While all that you say is true, it's also true that superiors who insist on issuing orders that are counterproductive are reducing the mission effectiveness of their units. One of the most important jobs of commanders is to balance various risks in order to maximize mission effectiveness. Unfortunately, I do not get any sense from this article that that is being done; I only see a focus on one particular order without any discussion of how it fits into the big picture of overall mission effectiveness.
Color me skeptical. Are not some of the regulations around the exact state of the uniform less justified than mask mandates, in terms of maintaining unit effectiveness? I can't escape the notion that the main reason for the difficulty of this particular order is the politicized aspect of the mask and/or the vaccine. I'm willing to entertain other hypotheses but I'm not aware of any that fit the data better.
> Are not some of the regulations around the exact state of the uniform are less justified than mask mandates, in terms of maintaining unit effectiveness?
Quite possibly, yes. My experience (which of course is limited: the military is very big--and it's also well out of date by now, as it's been quite some time since I was in the military) has been that in truly effective units, such "exact state of the uniform" regulations are not strictly enforced day to day, for that very reason: any time spent on enforcing them could be better spent on something of practical value for mission effectiveness. There are special contexts, of course: if you're attending a special military ceremony, your uniform will be expected to be immaculate, even if nobody enforces that day to day in your working environment. But that "special contexts" is the point: the regulations are interpreted according to context, in terms of the overall objective of mission effectiveness.
The relevant comparison here wouldn't be mask vs. no mask, but wearing a mask as precisely described (e.g. double-masked, N95, no facial hair, etc) vs wearing some facial covering in a manner which doesn't exactly meet prescriptions. And I'm willing to bet that there's plenty of laxity permitted day-to-day, so long as people are actually wearing a mask.
