No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

A recent post of mine about Stand-To! triggered a sequence of events that apparently led to an example of something I worry about for our Army: a zero-defect mentality that makes officers too cautious to succeed by taking calculated risks.

I seriously wondered about the judgment of the Army for linking to a communist newspaper article about AFRICOM deployments.

This was on Stand-To!, a site I've likened to Instapundit as a valuable aggregator of stories about the Army and national defense issues related to the Army.

But after the repercussions of having the error of judgment pointed out, the Army officers in charge of Stand-To! reacted not by working to make sure judgment in article selection is good--but by removing judgment altogether. Now, only articles from Army sources are allowed, as you can see from Friday's issue.

This makes Stand-To! less of a valuable resource. I used to read it every day it was published. I valued the variety of stories that the Army chose to highlight. But one mistake led the officers in charge to erase all chance of that mistake happening again in the worst possible way. They decided not to trust future officers to exercise judgment. Now it appears only Army articles are allowed.

So now I can go many days between bothering to look at Stand-To! If this is a reflection of Army values on risk-taking in war, we're in for some rude shocks the next time we face a tough opponent in conventional warfare.