Andrew – As I’ve now heard from scores of current or former military men who for the most part agree with my take, I’m kind of at a loss to understand your loss at understanding my point. I think the disagreement lies in what I take to be your overly rational approach to unit cohesion. Many of the officers I heard from explained to me that these laws are fairly rarely enforced but they are very useful for officers to use at their discretion to maintain unit cohesion. Morale is an animal spirit and doesn’t necessarily operate in neat ways, or so I’ve been told. I’d rather see adultery remain illegal under military law and have officers use their good judgment in enforcing the law than see adultery legalized and have officers lose an important tool.

What would I do about the examples you cite? I have no idea, but I think you’re using a familiar argument, accusing some of hypocritically defying a law or norm and then arguing that therefore there is no need for such laws or norms. Such arguments have their place, but they don’t have that much oomph for me.

Here are a couple sample letters from readers:

Jonah,
As a former US Marine who served in Desert Shield/Desert Storm, I have to strongly agree with you. When you send married men overseas for lengthy periods of time and do not allow their spouses to join (as was the case in most of the USMC deployment locations at the time I served) there is a certain paranoia about what your significant other is up to while you are away.
This is best illustrated by a tale about a Marine (or soldier or sailor or airman, depending on who is doing the telling) that receives a videotape from his wife, who is home while he is on deployment. The tape is pornographic in nature and turns out to be a video of his wife with another Marine. I had heard several different versions of this story starting in boot camp with the cuckolded Marine have been serving anywhere from a 6 month Westpac (shipboard) deployment to a year on Okinawa to serving at Gitmo. I believe a version of this found its way into the book Jarhead and was also portrayed in the movie.
It was often repeated to us by our superiors (I was enlisted) that if the Marine Corps wanted us to have wives, they would have issued them. The fact that tales like these make the rounds and the heavy discouragement of young Marines marrying illustrate the potential psychological effect that a cheating spouse can have on someone far from home for an extended period. Discouraging this type of behavior in that type of environment is not a moral judgement as much as it is a practical necessity for attempting to maintain order and focus on the mission at hand.

And:

RE: Cheating in the Ranks Mr. Goldberg, Yeah, war may be too important to be entirely left to us military folks, but how about letting us keep a tiny slice of it? Especially vis a vis what makes a proper military culture (within reason, of course. Flogging is probably not coming back in the Navy, natch). Two other points to add to your good ones: 1.) It aint just the troops who get paranoid about these things. The spouses really, really, really get upset about cheating, especially as we are away from home so much. The problem is compounded now that the forces are gender integrated. The troops will put up with a lot of things. The spouses won’t, and it has been shown that once we lose the spouse’s support, we stand a good chance of losing the member. 2.) The military leader is in some ways just like a politician, in this critical respect: Any leader who has a weakness will be attacked on that weakness by those who tend towards being “malcontents”. True, the more mature soldiers/sailors/airmen can separate the private and professional sides–but it means the professional side must be really really good (just as in politics). The entire military system is really set up knowing that sometimes we won’t get the really, really good natural leader, but just the “barely adequate” leader (after all, the natural leader wouldn’t need rank at all, would he?). That is why military culture stresses all the things it stresses–so that the “barely adequate” person will still have the tools he needs to insure the job gets done by people who are putting their lives in mortal peril (and may not want to). (As an aside, the best book ever on this subject is “The Caine Mutiny”, where-well, what do you know?–an “intellectual” spreads hate and discontent in a command, causing a marginal captain to start rolling the balls and lose his marbles.) One way to stop the fires of hate and discontent from spreading is to make your leaders act in noble ways. The entire reason behind the phrase “an officer and a gentleman.”