>>19 The US army is still designed for big wars, and therefore tends to emphasize the skill of any one soldier less.
Oh, I dunno. In how many other armies is an ordinary troopie trained to operate a radio? In how many other armies is an ordinary troopie trained to call in artillery and air support?
Granted, the US Marines have somewhat higher standards of training all around than the US Army (their close support pilots are especially good).
It is one thing to compare training standards between, for example, US Army Infantry and the Royal Marines. But when you say "other Western countries," that means we have to bring the French, the Belgians, and the Dutch into it too--who mostly do not have quite so good a reputation, militarily speaking.
I do not think, in any event, that it is so much that the US military is "designed for big wars" and no one else is. The British for generations kept very well trained and equipped mechanized army in northern West Germany in anticipation of WWIII. It is that the US military is an all-volunteer force, made up largely of people who do not plan to spend their entire lives there, and there are limits to how much training you can do in a two-year or four-year term of enlistment and still serve in a militarily useful capacity doing a militarily useful job somewhere.