Old corrective training vs the New corrective training! What are your thoughts?

Nothing wrong with a good, God I actually have to say, "Old Fashioned", Face beating. I think its the perfect motivational corrector for everything from sloppiness to tardiness to stupidness. Granted after a few repeats you need to resort to the counseling statement and more formal corrective actions to insure the SM is put on the right track to recovery if an issue becomes systemic.

during the "breaking in" process, I am all for it. As much as it sucks at the time, you're embracing the suck with your team, squad, platoon, whatever. It's definitely an induction to the military and part of the tradition, one of the reasons why I and I'm sure others enlisted. However, eventually the soldier needs to get he/she shouldn't do xy and z ONLY because he/she will get smoked. He/she shouldn't do it because it's a)stupid b)wrong c) dangerous or other.

Just because the army is getting softer, doesn't mean that they are getting smarter.

There is book smarts. Then there is street smarts!

I was a line guy for almost a decade, until I was shackled to a desk in a HQ Platoon while outprocessing. So my opinion may be a little different than others.

In a line unit, if one of my guys was unprofessional, he pushed until my arms hurt. PT was just the way it was. It's a group of hard men, so discipline is equally hard.

While I was attached to this miserable HQ Platoon (no offense!), I saw a completely different side. Everyone was soft on subordinates that lost their bearing and counseling statements seemed to be the "Be all, end all". It drove me insane.

In complete honesty, I think your NCO is correct. When I enlisted, we wore BDUs, shined our boots and had the fear of God in us if we had stubble on our face... As I went through the different transitions, I noticed a few things.

One, soldiers were coming from BCT to my unit, completely out of shape. How is that possible?! Two, quite a few soldiers didn't understand that a Specialist wasn't a PFC, and that a Corporal could hem them up. What's worse, when we DID get on our soldiers as Team Leaders, it was never taken seriously. Soldiers were free to talk on a first name basis (with MSG and above) and there was constantly the issue of the quality of soldier we were working with, because the Army became more worried about making their quota. But that's just this guy.