Quote Originally Posted by Bill Moore View Post
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.
Can people's personal lives make them professionally vulnerable? Why do we spend six figures on a background check before giving someone a TS/SCI clearance? Would you personally be comfortable with giving a clearance to a known philanderer? A known drug user? Etc?

I also know some people who value their oath of enlistment/office more highly than any other commitment they ever made, but I'm struggling to think of any objective method by which you could differentiate them from anyone else who just didn't want to live up to the commitments they've made. The oath of office/enlistment is a lifetime commitment, in the same way that marriage vows are (or, at least, that's how they're designed). A lack of willingness to live up to one doesn't necessarily indicate a lack of willingness to live up to the other, but it does indicate a lack of good judgment on the part of that individual, and a possibility of being put into a vulnerable position by enemy intelligence services. I can't be the only Archer fan here, but the 'honeypot' is not just Sterling Archer's favorite intelligence operation; it does actually happen.

That's only one example of the sort of things that people who aren't ethically sound can be drawn into. There are lots of examples of bribes, kickbacks, embezzlements, etc., involving military personnel. All of those are, IMO, moral issues.

I suppose that while I understand your distinction between personal and professional ethics, I don't consider them separable as you apparently do.