In Season 2, flashbacks to when Reacher set up his special unit show that most of the officers were majors prone to get in trouble. Major is the rank at which the number of US military officers really gets winnowed down (due to the limited number of promotion opportunities) and Reacher was probably easily able to get his chosen people transferred to his team because they were considered misfits with no future prospects in the army.
As Season 2 progresses, the gap between the stakes of the conspiracy that the Bad Guys are involved in (a plot to sell state of the art US military technology to the highest bidder) and the quality of mooks they send after Reacher and the Special Investigators becomes ever wider, leading to them looking more incompetent than they should be given the circumstances; but the brilliance kicks in with the reveal in the sixth episode of the season that Langston and his entire team are just former NYPD officers that got jobs running security at a defense contractor. They are not former military or former spies, they are just jumped up dirty cops trying to pull an international arms deal.
While Reacher would easily have been strong enough to drown KJ in the chemical vat in the final episode, he pulls him out again and kicks him into a fire instead, setting him on fire to give him a slower, more painful death. Good Is Not Soft indeed...
