One of the bigger reasons why the military doesn’t allow anyone in the ranks to walk around groomed like a Bedouin goatherd - conformity and discipline aspects aside - is to make sure your gas/air mask forms a solid seal. A Grizzly Adams beard and Gene Simmons hairdo ain’t gonna help your situation if someone’s lobbing chemical weapons at you.
” A Grizzly Adams beard and Gene Simmons hairdo ain’t gonna help your situation if someone’s lobbing chemical weapons at you.”
No, nor if you’re in the fallout zone from a nuclear explosion.
This is one of those military urban legends that really grind my gears. First off, it's not true that you can't have a beard and wear a gas mask, anyone who welds Galvanized metal for a living knows that and so does the Indian military, and the Israelis, and so on and so on.
Second, when was the last time anyone in the US military deployed to a likely chemical environment? 2004? We're making hundreds of thousands of men shave daily because they may someday deploy to a warfront that doesn't exist? Speaking of soldiers deployed into harm's way... All them special ops troops poking around the desert for Saddam's chemical weapons... Beards and wild hair.
Lastly, the modern military and the military of the future aren't going to be fighting mass formations, force-on-force infantry and armor enemies. They're going to fight with technology, asymmetric tactics, and with brains more than brawn. If you deliberately limit your talent pool and training rules to young men who could land on the beaches of Normandy and march in a line into machine gun fire, we are going to lose. Times change and war changes. I remember the weeping and gnashing of teeth when the Marines went to suede boots, as if a Marine without Lincoln wax in his foot locker couldn't shoot straight. Discipline is a lot more than a haircut.