At 06:05 PM Wednesday 6/1/2005, Dave Land wrote:
On Jun 1, 2005, at 3:22 PM, Ronn!Blankenship wrote:
At 11:47 AM Wednesday 6/1/2005, Dave Land wrote:
On Jun 1, 2005, at 8:57 AM, Nick Arnett wrote:
Little-Used Punishment
A senior officer's loss of a star is a punishment seldom used, and then
usually for the most serious offenses, such as dereliction of duty or
command failures, adultery or misuse of government funds or equipment.
Am I the only one surprised to find adultery on this list of "most
serious offenses" for which this sanction can be applied? I can see that
it's a problem if it leads to a dereliction of duty, command failure, or
misuse of gov't funds or equipment or so forth. I realize that this is
just the article author's list, but I suspect that he didn't make it up
out of whole cloth. I would be willing to bet that other serious
offenses, such as murder, drug abuse, prostitution and so forth would
qualify as well.
Far be it from me to minimize the personal costs of adultery, but I'm
not sure how that one (serious, but personal) failing rises to the same
level as, for example, dereliction of duty.
Thoughts?
Have you ever been in the US military?
I was in the US Coast Guard Academy in 1976. Class of '80 -- the first
one that included women cadets. I lasted about four months before I
"processed out," but I did get to spend a week on the Eagle during the
tail end of the Bicentennial "Operation Sail" program of tall ships
visiting US ports.
It *almost* made all the other BS of being in a military academy worth
it. Almost.
But, in direct answer to your question, no, I haven't.
That's okay. My point was just that the military is different in many ways
from civilian society, even to the point of having a different set of laws
for its members (the UCMJ), and some of the differences are hard to explain
to someone who's never been part of it and who may think that it is just
like civilian life except that everyone wears the same years-out-of-style
suit every day (and some of them get to fly really hot planes and shoot
really big guns). I expect you had some taste of the difference during
your time at the USCGA . . .
After asking the above question, I realized that people lose their
security clearance for things like adultery, because it makes them
susceptible to blackmail and such-like.
The same argument has been made about homosexuals: that, particularly if
they were still "in the closet", they could be subject to blackmail by
anyone who discovered their secret and threatened to reveal it. And even
today when that is more acceptable to many in society in general, there are
many who in particular do not want their parents or someone like that to
find out, and so are thought to be susceptible to blackmail
And I guess you don't get to
have any stars at all if you don't have pretty solid clearance.
And a few other things. People who don't care about it put in their 20 and
retire as O-5s (Lt. Col. in the Army, Air Force, or Marines, Cmdr. in the
Navy). Those who make O-6 then are concerned with whether they will get
stars or not, so they are really concerned with what their superiors think
about them. And then one-stars worry about getting a second star, and
two-stars worry about getting a third, and so on . . . People who want to
rise as far as possible in the Pentagon start early on worrying about what
their superiors think of them and what goes into their records folders.
(Me? As I've said before, when I determined that remaining in the Air
Force was not likely to get me any higher than the troposphere or at best
the lower stratosphere, I decided to go a different way. As it turned out,
even if I'd been successful in getting into the astronaut program, I would
probably have only gotten started by the time my health decided to go
downhill . . . though I suppose that had I been in Houston or Florida at
that time rather than where I was, maybe I wouldn't have caught whatever it
was. Or not . . . )
-- Ronn! :)
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