It's not possible to pay soldiers a reasonable amount of money. If you pay them too much, you basically get an army of mercenaries, while the personal sacrifice any soldier send into harms way endures is impossible to truly translate to money.
We entrepreneurs often talk of our way of life as something we choose quite explicitly over financial security. I'm pretty sure the success of an army depends a lot on it's soldiers thinking roughly the same way about their chosen path.
Finally, my impression is that the United States is build on a certain mentality that's difficult for us Europeans to fully grasp. The country was founded by people fleeing from prosecution and suppression, and it's first war was fought against that same suppression trying to catch up. That mentality lies pretty deep in Americans, as I understand. It has nothing to do with cheating people into collecting our garbage and manning 24-hour convenience stores.
It's a shame that thankfulness to esp. US and UK troops isn't better founded in western European minds, and that it's only brought up when trying to justify a new war. Fact is that 400.000 Americans died in WWII, without whom my German would probably be a lot better. There's a D-day burial ground in Normandy. Any European should make a point of visiting it sometime (I haven't yet) -- especially before making high-brow intellectual rants against war.