Military's Self-Inflicted Wound
As the Pentagon begins its open-ended review of U.S. strategy in Iraq, military leaders face withering attacks for having insufficient boots on the ground, for making National Guard troops into regular soldiers and for involuntary recalls of thousands of former service members who returned to civilian life long ago, most believing they would never again wear a uniform.
But at the same time that the U.S. armed forces are hurting for qualified soldiers, they're also firing qualified soldiers just because they're gay. According to Pentagon statistics, three to four gays and lesbians, on average, have been sacked every day for the last decade.
Worse, many of those discharged include badly needed infantrymen, nuclear power engineers, missile guidance and control operators and nuclear, biological and chemical warfare specialists. Another category in short supply, translators, was highlighted last week with the publication of data I obtained from the Pentagon that reveal that since 1998, 26 Arabic and Farsi language speakers have been fired from the military for homosexuality.
Military officials respond to the disconnect between discharging willing, competent gay soldiers and forcing unwilling civilians back to the front lines by claiming that they are simply following the law. And they have a point. What Pentagon leaders fail to acknowledge, however, is that the military is in large part responsible for that law.
Back in 1993, when the Clinton administration tried to end the ban against gays and lesbians in the military, the Joint Chiefs of Staff insisted that allowing homosexuals to serve openly would undermine "unit cohesion" -- in other words, if straight soldiers know that one of their comrades is gay, they won't be able to fight and work with him.
Based in large part on the Joint Chiefs' testimony, Congress passed "don't ask, don't tell," which prevents the military from asking recruits about their sexual orientation but at the same time requires the discharge of service members who say they are gay.
The policy was crafted as a compromise, but reports of anti-gay harassment have skyrocketed under "don't ask, don't tell," and more people have been fired than under the previous version of the gay ban. According to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a watchdog group in Washington, gay discharges jumped 92% in the first five years after the 1994 passage of the law.
