{"id":17764,"date":"2012-05-16T01:30:13","date_gmt":"2012-05-16T04:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/?p=17764"},"modified":"2013-10-30T20:33:47","modified_gmt":"2013-10-30T23:33:47","slug":"panetta-pleads-for-moral-behavior-in-the-military","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/16\/panetta-pleads-for-moral-behavior-in-the-military\/","title":{"rendered":"Panetta Pleads for Moral Behavior in the Military"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, concerned over instances of &#8220;misbehavior&#8221; that have shed negative light on the US military, issued a &#8220;personal plea&#8221; for US troops to &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/news\/military\/story\/2012-05-04\/panetta-military-discipline\/54743782\/1?csp=34news\">honor their military values<\/a>:&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;These days, it takes only seconds \u2014 seconds \u2014 for a picture, a photo, to suddenly become an international headline,&#8221; Panetta said. &#8220;And those headlines can impact the mission that we&#8217;re engaged in, they can put your fellow service members at risk, they can hurt morale, they can damage our standing in the world, and they can cost lives.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The sentiment was reportedly echoed by the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.military.com\/news\/article\/commanders-warned-to-get-troops-in-line.html\">top commander in Afghanistan<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Marine Gen. John Allen&#8230;believes that a number of major setbacks in the past six months have resulted from moral, <!--more-->not operational, failures, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal assessments.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Read that carefully:\u00a0 US military leaders are concerned that <strong><em>moral behavior <\/em><\/strong>is having <strong><em>more<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0influence on the mission than <strong><em>operations<\/em><\/strong> are.\u00a0 Didn&#8217;t somebody say it wasn&#8217;t the military&#8217;s place to dictate morality?<\/p>\n<p>There is\u00a0a twist of irony in calling for &#8220;moral behavior&#8221; in a military that was recently forced to accept a form of homosexuality large portions of the Nation, and most religions, consider &#8220;immoral behavior.&#8221;\u00a0 Of course, if your definition of &#8220;moral&#8221; is relative, then it makes perfect sense &#8212; except for your ability to explain how the US military can call for &#8220;moral&#8221; conduct without being able to <em>define <\/em>it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, concerned over instances of &#8220;misbehavior&#8221; that have shed negative light on the US military, issued a &#8220;personal plea&#8221; for US troops to &#8220;honor their military values:&#8221; &#8220;These days, it takes only seconds \u2014 seconds \u2014 for a picture, a photo, to suddenly become an international headline,&#8221; Panetta said. &#8220;And those headlines can impact the mission [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[58,219,442,2092,1977,2,198],"class_list":["post-17764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government-and-religion","tag-afghanistan","tag-dadt","tag-homosexual","tag-john-allen","tag-leon-panetta","tag-military","tag-morality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17764\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}