Do you think American soldiers are put on too high of a pedestal

[Anomalocaris]

It has been said Prussia was not a state with an army but an army with a state.   The US is certainly not the latter, and in any case the US far too riven with internal fault lines that are proving to be deeper than can be pasted over even by external security concerns for it to be plausible to become an army with a state.   Evidence of this is readily observed in republican willingness to accept Moscow interference in the very way government form in this country, to say nothing of embracing the most unqualified administration conceivable, all to retain the prospect of gaining Supreme Court seats for ideological reasons. National sovereignty has finished into a silly slogan, that one of the major parties, the one that sells itself as the national security party, is willing to fundamentally betray for domestic political advantage. This is not the soil in which any really dynamic militaristic state can grow. At most it will become a South American style corrupt military dictatorship that for all their showy militarism can't win wars.

What this country has become for now is a failing state in which the army has become something of the sand with which dispossessed population with little prospect of economic or social fulfillment use to bury their heads in order to confront the reality of the failing state.