I’m no great fan of Pace’s views on homosexuality,but I was also struck by this comment of his on another aspect of military law: “I would not want it to be our policy that if we were to find out that so-and-so was sleeping with somebody else’s wife, that we would just look the other way, which we do not. We prosecute that kind of immoral behaviour.”

We can leave the discussion on homosexuals in the military for another time (although, as I’ve said before, I’m skeptical about the current policy, and think the waste of talent it brings with it is, in wartime, little less than criminal), but, with limited exceptions, keeping adultery as a breach of military law seems to have even less to say for it. I can understand a prohibition against sleeping with the spouse of a soldier in the same unit or regiment (unit cohesion and all that), but banning straying further afield seems evidence of a preachiness better suited to the pulpit than the barracks: in the military it’s battlefield competence that ought to matter, not bedroom misbehavior.

Put it another way. If you had ever been the Duke of Wellington’s superior officer, or Lord Nelson’s or Ike’s, well, you get my point…and, yes, yes, I know there’s still some controversy over the Ike/Summersby thing.