[Absolute hijack, but minds are attuned to it: a local mission to find a deserter?]
You’re not fighting a war just to win a war. You’re fighting a war to defend your nation. That means you have to look beyond the end of the war to what your country will be like afterwards. In this case, the government decided that avoiding the complete elimination of a family was more important in the long run than the services of one soldier could provide during the war.
For reference:
I believe that two of the Bixby sons survived.
I think the first part of the movie set up the idea that the kind of combat taking place in that area was profoundly chaotic from the get-go. Sending a squad out on the Ryan mission was, as has been noted, pretty trivial and accomplished as much as probably most any other squad might have. If they had dispatched an entire brigade on that mission, that would have been pretty absurd and not nearly as entertaining.
But, OTOH, whole troop movements are periodically sent on missions that are designed to be useless, to divert the enemy from the more important goal at the time. And that is relevant because a soldier’s duty is to catch a bullet if the commander thinks that is the best use for him at that time. Strategy can be brutal and dispassionate.
Which leaves the Ryan story in kind of a grey area. Ryan’s duty as a soldier was to die if need be, except, top command decided it was strategically preferable to get him out of there. Morality really has no side on this issue. And commanders do make strategic/pragmatic errors in war, even the ones who get ribbons and medals.
Because of the Sullivan Brothers story, and the other stories alluded to in this thread, DOD enacted the Sole Survivor Policy. Wiki:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sole_Survivor_Policy.
Although it was not formally enacted until 1948, it was unofficial policy during WWII. Personally, if I were asked to volunteer for this duty, I would do it. Realistically, 6 soldiers are not going to do anything to speed up the end of a war that includes hundreds of thousands of combatants on all sides. Saving that one person will have a profound effect on one American family.
The burdens of general war are shared by entire nations - it’s a wise and compassionate one that makes the effort for the burden to not fall too heavily on one family. 
I remember them killing a lot of prisoners of war and soldiers trying to surrender…
The ungrateful little shit refused to be rescued, even though he was ordered to be rescued, thereby getting the surviving members of the rescue party killed. They should have put him against a wall and shot him dead.
Let those six guys go home, have a profound effect on six American families.
Prisoners of war? When? Some unnamed soldiers shot some Czechs trying to surrender at the end of the landing scene, and Upham shot Steamboat Willie, but there weren’t any POWs in the movie at all.
The end of the movie, after the final battle where Capt. Miller dies, telling Ryan to ‘earn this’, cuts to the framing story of Ryan (we don’t know it was him for sure until the end) taking his family to the graves at Normandy, and he breaks down at the grave of Miller, and asks his wife is he was a good man.
And he was, making a boatload of daughters with big chests. 
(seriously, what was up with that casting? Someone had to be thinking it.)
Funny how memory can be so bad.
Miller’s squad did no such thing (barring Upham shooting Steamboat Willie - if you think that was a case of merely killing “soldiers trying to surrender” you weren’t paying attention.) The killing of surrendering Germans was at the bunkers on Omaha, not on the Ryan mission. There was no killing of prisoners anywhere in the movie. Specifically, they *didn’t *kill Steamboat Willie, when they probably should have. It was a major plot point. Sorry you missed it.
BTW, I got that the two soldiers trying to surrender at the beginning of the movie were Czech from the imdb trivia page. Apparently they were members of prisoner battalions - captured by Germans earlier in the war and forced to fight for them.
Thank you for that link! 
Classic!
Nitpickery :
The *Osttruppen *weren’t prison battalions, exactly. Sure, most of them had been conscripted and thrown into battle against their will (although plenty did volunteer, too), but then so were the majority of Allied or even German soldiers in the war.
Prison battalions (or *Straffbattalion *auf Deutsch) are a different thing, namely criminals both civilians and military pulled out of the klink and given “another chance” in exchange for reduced or revoked sentences. They were typically used as cannon fodder, mine clearers, bomb disposal etc… with very strict supervision and a “do or get shot on the spot” management style.
Technically Wade (Ribisi) and Carparzo (Diesel) were the only Rangers killed looking for Ryan. Jackson (Pepper), Mellish (Goldberg), Sgt Horvath (Sizemore) and Capt Miller (Hanks) were killed later when the squad had already found Ryan and decided to make a go of defending the bridge at Ramelle with the Airborne. So six in all.
Probably no. In fact, a common theme throughout the film was how much of a FUBAR it was. i.e. Capt Miller’s “mission is the man” talk with Horvath. One of the main motivations for the squad to stay at Ramelle seemed to be to about making the mission something greater than just pulling some paratrooper off the line because his family had a run of bad luck.
Also to reiterate a point made up-thread. I don’t think anyone thought the mission was “certain death” or particularly dangerous. The main challenge seemed to be that with the Airborne broken up and scattered all over the place, it was basically a fool’s errand trying to find one “needle in a stack of needles”.
It was the decision to stay in Ramelle that became the suicide mission. Which is actually the part meant to demonstrate their heroism and sacrifice, since it wasn’t specifically part of their orders.
Tell that to the crew of the Enola Gay!
Yep I totally disagree with the mission. Ryan himself said his life was less important than stopping Hitler.
On the other hand, if this was some stupid war like Iraq, then absolutely.
Part of what makes it an interesting movie is that the central question - was it worth it? - is difficult to answer. On one hand, sending several men to their deaths to save one man doesn’t make sense. On the other hand, saving that one life had important impacts on the war effort. I think soldiers and their families would be inspired by the story and fight harder and send more support to the military cause.
There’s no right answer. Personally, I would be proud if I had a grandpa who died trying to save a family from the grief of an entire generation of their family being wiped out.
As others have noted, nobody sent several men to their death to save one man. The mission was to remove one man from the battle - nobody was being sent to die in his place.
Yes, the unanticipated result was that several of the soldiers sent on the mission were killed. But they were infantry soldiers fighting in a war - it’s not like they would have been safe if they hadn’t been sent on this mission.
Upham might have been safe since he was a cartographer and not technically an infantryman.