You may be new here, but you were just instructed that P&E expects a higher standard of discussion than you show in the quote above, much less the rest of the assertations in this thread. Said instructions:
These instructions were clear that this applies to all P&E discussions, not just the thread in question. And while this is a different thread, the notes all occurred before your post I quoted above. As such, I’m issuing a Formal Warning for disobeying moderator instructions, and suspending your account for one day while your future posting permissions are discussed.
The thread will be re-opened momentarily.
After further review, until @Gobb’s posting habits are evaluated, it makes little sense to re-open the topic as it’s largely his assertations being refuted by the rest of the posters, similar to his other locked thread. I will revisit after the review, thanks all for your patience.
@Gobb, after discussion between the moderators, we have determined to give you a chance to resume posting and improve your habits. Since you are a new poster, its possible that you have jumped in without reviewing the terms of service and rules, so you need to start there:
Terms of Service, available at the bottom of any page on the Straight Dope Message Board by scrolling all the way down, but linked here for you. Among our various rules, it spells out how to follow moderator instructions which is what brought us to the state of affairs. In addition, it’s worthwhile to review the pinned rules for each subforum: some like P&E/GD are more restrictive, others like the Pit more relaxed. If a moderator (see the shiny shield icon next to our names) gives you an instruction, either abide by it, send a polite PM to the moderator or another from the same forum, or go to the ATMB forum and create a polite thread about why/how the rule didn’t seem to apply and your fellow posters and the mods are likely to explain. As a prior moderator note pointed out, do NOT argue the moderation in the thread itself. Of course, if a moderator ISN’T using staff color [the colored box around the entire post] and/or using the word “Moderating” at the top of the post (normally both), then they’re posting entirely as a poster and are subject to the same arguments and disagreements as any other poster to the limits of the forum rules.
Again, before posting, it’s imperative to read the TOS I linked above and abide by them, otherwise warnings, longer suspensions and/or bans will happen very quickly.
I take it from the tone you’ve struck here that you’ve never served.
The military has a massive, ongoing recruitment and retention problem. They cannot be lethal if they can’t get people to join and then re-up.
For years the dress and appearance standards required men to be clean shaven. However, men afflicted with pseudofolliculitis barbae get horrible razor burn when they shave, which can lead to extreme scarring in the worst scenarios. For years, servicemembers affected by this had 3 choices – live with the pain, get expensive laser removal treatments on their own dime, or leave the military.
This condition is substantially more common among black men. While black men make up about 15% of the military, they make up something like 65% of the shaving waivers. Medical shaving waivers were introduced in the 90s (I think?) when black leaders speaking up on behalf of their black troops made everyone else understand that this was racial discrimination. They didn’t make it a race issue – it already was. They just made everyone aware of it.
Shaving waivers have been a boon for retention of black servicemembers. They make us more lethal. And Hegseth wants them gone, and he wants us to stop talking about race, because he wants us to be less lethal.
On top of that, U.S. special forces or troops who needed to be embedded among foreign populations, such as in the Middle East, have legit reasons to have beards. I recall Newsweek photos from 2001-2002 showing hugely-bearded SpecOps forces in Afghanistan who had such pluming facial hair in order to ingratiate themselves better with the local Pashtuns or whatnot.
Besides, beards or not is just fashion, nothing more. There is no historical basis that a clean-shaven military is more effective or “lethal” than a bearded one. Revolutionary War? Clean shaven military. Civil War? Bearded military. WW2? Clean shaven again. All of them were equally effective in combat. The Romans shaved; the Spartans wore beards. None of it actually means anything. In fact, I’m surprised that Hegseth is anti-beard - after all, nothing is more manly than a beard, right?
Amusing fact about Swiss Army Knives, as told me by a friend who had spent 25 years as a private in the Swiss army. Officers’ knives had corkscrews; non-officers’ had beer openers.
In this case, I agree with him about gender-neutral standards. Before him, the military said they were lowering standards for women in COMBAT ROLES because too many women were failing (PC). Trust me, whether you’re a fireman or soldier, if I can’t trust you for backup because you’re not physically able to do the job, then you’re putting me in danger
When I was in boot camp at Great Lakes in 1972 three black recruits in my company got shaving waivers. Two others did not. The rest of us were jealous.
