Even before its release, pro-repeal groups and the press have billed the Pentagon’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” study as the preeminent analysis of whether allowing openly gay service members would impact combat effectiveness. It’s no such thing.
According to details that have leaked in advance, the report didn’t even consider the only important question: Would repealing DADT help US troops accomplish their missions?
Any worthwhile review must consider whether repeal would hinder combat effectiveness, unit cohesion, recruitment and retention — yet the Pentagon report avoids these critical questions.
Instead, one main section of the study consists of (unscientific) polling on how troops feel about serving with open homosexuals, while the other just looks at how repeal could be implemented.
Let’s look at the “evidence.” In addition to some focus groups, an anonymous online “drop box” and a survey of military spouses, the Pentagon sent a questionnaire to 400,000 active-duty and reserve troops. Less than 30 percent returned it — and if our troops thought that repeal would help them take a hill, secure a perimeter or survive combat, the response rate wouldn’t have been so low.
Supporters of any existing policy are rarely as energized to offer their opinion as those who want change, so it’s highly likely that the poll overrepresents pro-repeal voices.
And a poll of the entire military isn’t much use. When the issue is how a policy impacts our ability to win wars, greater weight should go to the views of those in the combat arms. The opinion of a clerk who works in an air-conditioned office in the Green Zone just isn’t as relevant as that of a squad leader at a forward operating base.
Indeed, those serving in infantry, artillery and armor units surely had less opportunity to be surveyed: They’re either in the field training stateside or deployed to the front lines overseas. If the study were serious about analyzing how repeal would affect the military’s capacity to fight, it would have broken the results down by Military Occupational Specialty to allow it to focus on how the war-fighters felt.
Consider: The infantry make up only 4 percent of military personnel, but 81 percent of those killed in action during the War on Terror.
Marines are 11 percent of military personnel but 23 percent of those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan; the Army makes up 50 percent of the military and 73 percent of those killed in action. And the Marines, followed by the Army, are the most opposed to repeal.
Gen. James Amos, the Marine Corps commandant, and his immediate predecessor have been the most outspoken opponents of repeal, to the point of drawing a public rebuke from Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
“There is nothing more intimate than combat,” said Amos. “When you’re talking infantry, we’re talking our young men laying out, sleeping alongside of one another and sharing death and fear and the loss of their brothers.”
The time and effort spent studying DADT while two wars rage and a ruthless enemy remains determined to attack the US homeland speaks volumes about the misplaced priorities of the Pentagon brass. The Department of Defense could have been fighting the scourge of improvised explosive devices, preventing devastating intelligence leaks and improving care for the wounded.
The burden of proof remains upon those who support repeal to demonstrate that abandoning DADT will make the platoon sergeant’s job easier. Neither this Pentagon study nor any other information proffered by the pro-repeal political movement has come close to meeting this burden.
Kieran Michael Lalor is a Ma rine Corps veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the founder of Iraq Veterans for Congress and the author of “This Recruit.”