What are the best protection and maintenance software tools for personal computers?

The best defense is education. Its a wild claim but 98% of soldiers are not skilled or savvy on how to properly use a computer on the internet. Even reliance on commercial anti-virus and anti-malware tools is only a piece of the pie. You have to be conscious of the type of websites you are visiting. What information you are posting or sharing, media and all of that. Email is definitely one area where large gaps remain, too many people blindly click links without verifying their source. No one actually checks the email address to see if its legit @microsoft.com vs @micros0ft.com, so i'm pretty sure the ignorance to best practices is real.

The Cyber domain is now at the forefront of the fight. The internet is only growing in complexity and diversity of vectors to attack. We have to constantly educate and train to recognize these threats and combat them, re-assess and continually harden our defenses.

So who knows what the next 3 years will look like, let alone the next decade.

First, I'm going to say I think on your survey, you meant to say "Soldiers should not be using military computers for personal use". But yes software protection should be taught. Of course the only true protection is to not plug in to begin with. Sure we can teach people how to protect themselves from viruses and other computer problems. The biggest problem of course is that anti-virus software is out of date the moment you buy it. Cyber security only protects against the threats that are currently known. There's no way to protect against unknown threats and since computer threats are continuously evolving, it'll always be an uphill battle.

Or have a management vendor like Qualys to manage Vulnerabilities on military systems. Soldiers dont get enough soldier training, so we dont need to add more "non-soldier" training to it. Let the 25 series guys handle it.

Whitelist sites
Manage hosts
Patch Management on your systems (Qualys)