Expediency.

This is coolbert:

“I fancy that those editors and legislators who sit in their cozy armchairs, in office or congressional hall, and talk wisely about the necessity of flogging for sailors, need only once to witness the infliction of the punishment they think so needful, and experience with their own breasts the feeling of dark humiliation which falls upon the soul at seeing the manhood being scourged out of a fellow creature, to alter their convictions as to the expediency of flogging.” - - Holbrook.

More on punishment ancient and venerable U.S Navy. Flogging that practice now abolished a long time ago. Apply the cat-o-nine-tails and do so well-laid-on as was the saying of the day.

Flogging usually associated with the Royal Navy [RN] but hardly confined to the English.

Flogging thought to be a thing of the far-distant past but not in all cases.

"What would the public think of an Eighth Amendment (which forbids 'cruel and unusual punishments') that would permit flogging in the navy today on the grounds that flogging was common practice on eighteenth-century ships?" - - Associate Justice Breyer, US Supreme Court.

As to crimes or misbehavior that might merit the punishment of flogging:

"Drunkenness or striking an officer might incur a dozen lashes, which could be administered on the authority of the ship's captain. Greater punishments were generally administered following a formal court martial, with Royal Navy records reflecting some standard penalties of two hundred lashes for desertion, three hundred for mutiny, and up to five hundred for theft. The offence of sodomy generally drew the death penalty, though one eighteenth century court martial awarded a punishment of one thousand lashes – a roughly equivalent sentence as there was no likelihood of survival."

Additionally from a man who is acknowledged as having a certain expertise in such matters:

"Having a voluntary military removes the incentive for punishing people who had to be forced into the military (via draft or shanghai) versus those who are there of their own free will. For the latter, the ultimate punishment/encouragement is the threat of being fired from that job."

The modern military such arcane punishments for disobedience now considered a "cruel and unusual punishment" and no longer needed! I don't even want to get into ball-and-chain!

YES it hurts but it is supposed to hurt.

coolbert.