Unfriendly Fire

by Dr. Nathaniel Frank

  The Rand study, commissioned by Les Aspin, provided invaluable data that was largely ignored. As one Pentagon official explained, the Rand study provided a “methodological approach,” while the military itself offered an “independent judgment.”1 And in the contest between the generals and the professors, there was never any question of who would win—a chest full of metals carried far more weight than a Ph.D.

  Nevertheless, Rand sent a team of seventy-five credentialed, multidisciplinary social scientists from its National Defense Research Institute across the globe to research the issue. Sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, historians, economists, doctors, lawyers, and national security experts exhaustively studied the scientific literature on a broad range of related topics: group cohesion, the experiences of foreign militaries, the theory and history of institutional change, public and military opinion, patterns of sexual behavior in the United States, sexual harassment, leadership theory, public health concerns, the history of racial integration in the military, policies on sexuality in police and fire departments, and legal considerations regarding access to military service. The result was a five-hundred-page study, completed in July 1993. The Rand researchers concluded that sexual orientation alone was “not germane” in determining who should serve. The authors stated that Clinton’s proposal to lift the ban could be implemented without major problems if senior leaders got behind the change and clear guidelines were disseminated throughout the chain of command. They also suggested that the UCMJ’s ban on consensual sodomy should be consigned to the dustbin of history.2

  The Rand report, produced at a taxpayer cost of $1.3 million, barely made it out of the firm’s Santa Monica headquarters. According to The New York Times, Pentagon officials tried to keep the study from going public and refused to talk about it. But summaries were leaked to the Times, making some military men apoplectic. Senior officers complained bitterly that the report exceeded its mandate by challenging the rationale for gay exclusion rather than simply suggesting a method for implementing a plan that was closer to the compromise policy being bandied about in Washington. Rand’s recommendations, said one senior military officer, are “unacceptable to the military,” and “unacceptable practically and politically to Congress.” According to the Times, Pentagon officials admitted that they never actually considered the Rand report when shaping the final policy, because of the resistance of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.3

  “I think they had their heads up their asses,” said Moskos later of the Rand report. Though an academic himself, Moskos had little patience for scholarship that seemed to him to place the aspirations of liberal social reform above the military’s right to preserve the culture and self-image to which it was accustomed. Fortunately for Moskos, his own “don’t ask, don’t tell” plan carried the day instead of Rand’s comprehensive study. It was his plan that shaped the Military Working Group’s official recommendation for how to preserve the military’s anti-gay “core values” in federal law. As promised, the MWG did, indeed, issue the military’s “independent judgment”—independent of genuine research or inquiry. Like the Rand commission and the study groups in each of the service branches, the MWG was supposed to advise the Pentagon how—not whether—to end discrimination. But the generals stonewalled. “The military would love to fight this,” admitted an army official anonymously, “but we can’t fight it openly.” Only when press reports embarrassed them with accounts of continued military resistance in heeding Clinton’s order did the group even meet to discuss the policy.4

  When the MWG finally met, they opened an office on Pennsylvania Avenue, not far from the White House. The group was initially headed by Lieutenant General Minter Alexander, a command pilot in the air force with three decades of service. Alexander was serving as deputy assistant secretary of defense when he was asked to chair the MWG, and he was responsible for the regulations that governed separation from military service. While the large staff supplied research materials, the panel of five generals and admirals under Alexander’s command took testimony from military members and other interested parties, including gay rights groups.

  The flag officers were not exactly experts on the topic at hand. “We didn’t really understand entirely what all was meant by ‘sexual orientation,’ ” recalled Alexander, referring to the president’s orders to end discrimination based upon sexual orientation. “We had to define in the first few sessions what we figured they were talking about.” Like the other officers, Alexander was concerned that a sudden change in policy could jolt the military and strain efforts to bolster morale and discipline during a time of anxiety over force reduction and other changes. But the more he studied the issue of gay service, the less concerned he became; the more he knew, the less he feared change.5

  Unfortunately, the rest of the group was not as open. Les Aspin and his staff at the Office of the Secretary of Defense were fully aware of this. “They didn’t expect a whole lot out of the Military Working Group,” said Alexander. “They thought they knew the results of what was going to happen there. It was going to be very difficult to get an objective, rational review of this policy.” Part of the reason for this, said Alexander, was the political leadership. The White House had given the military vague direction and little in the way of preparation or research. The Clinton team did not appear to understand how fierce resistance was in the military and how slowly military culture changes. But ultimately the military is subordinate to the civilian leadership, and the resistance of the MWG to ending anti-gay discrimination was a product of the beliefs and feelings of those who comprised it. “Passion leads, and rationale follows,” said Alexander. “We didn’t have any empirical data.” So the conclusions the MWG drew were “subjective, based on the interviews with people” who testified. In tense, private sessions with emotions running high, senior representatives from each service branch rolled out the doomsday scenarios they were bred by instinct and culture to dread. “You just wouldn’t believe the litany of” fears that came up in those meetings, Alexander recalled. “Barracks, bathrooms, roommates, hot bedding on submarines, readiness, all this was coming out.” The general remembered that conversations were “very strident at that time,” and reflected a “different attitude than we have today.”6

