Since I haven't been active duty for a long, long time would love to get your input into the conversation since you are AD and in the thick of the real Army right now.
Well I am on the road to a different part of the world but I'll weigh in...
I think that the Army and the military in general are reflecting the result of 10 years of slipping standards both within the organizations and society at large.
I feel the young cadre member's frustrations. Unfortunately, the reality is that kids are softer in general. I don't mean that in the "I'm so old and salty" way. I think largely my generation is included in that. Our society has increasingly trended toward a culture of loving and embracing the individual, and doing so at the expense of adherence to the team ethic. It pervades everything. Think about the environment your kids have grown up in. I won't devolve into the cliches about "everyone gets a trophy" because I think they're exaggerated. But I submit that our society, as reflected in the exaggerated self-designed disaffectation of the Gen-X and Gen-Y cultures, has trended rapidly toward an ideal that allows for a "do whatever you want because you're the most important thing on earth." (old folks...how many of your peers in the 70s and 80s thought it was ok to live with their parents after college, as we see in record numbers today?).
The result of those ideals, when coupled with the military emphasis (and the Army is REALLY bad about this) on college money as a recruiting tactic and the increasingly legal requirements for chaptering crappy folks, results in the slow rot of discipline and competency among our ranks.
Riddle me this:
You're at a gas station off post. You see a soldier with his uniform looking terrible. His cover isn't on. He's an embarassment. He's completely ate up. You go over to him and make a stern but professional correction. He looks at you and says "F*** off." You demand to know his unit. He says "I just told you. F*** off."
What now? What do you do? The kid has some non-descript last name on a post of 22,000 soldiers. So tell me, Packer, what's your leadership toolkit have in it for that?
Personally, you know deep down that this guy is in all likelihood a REMF troublemaker. Your natural instinct as a disciplined, fit, type-A warrior is to choke the consciousness out of him. But that's not an option. So what do you do?
That's the problem with basic training. And to another degree, Beast. There is a time-tested value in having drill sergeants scare you to death, to having your room torn apart, and to doing pushups until you collapse from muscle fatigue. Why? Because it breaks the will that says "I'm the most important thing on earth." If basic is supposed to be the tough part--the place where Soldiers realize that they are subservient to the team, but find that the "team" has no bite to back up its bark, well, that's how you end up at our scenario above.
If you want to boil it down to simple math: garbage in, garbage out. We increasingly get garbage in. And as I've said before, it's perpetuated by generals and colonels for whom war-fighting has been supplanted by careerism in the steady climb to their headline jobs (sorry Bullet, but that's how the warfighters of this generation view your generation, and I'm far from the first person to say so, and I doubt I'll be the last).