Steve, Sam, and Bucky aren’t US military any more. I won’t talk about Carol or Maria to avoid spoilers. Again, Rhodey (active or retired) and Fury (retired) are the only characters entitled to be addressed by their ranks.

Apologies to OP for hijacking, but to reiterate their original point about the total lack of respect Rhodey gets from fandom: 

(1) Rhodey is a goddamn full bird Colonel.

(2) Rhodey was promoted from Lt. Colonel to Colonel at the end of IM3. He’s been a full bird Colonel for nearly 6 years, but fandom still gets his rank wrong. (Props failure in Age of Ultron is partly to blame. But this is the same fandom that tried to figure out every ribbon on Steve’s WWII uniform, so props failure as an excuse doesn’t really fly, imho.)

Colonels are the highest ranking field officers.

Next stop are the General Officer ranks, at which point Rhodey is fast tracked to running the damn Air Force in a couple more years, or become the Chief of Staff. Or, he could aim low and preside over a treaty organization.

Like NATO.

But that’s if he gets promoted. The US only allows a low percentage of the Air Force to hit General, so they stop a soldier at Colonel and groom them for taking over those massive positions.

They placed him over the Avengers, a now international special-ops pseudo-military organization with the heaviest hitters in Earth. Rhodey has to negotiate with heads of state, heads of various militaries and government agencies, and treaty organizations. Rhodey wields more power than any other US colonel, and has more functional authority than a freaking CHIEF OF STAFF in case of metahuman/extraterrestrial emergency.

You can damn well bet that James Rhodes, Warmachine, Iron Patriot, and legendary military fucking rockstar, is getting custom tailored to take over NATO–or primed to track to a Chief of Staff. Running the fucking entire Air Force and a chunk of the combined US military will be a cakewalk to what he already does.

Might even be a step down. Afterall?

He Can Pull Rank On Anybody In Any Military.

Any.

Military.

Even ignoring that, Colonels oversee battalions, with about 4 to 5 THOUSAND people reporting to him.

Rhodey commands a mini-fucking-army all on his lonesome as a regular Colonel in the USAF.

Tony is filthy rich and has economic might, but he doesn’t have the raw extent of power Rhodey does.

Steve and Sam would be his minions, and too far down the chain to even directly report to him.

None of the other Avengers rank Steve, who is so far down the chain he’d be “Sir”-ing Rhodey or addressing him by rank every damn sentence, so I won’t even waste my words on them.

It’s like this: James Rhodes runs house, even over his superiors.

He is the embodiment of the Colonel Badass trope.

Boom.

Legally Blonde

its even better when you remember how she burned him with the “what, like its hard”

Come here