  While Alexander was chairing the MWG, Charles Moskos came to see him. The general was, by this time, leaning toward a policy that would allow gays and lesbians to serve, let them tell the truth about their sexual orientation, but prohibit homosexual acts while in the service. Moskos, who was simultaneously selling his policy to Nunn and Aspin, both in direct talks and as a star witness in the congressional hearings that spring, tried to convince Alexander that “don’t ask, don’t tell” was the best solution.

  Alexander never got the chance to lead the MWG toward a somewhat more liberal policy. In May, Senator Nunn’s office abruptly assigned him to testify at a set of budget hearings that made it impossible for him to continue leading the MWG. In Alexander’s absence, Moskos’s policy carried the day. “He won,” said Alexander. “He basically got that adopted.” It might have gone that direction anyway, as the general was beginning to come under the sway of Moskos’s ideas even before he was removed from the MWG. “It was the least worst alternative,” said Alexander, echoing Moskos’s Churchill quote on democracy. But as Alexander understood it, Moskos’s plan was to be temporary, a transitional step to allow people to get used to serving with gays. “But fifteen years is too damned long,” said Alexander when sharing his current thoughts. “I think ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ was a good interim solution as a first step to addressing this problem,” he said. But the policy “is not necessarily improving readiness,” and in fact “we know it has hurt readiness and morale in some cases.” Alexander now believes the law “impedes further progress” and should be repealed.

  Vincent Patton, the master chief petty officer of the U.S. Coast Guard, was a staff member of the Military Working Group. The highest-ranking enlisted person in the Coast Guard, P
atton had two decades of experience in the armed forces and took his appointment to the MWG seriously. But when he got there, he found others did not: “People were still complaining this had to be done.” Patton provided a wealth of research to the flag officers in charge, but he never heard a thing in response—no requests for clarification, no follow-up questions, nothing indicating they had even read what he provided. “They had already made a decision about what they were going to do,” he said, “and they weren’t about to take anything I had to give them.” Patton said the policy recommendation was hammered out by a small circle of people “behind closed doors” who had no genuine interest in an honest discussion of whether gay service would be good or bad for the military. Instead, anti-gay stereotypes and resistance to any outside forces that challenged military tradition were the ruling sentiments of the Military Working Group.7

  The MWG’s fifteen-page report was made public in June 1993. According to the group’s findings, “the introduction of individuals identified as homosexuals into the military would severely undermine good order and discipline. Moral and ethical beliefs of individuals would be brought into open conflict. Leadership priorities would, of necessity, be reoriented from training for combat to preventing internal discord.” Given the president’s order to formulate a policy that did not discriminate against homosexual people, the panel begrudgingly endorsed a plan where sexual orientation alone would not be a bar to entry—as long as it never became known. But the report made the officers’ views clear: “All homosexuality is incompatible with military service,” it said, a direct rejoinder to suggestions that discreet homosexuality might be acceptable. Damage to combat effectiveness “is not limited to known homosexuals.” Again and again, the report stated, with no proof, that the presence of gays—known and unknown—would “have a significantly adverse effect on both unit cohesion and the readiness of the force.”8

  TO SOME, BURYING the Rand study and opting for the MWG report came as no surprise. The Pentagon, it turns out, has a long history of denying, destroying, and suppressing studies that undercut the rationale for discriminating against gays. As early as 1957, the secretary of the navy appointed a panel to investigate its homosexual exclusion policy; the outcome, known as the Crittenden report, found that homosexuals posed no greater security risk than heterosexuals. It said security risks were based not on sexual orientation but on “indiscretion.” Certain relations among heterosexuals were considered more threatening than homosexual conduct or the simple fact of being gay. It concluded that the notion that gays were a security risk persisted without any evidence. “The number of cases of blackmail as a result of past investigations of homosexuals is negligible,” it said. “No factual data exist to support the contention that homosexuals are a greater risk than heterosexuals.” The navy refused to release the report, and it was only made public by court order two decades later.9

  A generation later, the pattern was repeated, with scarcely an update in the playbook. In 1988 and 1989, a Defense Department research center wrote a series of reports about gays in the military as a security risk. These were the studies that Bill Clinton had mentioned as he made the case to lift the ban in 1992, studies that were commissioned by the Personnel Security Research and Education Center (PERSEREC), a research wing of the Pentagon established in 1987. They were authored by Theodore Sarbin, professor emeritus in psychology and criminology at Berkeley; Captain Kenneth Karols, a psychiatrist and navy flight surgeon; and Michael McDaniel, a PERSEREC researcher. The men had no links to gay and lesbian advocacy, no agenda to forward, no chip on their shoulder. Their ideological leanings, if any, as researchers hired by the military were in the direction of supporting existing policy.10

