WASHINGTON — A retired Marine Corps general says misconduct by top-ranking military officers is an “epidemic” that demands action from Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel.
The Oct. 2 talk, entitled “The Ever-Shrinking Fighting Force,” was held as part of “Covering the Military, Veterans and Homeland Security: Tomorrow’s Trends and Issues,” the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative’s 2014 conference.
While Punaro came to chiefly talk money and the military, he made a point to call out misconduct within American ranks as a pertinent threat to its future, saying that “the amount of misconduct that’s happening at the flag and general officer level” within the United States military was difficult for him to comprehend because such officers most likely have a minimum of three decades worth of uniformed experience under their belts and “have come through a pretty rigorous screening.”
The Vietnam veteran and current chairman of both the Reserve Forces Policy Board and National Defense Industrial Association called the level of disregard “for the Uniform Code of Military Justice” and appropriate behavior on the part of high-ranking individuals “very, very worrisome.”
And he should know: Punaro previously served as the staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington, which is in charge of processing the military nominations of all general and flag officers.
“We have some very serious ethics and leadership problems in our military, not the least of which are sexual assault and harassment,” he said.
Punaro also acknowledged that the military dropped the ball when it came to handling “an overabundance” of problems involving sexual assault and harassment within its ranks.
“We’ve not dealt with it in as [a] responsible way as we should have over the years,” he said.
He called the issue of general military corruption, which he said also extended to involving recruitment and contractors, an external, policy-based threat to the future of the shrinking military.
The placement of the topic’s discussion – sandwiched between talk of the sequester’s impact and decreasing force readiness –underscored its urgency within the context of the current state of the U.S. military.
And Punaro said he refused to accept the military’s marathon campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan as a justification for the allowance of actions which he views as being egregious.
“People will say: ‘Well, it’s because we’ve been at war for 12 years,’” Punaro said. “I don’t think that excuses it one bit, any more than violating the Geneva Convention excuses troops’ conduct on the battlefield.”
