Life exists in shades of gray. If you read the article, it spells out this dilemma quite clearly. The problem is that the military generally ran on a pool of

Life exists in shades of gray. If you read the article, it spells out this dilemma quite clearly. The problem is that the military generally ran on a pool of recruits post-Vietnam who were largely effective and got the job done. This happened despite military doctors setting sometimes-unrealistic standards for who could get in at all, or who needed voluminous amounts of paperwork for a waiver of standards. Kids hid conditions, and recruiters made tough calls to balance what kids truly were a bad fit (asthma, major mental issues, morbid obesity) as opposed to the track star who merely had a broken leg once. 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.