Militarism and its virtually sacred, officially unquestionable manifestations, in its most “efficient” and extreme forms such as JSOC, reinforces the authority, persistence, and dominance of the American mythos, since its relationship to civilian lives is substantially unreported and enigmatic to the American public, while “plausibly deniable” to the world at large. Military force provides the critical mass that keeps up US momentum in the exploitation and pacification of the third world (not to mention the perpetually renewed incentives to oppressed populations to spawn insurgencies, a.k.a. “terrorist groups”), while holding on to a premise of US as having presumptive and enhanced “rights” in its relational posture toward “the developed world.”
This is what “civilization” has come to for the United States. Militarism is the net we are tightrope-walking above. It will catch us when we fall: the US is set to become a palpably military state. (We are already what is called a “fiscal-military state.” Defined at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal-military_state)