Quote Originally Posted by former_0302 View Post
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.
Quote Originally Posted by TheCurmudgeon View Post
Yep, with you 100%. Without morals, the rest is just window-dressing.
I don't buy it.
Career soldiers have a tendency to think of themselves (or the military) as superior to the general
population - particularly if they happen to write in English. It was only a question of time till this
attitude would resurface once the topic wandered towards the civ-mil-relationship and
representativeness issue.

There's nothing that special about the military. And the people in it aren't that special either. Many of
them would be (or were) failures in civilian life, for example - and this includes officers and NCOs.

The more strict the military pretends to be on minor offenses, the more likely they are to be hidden from
official records. You don't really think a general loses his job for driving drunk or cheating on his wife, do
you? And abuse of 'go drugs' by flying personnel is an open secret if not officially endorsed.
The ones who get into great trouble for such things are the ones who have made the wrong enemy in
the system.

Besides, there are plenty civilian jobs in which stuff like drunk driving or drug abuse may be career-
ending. German policemen live in perpetual fear that some stain in their personnel records could stall
their career indefinitely, for example. A great share of the working population depends on their driver's
license and lives in fear about losing it.


There's also nothing special about job requirements for a very large portion of the military. Office work is
office work, workshop work is workshop work - for most of its jobs and much of the time the military
cannot really claim to be in need of substantially elevated standards.
It's easy to find a great many civilian jobs with more critical demands on the personnel than for most of
the military personnel, even at wartime.
Think of a railway control centre, a surgeon, a bus driver, a pilotage, a lab technician, ... the dumbass
doing an inventory list in a depot full of spare parts cannot come close to them only because he's
wearing a BDU. So why would him cheating on his wife or smoking pot on weekends be of interest at all?