Oldgringo wrote:seamusTX wrote:Through most of the 20th century judges would give young men who had gotten crosswise with the law the option of enlisting in the military or going to jail. It was only with the all-volunteer forces that the military could establish higher standards.
- Jim
This is true.
I remember Parker's Midway Drug Store, the hangout of my youth (circa 1956) in Harrisburg, IL, was broken into by a jerk who was a couple years ahead of me in HS. Sam Parker, a WWII marine veteran of the PTO, gave the jerk the choice of jail or the marines. He chose the marines...
There used to be this thing called "accountability". Where did it go?
Whole different ball game now.
As you go back in time, the way discipline was handled in the military becomes less...refined, shall we say. In the era of your judge, I would suspect it would not be entirely unusual to find screw-up recruits being beaten by their sergeants on occasion to discourage their mistakes, and a thief in the barracks could easily find himself wrapped in a blanket and beaten and kicked by his fellow soldiers -- and no one would officially take notice. Sergeants ruled the earth that enlisted men walked on, and officers seldom "interfered." The "Code Red" business in A Few Good Men, where Jack Nicholson was the old school Marine, and Tom Cruise was the new, law-and-order-by-the-book idealistic but inexperienced (in actual military matters) lawyer was not an entirely fanciful rendition of the collision of the "older way" and the "newer way."
Soldiering itself was in many ways simpler and required more in the way of physical stamina and sheer mental toughness and perhaps rather less in the way of advanced technical skills, working with friendly and not-so-friendly allies, diplomatic skills, etc. We used to bomb entire cities flat or burn them to the ground; I remember reading military histories where when the the American Army rolled into Germany, in at least some sectors they sent word ahead to he German villages that any town not displaying white surrender flags from all the buildings would simply be levelled by artillery fire.
We also wanted larger numbers of troops, and it is pretty much a law of nature that the more people you want in an organization, the more "flexible" your standards are going to be. Marching right along with this is lower pay and lesser living conditions and a bunch of other stuff.
Now we want troops that are physically tough AND possess a number of other mental attributes, and we pay more to get fewer, but better people, and we send them not only to basic and advanced military training, but all kinds of technical and academic schools. There is simply not the time or resources to waste dealing with screw ups and criminals, partly because in absolute terms there are fewer resources to do so and partly because the processes themselves are more formal and resource intensive. Goodbye blanket party, hello Article 15 or court-martial. (Not saying that "unofficial sanctions" are not occasionally administered, but much more rare.)
So when someone is identified who is going to waste everybody's time, the response is to get them out as soon as possible. And the fastet, least resource intensive way to do this is to not take them onboard in the first place. Screen out those with criminal histories and/or no high school diploma, for example.
Why is that?