I worked under a similar restriction when I was in my twenties and had to deal with railway tank cars of chlorine. However mustaches and neatly-trimmed beards were considered fine as long as you could demonstrably get a clean seal - so long muttonchops and the like were out. In addition to annual pulmonary checks, we were regularly tested with a smoke irritant designed to make you cough if it got through. You were required to shave on command with a razor as needed, but in practice it never came up and plenty of people wore beards without any issues.
At any rate many European militaries allow beards or just trimmed mustaches, sometimes with the same caveat as above, so I wouldn’t consider it a pressing, every day problem.
What you’ve written is an example of begging the question. Basically, you say something like, “Legend has it that King Arthur will awake again, on the darkest day, and bring England to a new greatness. I have no fear for our future.” And now, maybe that’s all true. If it is then, yes, as a British person maybe you don’t need to fear for the future. But is the legend true? Is the legend writer’s idea about what “greatness” means the same as what you would think it, or would it be more like medieval fundamentalism?
Ultimately, the whole statement relies on a series of assumptions, and builds on those statements without ever questioning them. If they’re all true then the logic holds and all is well. If any part isn’t true, then it’s a different story.
So, let’s walk through some assumptions. I’m not saying that they’re wrong, just that we need to question them and demonstrate that they’re true if we want to accept the argument.
Assumption 1, the older standards were carefully set through a rigorous and complete series of testing that ensured everyone could do their job. The standards were not set based on, for example, dick swinging, tradition, or by telling an intern to write something down and hand it in, in 20 minutes once back in 1910.
Assumption 2, what you were told was the motivation was actually the motivation. For example, I might decide that the most important thing - assumption 3, the job of a war fighter - in the military is killing, not pulling your dumb ass out of a fire cause you’re too big to fit through the door, not hauling around extra food just so you’re confidently going to make it back to base with a full stomach - even though that slows you down and isn’t necessary if you’re just going take the food off all those you killed. Ultimately, the most death comes about by having more hands holding more guns, and you just don’t need to be so strong to hold a gun. The job of a warfighter is death, and all else is meaningless.
Alternately, I might decide that the most important thing about being a soldier is to not be a dumbass. You can put a gun in any idiots hands but you put it in the hands of someone smart or - more importantly - you put a bunch of guys with guns under the command under someone smart, and suddenly you’re winning a lot more battles. Guns only take you so far without a solid plan behind how to use them.
But so if the smartest people are distributed across the genders then you need to get them up the ladder and into command. But a person in command is going to be useless - no matter how smart - without practical experience. So now you’ve got to decide. What’s the cost to putting someone who’s not 100% as fit as could be best into combat? Maybe, in most situations most of the time, it’s more a theoretical concern than a real one. Maybe you actually do some testing and determine that the standards that used to be set were dumb and overkill all this time.
Maybe it does cause some harm, and the teams with girls die just slightly more often by a tiny but measurable amount.
But then, what’s the benefit by doubling your brain squadron? If you take the smartest 5% of ladies and put them into combat, that’s barely going to affect your numbers when it comes to physical fitness in the field because most women don’t go into the military to begin with and 95% aren’t smart enough to be worth pushing into a combat role to try and move to the ladder. But up the ranks, your army versus that other guy’s army, you’re going to kick their asses because you’ve got more mental talent working the problems, on a front-line soldier head count basis.
So, yes, it could be as you said. It could have been liberal and political, without any reasoning behind it.
But that also might not be the case. Or it could have been liberal and political but, in actual effect, still been for the best.
You’d need to go talk the people that made the decisions, see what work they did in consideration, testing, and measuring. Everything else is just making up shit like it’s true, on the Internet.
While I’m not up to date on current NBC protection, I’m pretty sure modern masks can handle reasonable beards.
The 19th Century was a bearded century, the 20th Century was a clean-shaven one. Based on fashions from the past two decades, I think the pendulum is swinging back to bearded in the 21st. Since military fashions and civilian male fashions have always been intertwined, I wouldn’t be surprised if 50 years from now, beards will be mandatory in the military.
