Three Bad Arguments for Continuing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

Former Air Force chief of staff Merrill McPeak has a long op-ed in today’s New York Times arguing for the continuation of the military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy. In the piece, McPeak advances three arguments for why DADT should be left in place:

First, they say, many otherwise proficient servicemen and women are tossed out only because of an inability or unwillingness to stay closeted. As the services keep track of what it costs to train somebody in a specific skill, the price tag, we are told, can be calculated simply by multiplying the number of service members ejected by the cost of training a replacement.

But this is the wrong way to reckon cost. Each service maintains a multibillion-dollar training system: bases, classrooms, instructors and so forth. This is necessary because of the substantial turnover as service members return to civilian life. The size and cost of the training system is influenced over time by economic factors like pay and benefits or employment opportunities in the civilian sector. In recent years the services have been able to make sizable cuts in training infrastructure because of better retention in an all-volunteer, more professional force.

Nonetheless, these large-scale factors swamp the question of marginal training cost. In the early 1990s, as we thought through the implications of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” I worked out the numbers for the Air Force. During the previous decade, we’d put about 800,000 people through basic and advanced training programs, at a cost of about $30 billion. The money we expended on training 3,000 people who were eventually removed on account of homosexuality was minuscule by comparison. (During the same decade, we forced out 15 times as many people for failure to meet Air Force weight standards, with no one objecting to the cost.)

I find this to be totally unconvincing because it seems focused on the bottom line cost as opposed to value added after the fact. The military would seem to come out ahead if it retains an Arabic translator – who just happens to be gay – when its fighting a war in an Arabic country than it would have by cutting that same solider loose based on his sexual orientation. I’d call that money well spent as opposed to a “minuscule” expense in the training budget. I also find the comparison about the military expelling overweight soldiers specious; being in top physical condition is something we expect of troops in theater as it directly relates to their fighting ability. However, being gay doesn’t make one a less effective translator.

Moving on:

The second major argument for allowing openly gay service is that it’s a matter of civil rights, akin to racial integration. This view must rest on the notion that serving in the armed forces is a job like any other, and therefore civilian anti-discrimination laws should apply. While it may seem hopelessly idealistic, my view is that serving in uniform amounts to a calling, different in many ways from other jobs. (One of the ways is that your employer can order you to risk your life.)

But let’s limit ourselves to practical considerations. The services exclude, without challenge, many categories of prospective entrants. People cannot serve in uniform if they are too old or too young, too fat or too thin, too tall or too short, disabled, not sufficiently educated and so on. This, too, might be illegal in the civil sector. So why should exclusion of gay people rise to the status of a civil-rights issue, when denying entry to, say, unmarried individuals with sole custody of dependents under 18, does not?

Besides resting on another lazy set of comparisons (does McPeak not understand why we as a society might want a single parent to stay at home with their children?), he goes on to say that the main reason he opposes the civil rights argument is because it requires the leadership of the various service branches to embrace the changes so they can lead in a more effective way. We can wait forever for the brass to get over their uncomfortable feelings about the policy, but there’s a chain of command and the President, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs all embrace the idea of repealing DADT. If McPeak is a believer in the importance of the chain of command, the other heads need to fall in line, regardless of how uncomfortable it might make them.

The final argument also happens to be the most risible:

Last, and most frequently heard, is the seemingly businesslike argument that what’s important is an individual’s performance. Hundreds of service members are mustered out annually for failing to stay closeted, regardless of job performance. Indeed, we seem to have here an odd exception to the American idea that people should be judged by their actions rather than their makeup.

But it would be a serious mistake to imagine that personal performance is what matters in combat. Combat is not a contest between individuals, like poker or tennis; it is a team event whose success depends on group cooperation and morale. So the behavior that concerns us is not individual achievement but the social dynamics of relationships and groups. The issue is whether and how the presence of openly declared homosexuals in the ranks affects the solidarity of the unit.

In study after study and in country after country, there’s been virtually no evidence that unit cohesion has been affected by letting gays serve openly with their fellow brothers and sister in arms. It’s a lazy argument unsupported by even the most basic set of empirical data.

I wonder what possessed the Times to run this piece. I can only hope they let McPeak air his views to prove that opponents of keeping Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in place really have no leg to stand on.