Student of Trinity
Silver Meritorious Patron
I don't intend to support the Sea Org in any way, but real military organizations also tend to have theft issues. For sure nobody is going to steal anything from their actual buddies, and probably not from any identifiable individual even from another unit. But any items that seem to belong only to some institution, like the army itself, or maybe the company stores, or certainly some other unit's supplies — that stuff is widely considered fair game. It's not stealing — it's scrounging. Or something like that.
The point as I understand it is that everybody knows the bureaucratic military hoards valuable equipment just for the sake of listing it neatly on forms, and not for any good reason that ought to be respected. So everybody considers their own clear and present needs — or prospective future needs — to be more important than the bureaucratic hoarding instinct. Every now and then some military unit really does need to stockpile something, and then it's a huge pain that everybody and their sergeant insists on snagging the stuff for themselves at every opportunity. But so it is, and has ever been.
The point as I understand it is that everybody knows the bureaucratic military hoards valuable equipment just for the sake of listing it neatly on forms, and not for any good reason that ought to be respected. So everybody considers their own clear and present needs — or prospective future needs — to be more important than the bureaucratic hoarding instinct. Every now and then some military unit really does need to stockpile something, and then it's a huge pain that everybody and their sergeant insists on snagging the stuff for themselves at every opportunity. But so it is, and has ever been.