With regard to your first paragraph, I'm afraid I'll have to respectfully disagree with your statement that the source of our overwhelming is mostly from technology. The caliber of our people is far higher than it's been in past decades and past centuries. Right now it's very hard to get into the military, and that's heavily due to mental screening. Removing a lot of women from the equation would cause us to lower metal standards to enlist more men, and I wouldn't recommend that.
You make your points very well -- I hope I don't seem obtuse or argumentative if I respectfully disagree with part of what you've written.
Are you kidding? Disagreement is why the country is so great, respectful disagreement, or loyal opposition, is a point lost on our current generation of politicians.
Again, you can have the best of both worlds, just don't mix them. I could make an outstanding argument that the general level of the average recruit is perhaps as low as its ever been, both physically and academically.
The reason why we are without parallel militarily can be attributed almost completely to our complete domination of space. We are the only force in the world with a fully integrated C4 infrastructure. One Aegis class cruiser can coordinate an entire carrier battlegroup in either an attack on another battlegroup, or a defense of the battle group - all of that is based on satellite, encrypted GPS, etc.
One forward observer with a radio can call down air firepower on just about anything nowadays.
I'm not saying that we are fielding a bunch of morons out there, because clearly that isn't the case, but the difference in your average corporal physically and academically isn't better to the extent necessary to claim that our corporals are clearly superior, for example, than Germany's or Swedens.