It’s unintentional selective disobedience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Don’t believe me?\u00a0Then why do we take weeks or months preparing for\u00a0readiness inspections\u00a0FASMO and CGRI inspections things we take weeks or months preparing for<\/span>?\u00a0If we’d been executing the orders, we would all just be in compliance with standards as a matter of course \u2014 any day of the week would be a good day for an inspection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But we don’t comply until it becomes an absolute necessitywe have to<\/span>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Operations shut down and Marines are pulled to help the sections get back in compliance, like bad lance corporals who live like pigs until Thursday afternoon field day inspections.\u00a0Is that the new standard?<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Marines,\u00a0we keep our eye on the ball: higher’s intent. We get the items briefed at the commanding officer’s\u00a0CO’s <\/span>weekly meeting. Units are 100 percent One-hundred percent<\/span> Sexual\u00a0Assault\u00a0Prevention and Readiness-trained, but our vehicle record jackets haven’t been updated in months.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maj. Paul Stubbs, shown in Afghanistan here, says so many competing training requirements leave Marines not following some Corps-wide orders.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Photo Credit: Courtesy of Paul Stubbs<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n But nobody is asking about the vehicles just now, and if our unit numbers are in red and the other units are in green, we look bad in front of the boss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The direction we are heading leaves us is to <\/span>continually playing catch-up and clean-up as the requirements that actually get noticed change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This engenders a weapons turn-in mentality: We are busy, so only clean where they will look. The rest can rust; we have other things to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I have had senior officers brush aside requirements because the unit was too busy. When they’re\u00a0and when <\/span>confronted with the actual order to which that requirement pertained, they responded<\/span> “but there is no demand signal to spend time on this.”\u00a0As if a compressed schedule translated into automatic exception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But commanders set the priorities and if they add rocks to our pack and never take any out, well-meaning career professionals have to decide for them which orders to ignore:<\/span>. The answer is\u00a0the ones that aren\u2019t enforced.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why is there never a discussion about getting rid of requirements, just adding new ones?<\/p>\n\n\n\n For example, why does a lieutenant colonel who has never used tobacco have to take the MarineNn<\/span>et tobacco cessation class once a year?\u00a0Is that something that could perhaps be only required for tobacco users?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Does a Marine married for 20 years need the class on preventing sexually transmitted diseases\u00a0STD class<\/span>? Is he or she the <\/span>really the target audience for this information?<\/p>\n\n\n\n We preach top-down planning and bottom-up refinement, but we seem to skip that second part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We have chosen to stay on top of the things our higher command has put on their radar.\u00a0And t<\/span>The rest is set aside as something we pay attention to once every couple of years, when it once <\/span>again becomes important to leadership’s higher’s score-cards on <\/span>command inspection score cards.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n So\u00a0I think I’ll grow a beard and see how long it take someone to tell me I am out of regulation. Then if they are not of higher rank than me or able to reach into my chain of command, I will apply what seems to be our paradigm of ignoring it until there are actual consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Or maybe I should just keep shaving every day, and we should do a sanity check on the cost in hours of compliance, and match that up against what we want the unit to do for the actual primary mission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But we cannot do both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And we aren’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maj. Paul Stubbs is an infantry officer currently assigned to 2nd Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company. He has deployed six times, including twice to Iraq and once to Afghanistan. He served as a company commander during three of those deployments. Stubbs served as an enlisted soldier and sailor before becoming a Marine officer.\u00a0The opinions expressed are his own.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It is increasingly apparent that more and more Marine Corps orders are set aside because we are so busy answering higher-ups’ mail and adding new requirements and systems to track and manage training and equipment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":49561,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":14,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1817],"class_list":["post-22599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"NSK6ZOSCVVG4XD4KI2SGMYRKQI","arc_canonical_url":"\/opinion\/2016\/03\/13\/marine-infantry-officer-blowing-off-orders-has-become-a-troubling-norm\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/635932901089501863-skipper-catjpeg.jpg\")