@jrrooker – You bring up great points about discipline and how hard it is to enforce it. To me discipline is a lot of factors that come down doing the small things right. Discipline involves standards, values, and norms. Here are some questions that I come up when I think about discipline:

1. Does a unit conduct effective counseling?  Counseling is important because it provides a leader (all ranks) another opportunity to establish standards, norms, and procedures. I cannot stress this enough. If PLs are not counseling their subordinates, it is likely that they won’t counsel theirs so on and so on.  Counseling is more than just telling others what are the standards and regulations. It is also an opportunity to get to know the motivations (or lack thereof) of that person.

2. Do leaders and Soldiers know the standard and the consequences if they do not follow it? One of the things I did as a Commander was let the platoon leadership know of some of the different options I had at my disposal. Bar to re-enlist was tool that worked well in motivating positive behavior. Additionally, any type of UCMJ or adverse action always involved the entire chain of command (like @cale mentioned).

The JO Forum’s JAM question touched on inspiring discipline  you can read more about it here. Also, my good friend Jeff wrote about his thoughts here.