Quote Originally Posted by Courtney Massengale View Post
But to echo many of the other comments, the UCMJ system has become so cumbersome and toothless that perfectly sanctioned – but still irresponsible – actions are becoming favored when its time to send a message.

To tie it all in to warfighting, it helps develop a mentality that addresses the short term issue "How do I get rid of this problem" rather than looking at the long term consequences of decisions. It trains leaders to do the most convenient thing rather than think about what the right thing really is.
I've seen a lot of comments about how difficult it is to pursue something under UCMJ, and yet there's been no mention of summarized Article 15s. These are so easy to do. Almost any offense can be categorized as an offense under Article 92. My training room had a summarized Article 15 form with the generic Article 92 offense ready to go. Admin time at the company level - 5 minutes to complete the form and 10 minutes to conduct the Article 15. Of course, there was team/squad leader time involved in writing the counselings that would both demonstrate that the soldier had been corrected before and given an opportunity to improve their performance. So we're talking 15 minutes of company HQ time and maybe 30-60 minutes of TL/SL time per summarized Article 15.

I probably did about 15 or so of these during my 18 months in command, and the beauty of these was that when it came time for a 14-12b? chapter (pattern of misconduct), all I needed was a summarized and a company grade Article 15 to demonstrate a pattern (I'm sure the bar has shifted higher given the retention problems and wanting bodies to fill spaces for deployment, but that additional UCMJ action is an easy way to meet whatever requirement). The pattern of misconduct discharge warrants a general under honorable conditions discharge, which means a loss of veterans benefits, and so during the summarized proceeding, I would let the soldier know that continued substandard behavior would result in company grade Article 15 and the adminstrative separation that would include losing their GI Bill.

Both the swiftness of the punishment - if the offense were committed Friday morning, we could complete the process by Friday afternoon no matter what we were doing and the soldier would be edging sidewalks or painting or whatever by the time the company was released for their long weekend of fun - and the potential loss of GI Bill was enough of an eye opener for all but those that Darwin would have gotten anyways. I can't state a definitive claim that the summarized Article 15s helped give more teeth to the SLs and PSGs when they did their informal/formal counseling to substandard soldiers, but I can't help but believe that it did since the possibility of punishment became much more real (but also not a disincentive to future performance since the summarized Article 15s did NOT become part of the permanent record).

The last benefit here is that to take advantage of an Article 15, it gave the TLs and SLs an incentive to do proper counseling since I required it for any proceeding, and it helped us to make sure that we would have the goods when it came time to prevent the automatic promotion of soldiers that meet the TIG and TIS standards but weren't mature enough. It help promotes a healthy balance between corrective training and escalation (without harm to one's permanent record) when required.