Color vision: Normal color vision is required at all levels of flying, from private through commercial and ATP in the civilian world, and military requirements are similar. You need to be able to distunguish between light colors in order to fly safely. PAPI, VASI, and aircraft nav lights are just a few examples. nav lights are red on the left wingtip, green on the right, so when looking at this aircraft at night you could determine if it is flying toward you or away from you. This is just one example. It is purely an issue of safety.
Corrected vision: Military requirements say that to be qualified to fly any type of aircraft you must have 20/20 uncorrected vision to be accepted into a flight program. First, this is purely to narrow the field of qualified applicants. The military would be inundated with applications of thousands of candidates who want to get into a flight program. So to narrow that field, the minimum vision requirement was arbitrarily set at 20/20. You can surely understand however that the better vision a pilot has, the safer he or she is going to be able to fly an aircraft. This may seem unfair, but the military is not and has never been about fair. The military is not an equal opportunity employer. The US military is an instrument of national policy and defense. Period. Now secondly, the 20/20 requirement is not entirely true. You CAN fly military aircraft with corrective lenses (Spectacles or contacts) even fighters. What the military does not make widely known is that there are a limited number of waivers available for candidates that are otherwise exceptionally qualified. For example, a 24 year old male, 6'0", 180 lbs., 5% body fat, with a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering from MIT with a 4.0 GPA, high moral character and excellent demonstrated leadership skills, but has 20/50 vision in each eye correctable to 20/20 or better is probably going to be granted a vision waiver. I personally know an F-16 pilot who entered the US Air Force Academy with contacts. He was granted a waiver. So the 20/20 requirement has exceptions, but there are zero exceptions for color vision.
As for corrective surgery, the procedures are too new to know the long term success or effects of them for the military to sign off on them yet. If they prove to be successful over the long term I suspect that such procedures will ultimately win military approval, but the military does not rush anything of that nature.