Quote Originally Posted by former_0302 View Post
I agree that, in reality, some standards are more important than others. I also agree that the standards for a deployed unit should be somewhat different from those for a unit in garrison, and even ones in the field during exercises (I had a platoon sergeant once who wouldn't let Marines ever be outdoors without something on their head, which I thought was a bit extreme).

Having said that, moral and performance standards in particular matter. I don't care so much for PT standards, like you, mainly because our PT standards are not a metric of anything that is all that important to job performance (how fast you can run three miles in shorts and sneakers is not at all indicative of how mission-ready you'll be after you've walked 10 miles carrying 50 lbs, in my experience). If you can't hit a target under specific conditions, I don't want you on that gun/mortar/whatever. If you can't navigate, I don't want you in any job where your GPS batteries die and you have to use a map and compass to get somewhere.

The moral standards are a similar thing. If you don't have the discipline to not drink and drive, or use drugs, or even cheat on your spouse, I don't think you should wear a uniform. None of those things will necessarily get you fired from civilian employment, but they'll get you booted out of the service pretty quickly.

Those are the main things I'm referring to when I speak about standards.
I actually find my position closer to Fuchs than yours on this issue oddly enough, and perhaps that is due to being in the Army through the late 70s to recently and watching the evolution of the impact of the Christian Right on the Army in particular. It was getting to the point I thought we may have been in the North Korean military or the former Soviet military with everyone spying upon one another looking for dirt they could report on. The type of dirt that gets reporting on today such as drinking, Joe cheating on his wife, etc. would have resulted in the tattler being told to mind his own business a couple of decades ago. On the other hand, hopefully every effort would be made to hammer the self-serving individual who cheated on his travel voucher or used his position in other ways to personally gain from it. There is a difference between professional values that are important to the organization and subjective personal values (how one lives his or her life).

Quite frankly I knew several good soldiers to include officers that drank and some even cheated on their spouses, but wouldn't for a second do anything unethical professionally and you wouldn't hesitate to count on them in combat if you knew them. They just came from a different school of thought when it came to how they conducted their personal lives. Morals are absolutely important, but morals that are related to the profession, not subjective morals where you get to evaluate someone's personal life. This focus on people's personal lives is little more than political correctness concealed as discipline, and it is ruining our society and our military. We boot these guys out, while keeping those who appear to be squeaky clean by appearances, yet it is the squeaky clean ones more often than not that end up betraying their country, perhaps because it didn't live up to their high expectations? Snowden and the specialist who provides droves of classified material to Wikileaks are examples of these types of crusaders. We're in a human organization and if we don't get that humans will error and that each will have different personal values we'll only create the illusion of a force that conforms to a particular set of morals in their personal life. We need to focus on their professional lives and not keep trying to peer into their bedrooms. I can recall two officers who made a huge issue of infidelity and excessive drinking. One later was caught in an act of infidelity and the other finally got called out (and kicked out) when he got his 4th Driving While Intoxicated ticket. There seems to be a correlation between those who are the most self-righteous and also the most guilty.