Sunday, December 19, 2010

OK to Tell! OK to Ask?

I served on active duty with some gay guys. One remarkable one in particular was very successful in the military as a career fighter pilot. We flew together in training and in combat. I never had a suspicion until many years later. His orientation was essentially irrelevant. He rose to very high rank and performed admirably throughout his long career.

I served with others about whom I harbored suspicions, but never had an issue and all of them did the job without problems. In other words, the system has been fine. Of course it is technically flawed. There are conflicts involved when an individual must repress who they really are and inherently is force to lie about themselves in order to preserve their career. That is unfortunate.

There is still a question about whether or not the military at large is ready and able to deal with openly gay troops. While many are understanding and accepting, the reality is that a lot of the military originates from a societal level and a cultural background which is not so tolerant. Are we at a point in our cultural development where that is not a detriment to an effective military?

Senate Passes DADT Repeal. Bamster Gets to Crow

As with most of the recent acts of our legislature, there seems to be a total disconnect between the fantasy of their agenda and the reality of the world. The weasel-wording of their language provides an incredible range of possible outcomes and a flexibility to make things mean whatever the interpreter wants them to mean at the moment:
Under the bill, the president and his top military advisers must first certify that lifting the ban won't hurt troops' ability to fight.
How is that going to work? We start with a legislature comprised of 535 persons, more than 90% of whom have never served in the military imposing their judgment on the corps for political purposes, now we ask the President who has even less relationship to "certify" something he knows absolutely zero about.

If the phrase "top military advisors" means CJCS Mullen and SecDef Gates, they will mouth whatever he needs them to say. If the phrase means the four service chiefs, they testified last week and all four of them stated clearly that the service was not ready to take this step without serious degradation of our combat capability. Hard to ignore that.

1 comment:

Six said...

I've modified my stance on this somewhat.
I believe that every American should be allowed and encouraged to serve, gay and lesbian included. DADT has worked well in that regard and seems like a simple and reasonable solution. The problems kick in when serving members, some of whom are invariably particularly valuable, get caught or come out and are involuntarily seperated. Such is demonstrably harmful to the military.
But. So also will be the loss of active duty service members who WILL leave upon implementation of the repeal of DADT. The repeal of DADT and allowing openly gay and lesbian members to serve is inevitable. The influence of the left and the social engineers is prevalent and I see nothing on the horizon to change that.
The remaining questions are timing and implementation. We shouldn't even be considering such with 2 active wars and perhaps more coming with Iran and North Korea rattling their sabers.
The decision is being made at the policy level, as it should, but the rank and file, the War Fighters, are being ignored and that is going to lead to an exodus the likes of which we have never seen. The Whitehouse and JCS ignore them at their (and our) very real peril.
Who will replace these Warriors? Bean counters and fobbits can be had by the double handful in any society. Those who will stand, fight and die are an exceedingly rare and precious commodity. Say what you will but many (even a majority) of those are from a segement of our society for whom homosexuality is anethema. Will they be willing to serve? I don't know. Probably, almost certainly, but that change in mindset is going to take years, perhaps a generation, and would be best done in peacetime. Even FDR knew this where de-segregation was concerned.
My bottom line is leave DADT in place, perhaps with a Commanders Guidance for case by case exceptions, until we have the time and space to step back and take a deep breath without the pressures of War to plan and implement the final repeal of DADT. It's that or risk the systematic dismantling of the finest military in history.
I don't trust the CJCS or the CINC to do the right thing here but the new Congress takes office in January and they do control the purse. We shall see.