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I very much agree with you - see Brett Devereaux and the Angry Staff Officer on why modern America, or basically any civilised society (going back to Athens and Rome) needs soldiers and not warriors.
Interesting military history question - who were the last warriors not to get their arses kicked by soldiers?
People who talk about "warriors" either aren't aware of the warrior/soldier distinction, or are hinting at the cluster of wrong ideas that come when you think of yourself as a Spartiate and your political opponents as upjumped women and/or helots. Devereaux calls this cluster the "cult of the badass" which is why I have occasionally used the term "badass" snarkily in the thread.
I expect that in the US context it began with not wanting to use "soldier" to describe someone who fights land battles for pay in the organised service of the state of which they are a citizen because it annoyed the Marine Corps.
As I think about it more some of the confusion with the warrior/soldier distinction might be that soldier is a legal term and warrior is not. And almost no one is careful with their language.
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Probably the Mapudungu, who maintained independence from modernizing Latin American states on the pampas slightly longer than the Sioux or Commanche did vs the USA.
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I personally blame Dave Grossman, who created the wolf-sheep-sheepdog paradigm. Okay, that might be giving him, specifically, too much credit, but it seems like in the GWoT era, the Army and Marines both started to absorb the idea that military personnel, and especially combat arms, and especially especially Special Ops Dudes were an inherently separate and special class of people. This probably felt justified to a degree, given the way you had an all-volunteer military fighting a permanent war while the civilian population was completely tuned out. Easy enough to buy into the idea of a special martial elite when you come home and there's no visible expression of the nation being at war.
This was hardly universal - I know plenty of current and former military who make fun of this mindset - but it definitely caught on with a lot of people.
(as an aside, while I agree with the sentiment and the overall point, the ASO article is pretty sloppy on some historical details, e.g. longbows did not materially contribute to the decline of armored knights on the battlefield)
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This is the common motte-move of just setting the definitions of the terms as an "I win" in advance, in this case by taking everything modern society likes about the military and putting it in the "soldier" bucket and taking everything we dislike and putting it in the "warrior" bucket. I'm comfortable throwing out Devereaux definition (which quickly gets bogged down in epicycles, as when he has to introduce the "mercenary" as a third type one paragraph later) and using ordinary language. Realistically, if you look at how people use the words, and look at successful modern soldiers, they're someone who can be a soldier when things are going smoothly and a warrior when the chips are down - when you're in the Ardennes surrounded by krauts, you want a "warrior mentality". Any combat vet who is not a lib blogger will tell you something similar, that's just what the words mean. /u/coffee_enjoyer is largely correct about what people mean by a "warrior mentality" politically, but it's also worth noting that a lot of the actual tip of the spear guys sign up in hopes they will get their warrior moments (and often end up having unpleasant encounters with reality/the VA).
Happens commonly in Africa, not unrelated to their low quality of soldiering. Otherwise, the Arab Revolt is a good example, given its centrality to all this Fremen stuff.
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The Taliban.
My read is that Pushtunwali was a warrior ethos and the OG Taliban were soldiers (they were recruited from seminaries, and 1990's-era Taliban propaganda claimed they were theology students first and fighters second) beating on warriors when they conquered Afghanistan the first time. But a good candidate answer - clearly the Taliban had become less soldierly and more warrioresque by 2021.
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