Years ago....1977....I joined up with the Air Force. One of those ten little things that you came to question over the first year....was this mentality about long sleeves and short sleeves. The Air Force had to "control" everything, and mandate what could be done or never done.
With the 'greens'.....they actually allowed us to take the shirt into the tailor and have the shirtsleeves cut off....thus making it a shortsleeve shirt. However, this meant that after mid-October of each year....you had to wear only longsleeves. So you'd pack away the one or two shortsleeve shirts into the closet and just get by until mid-April....when they were allowed back.
The same issue existed with the 'blues'....with some rule in effect. Of course, none of this made any real sense....except to control people.
As the years passed....the old 'greens' went away, and the BDU arrived. The nifty thing about the Air Force view of the BDU....was that you could roll up the sleeves. So in the midst of December....in some hot building that had lousy heat control....you could roll up the sleeves and get some relief.
When the Army went to the BDU....you would have thought that they did the same thing, but no.....they instituted a rule that said that the sleeves MUST NEVER be rolled up....even in the midst of some deployment to Central America or Africa.
Naturally, there's grumblings about this kind of mundane and stupid rule. Someone at the top thinks that if you rolled the shirt up....it'd mean more cases of skin cancer. What evidence or study do they offer? None. As far as I can see.....no scientist or foundation group has ever gone out to do a research project on such an idea.
Why all this bother over shortsleeve and longsleeve stuff? I don't know. Evidently, it bothers some folks to show your arms. Maybe it's the tattoo stuff, or the muscles demonstrated.....but it's really a problem for some folks.
Years have passed, and I've been out for fifteen-odd years now. As a contractor and GS.....I had a couple of longsleeve shirts, and maybe wore them twenty days out of the year. I'm anti-longsleeve.....about as much as you can be. Maybe in the right office....with the right AC temperature....it makes sense. But in the real world.....it just doesn't work.
