Without linking my thoughts directly to the Colonel's article and his thoughts on standards, I will say that I am not impressed by some of the crap that Marines have gotten into over the past, say, six years.

The drugs alone leave me bewildered that some of these shenanigans are even being entertained with possibilities of retention. I see that vice (whether it was one time or not) as a zero-defect realm, but that is not the practice.

It's downright shamefull when the "legal beagle" platoon is just that, a full platoon's-worth of bums waiting to be separated from the Corps because they could not hold up their part of the bargain. I for one don't believe they can all be boiled down to simple leadership failures. I never have, ever since I was a young lieutenant and the SgtMaj had the nerve to stand up in the Regimental classroom and tell the assembled audience of officers (don't recall SNCOs being there) and say that the 28 recent crystal meth drug pops (isolated into one coy BTW) were a leadership failure.

That came from a bum himself who was never seen in the coy areas without the Bn Cmdr around. It got so bad that we nicknamed them Yogi and Boo-Boo. The BC kicked ass, but his senior enlisted adviser was worthless. Never talked to Marines outside of NJP, promotion, or an award ceremony, and sat in his office all day, smoking cigarettes and playing DOS-based video games (remember those days ). I can't sit back and say his failings were the true leadership problems that caused the issues, but the term gets thrown around by too many without a reasonable understanding of what the real issues are...Sometimes a Marine just makes the conscious choice to be a bag, and they just need to be held accountable and helped out. Sometimes he needs real help.

I don't know sometimes, but I would say that we (the ones where the rubber hits the pavement) need to develop some sort of campaign for dealing with the issues that we are seeing increase with alarming frequency.