Now Genesis came along and made everyone strictly play "by the rules," and exposed the problems with this kind of black-and-white thinking. It turns out the standards the military was REALLY operating on were not the standards they thought they were getting. And the standards they REALLY were operating under got the job done, whereas the strictest standards they COULD apply would result in not being able to staff the force, because doctors were not willing to incur enough risk.
Ultimately, it becomes a question of whether or not to break a rule at potentially little or no consequence to accomplish an important goal, or to be so pedantic at applying the rules that the organization cannot achieve its goals. The FAA and airlines have the same problem. Scores of airline pilots hide and fail to report medical conditions so as not to lose their jobs. And eventually someone goes nuts and tries to crash a commuter plane. But for that one nutjob who obviously shouldn't have been flying, there's scores of airline pilots fudging their paperwork and seeing docs off-network for cash who nonetheless safely and effectively fly their aircraft. So what IS the standard, or what should it be? Because the black-and-white standard then becomes just a lie doctors tell themselves to avoid risk.
https://www.ausa.org/articles/no-time-literally-all-requirem...
Think of the last time you interacted with a tech support person who refused to deviate from their script. Now imagine that, but directing operations in a war zone.
> A system that required dishonesty wasn’t honorable and it seems odd to blame the software/system that exposed that.
Personally I would place the majority of the blame on the people who designed and deployed this software.
At best, inflexible software that programmatically enforces standard operating procedure is ignored by the folks on the ground.
At worst, it craters mission readiness until someone with sufficient authority to make "a more flexible, nuanced screening process" takes notice and updates doctrine.