My current place is not military.
Historically they didn't care less about standards and it showed. The drawings were poor to say the least and it did/does lead to problems. High reject rates, no come back to vendor, field failures, being tied to vendors who had some how figured out what we wanted and paying a premium because of it, I could go on.
I and my team have been brought in largely to introduce industry standards.
Note the phrase "Industry Standards". They are industry standards, they are no longer "just for the military'. This view shows a lack of understanding.
The newer standards have plenty of shoulds & mays if you don't want to be too strict but they are still a good start.
And if you don’t reference the standards on the drawing or other product definition then how will the vendor/shop whoever know that you want it invoked?
I put the following out at my place a while back and have posted part of it here before:
Industry Design & Drawing standards can be of significant advantage to an engineering company, they essentially define a standard "engineering language" and set of practices, customs, definitions etc.
Use of them reduces reliance on informal "tribal knowledge" since they allow any competent engineer (or related position) to understand the data without ambiguity. This allows any engineer to work on future revision of the data with less chance of errors based on misunderstanding, it also supports verification (checking) of the data with less chance of time-consuming misunderstanding thus producing better quality data. It allows manufacture of the item defined by the data to be outsourced with minimal chance of misunderstanding. This then supports increased outsourcing to increase through put without increasing manufacturing overhead. It also allows competitive tendering from a number of suppliers rather than relying on one supplier that has built up tribal knowledge of the item, leading to cost reductions.
While many of the standards have their origins with the military their aim was and still is to allow maximum rate of production for the best value using multi sourcing and competitive tendering (especially during war time). This is equally applicable to commercial companies and the standards have now been widely accepted by industry and in fact most are no longer controlled by the government but by industry bodies.
Now I’m not expecting to convince anyone just based on the above and this is starting to get off topc & I don’t want to get accused of “Standards Thumping” again. However, given this is the Drafting Standards, GD&T & Tolerance Analysis Forum I don’t think it’s that out of place.