Essay in DoD journal urges repeal of gay ban - Military News | News From Afghanistan, Iraq And Around The World - Military Times

Essay in DoD journal urges repeal of gay ban

An essay published in a top Pentagon journal calls on the Obama administration to repeal the ban on service by openly gay people in the military.

The essay was penned for Joint Force Quarterly, the Joint Chiefs chairman’s “flagship joint military and security studies journal,” by Air Force Col. Om Prakash, a student at the National Defense University in Washington. The essay took first place in 2009 Secretary of Defense National Security Essay Competition.

“It is not time for the administration to reexamine the issue; rather, it is time for the administration to examine how to implement the repeal of the ban,” Prakash argues.

He bases that conclusion on several factors:

• The loss of some 12,500 personnel due to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law since its implementation in 1994, and resulting financial impact and loss of skills.

• His conclusion that open service by gays would not degrade social cohesion.

• Polls of the general public that increasingly show acceptance of the concept.

• The difficulties commanders face in enforcing the ban.

• The fact that, by some estimates, about 65,000 gays now serve in the U.S. military.

Irresolvable to date, he says, is the argument over whether being gay is a choice, as many opponents of reversing the law argue. If it could be proven that it is not, Prakash notes that “traditionally, courts have protected immutable characteristics, and Americans writ large are demonstrably more accepting of characteristics that an individual cannot change.”

Not an endorsement

Publication in the journal does not mean that Joint Chiefs chairman Adm. Mike Mullen endorses Prakash’s view, said Mullen’s spokesman, Navy Capt. John Kirby. He said Mullen has not changed his stated view that “don’t ask, don’t tell” is the law of the land, the military is bound to follow it and any change needs to come from Congress.

“The article represents the author’s views and only the author’s views,” Kirby said. The essay “doesn’t represent the chairman’s views or the military’s views or NDU’s views … and it was put in the magazine because it won an award.”

Mullen was not involved in the judging process, Kirby said.

Mullen does not exercise direct editorial control over the journal, which is assembled by the journal’s editorial staff at the National Defense University. But he is made aware of each issue’s contents, knew that the essay was to be published and “fully supported its inclusion,” Kirby said.

“He wants the magazine to be a useful, productive forum for the debate and discussion of all kinds of issues that are relevant to today’s military,” Kirby said. “And this is certainly one of those issues. … It passed all the wickets for relevance.”

Calls for reversing the law have been building momentum since last year, when then-candidate Barack Obama said that he supported a repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Since becoming president, he has discussed the issue “on several occasions” with Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, according to Kirby. Mullen “understands the president’s strategic intent to have the law repealed,” Kirby said.

On Capitol Hill, a bill in the House, sponsored by Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Pa., calls for outright repeal. The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., has promised to hold the committee’s first hearing on the issue in 16 years sometime this fall.

Kirby said that there currently is no Joint Staff policy review or study on the issue underway. Mullen has discussed the issue “briefly” with the service chiefs in the secure “tank” meeting room at the Pentagon.

Difficulties with changing policy

In his essay, Prakash acknowledges the difficulties the services would face should Congress reverse the law: respect for privacy, “required just as when women were fully integrated” into the military; holding gays to the same standards as others, particularly with regard to fraternization between officers and enlisteds; legal treatment of gay service members’ partners; how to educate and lead the force should the law be reversed; and the monitoring of units to ensure that a changed policy does not result in dysfunction, and how to intervene to reverse such instances.

On the other hand, Prakash notes, the U.S. military would have the advantage of studying how integration has taken place in allied militaries that have allowed gays to serve openly.

“There was no mass exodus of heterosexuals, and there was also no mass ‘coming-out’ of homosexuals,” Prakash writes. “In a survey of over 100 experts from Australia, Canada, Israel, and the United Kingdom … all agreed the decision to lift the ban on homosexuals had no impact on military performance, readiness, cohesion, or ability to recruit or retain, nor did it increase the HIV rate among troops.”

“Don’t ask, don’t tell,” Prakash writes, was a political compromise “that has been costly both in personnel and treasure.” It “forces a compromise in integrity, conflicts with the American creed of ‘equality for all,’ places commanders in difficult moral dilemmas and is ultimately more damaging to the unit cohesion its stated purpose is to preserve.”

In addition, no scientific evidence supports the claim that unit cohesion will be negatively affected if gays serve openly, Prakash writes.

He also says that while there is sufficient empirical evidence from allied militaries’ experiences to indicate that leadership challenges will result from a change in the law, the challenges “will not be insurmountable or affect unit cohesion and combat effectiveness.”

Lifting the ban, Prakash writes, “would more clearly represent the social mores of America in 2009 and more clearly represent the free and open society that serves as a model for the world.

“Ultimately, service members serving under values they believe in are the most effective force multipliers.”

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