  Like the Rand study, the PERSEREC reports found no evidence showing that gays were unsuitable for military service and suggested that the policy was unnecessary and even damaging. In fact, they noted, the risk of blackmail was actually worsened by the taboo against homosexuality. Examining 130 cases of possible espionage, researchers found that only 6 of the subjects were suspected of being gay.11

  The first report directly addressed the unit cohesion rationale for the gay ban and found that it was based on fear rather than facts. “Buried deep in the supporting conceptual structure” of the ban’s defense, said the report, “is the fearful imagery of homosexuals polluting the social environment with unrestrained and wanton expressions of deviant sexuality.” Yet “all the studies conducted on the psychological adjustment of homosexuals that we have seen lead to contrary inferences.” Using heuristic models of shifting social attitudes, the report pointed to growing tolerance of homosexuality and concluded that “the military cannot indefinitely isolate itself from the changes occurring in the wider society, of which it is an integral part.” In the final analysis, it found, “having a same-gender or an opposite-gender orientation is unrelated to job performance in the same way as is being left- or right-handed.”12

  The second PERSEREC report actually found something few people have suggested: that gays and lesbians are better suited to the military than straights. Using social adjustment surveys, the researchers compared data from gay discharges with that of other discharges in areas such as school behavior and cognitive ability. Their summary found that “the preponderance of the evidence presented indicates that homosexuals show preservice suitability-related adjustment that is as good [as] or better than the average heterosexual,” a result that appeared to “conflict with conceptions of homosexuals as unstable, maladjusted persons.”13

  When military brass got word of PERSEREC’s findings, they balked. For months, they denied that the studies existed. According to Lawrence Korb, assistant secretary of defense under President Ronald Reagan, the Defense Department ordered the reports destroyed. When presented with salvaged copies that had been leaked to the press and the congressional offices of Gerry Studds and Patricia Schroeder, military officials said the reports were “drafts” that had never been accepted by the Pentagon and therefore they did not have to be released because, as studies, they still did not exist. At one point, the Pentagon even claimed that PERSEREC was not part of the Defense Department, a fact belied by the giant DOD seal on all its official documents. In reality, the research center was established, underwritten, and administered by the U.S. military.14

  The PERSEREC reports might never have surfaced if they had not been forced out in 1989, during the discovery period of the Joseph Steffan case. Gerry Studds and Patricia Schroeder wrote to Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and demanded the release of the information for the benefit of the Steffan lawyers. The deputy undersecretary of defense, Craig Alderman, Jr., was forced to attack the reports to justify their suppression. The PERSEREC study, he said, “missed the target.” In two angrily worded memos to the authors, Alderman wrote that the researchers had “exceeded your authority.” They were supposed to assess whether gays in the military were reliable, but they ended up also assessing their “suitability.” Apparently two-for-ones are not popular at the Pentagon, particularly when the product conflicts with a treasured policy that’s considered essential to long-standing military culture. The “unfortunate” study “has expended considerable government resources, and has not assisted us one whit in our personnel security program,” complained Alderman, further griping that the whole sorry episode would “cause us in Washington to expend even more time and effort satisfying concerns in this whole issue.” He directed PERSEREC to “develop a positive response” to the guidelines of his office, coordinate closely with his staff for all further investigations in this area, and await approval before embarking on any more “questionable” research.15

  PERSEREC replied that the Pentagon would have embraced the report if it had come to the opposite conclusion, suggesting that the rejection was purely ideological and political. The question of suitability, argued its director, Carson Eoyang, was a necessary part of determining whether gays could be given security clearances. “The nature of research,” he wrote, “is such th
at the answers to the focal question are not known in advance. The underlying purpose for asking the question should not be invalidated because the results turn out to be problematic from a policy perspective.” Studds, for one, appreciated the humor of the situation: “The Pentagon said, ‘We didn’t ask you that question; don’t answer questions that we didn’t ask you.”16

  In January 1991, the Steffan case turned up another Pentagon document, this time an army memo echoing PERSEREC’s findings. The Pentagon only released it under a federal court order. “Current research has not identified that homosexual personnel are any greater security risk than their heterosexual counterparts,” it read. Absent any evidence that gays compromise the mission, “the Army has no basis on which to justify such continued discrimination.” Amazingly, it also noted that attitudes toward gays had recently “undergone significant evolution”—and that was in 1991. It would make later debates over whether tolerance of homosexuality has progressed enough seem like a bizarre replay of an earlier era.17

  In 1992, one of Congress’s research arms, the Government Accountability Office (GAO; then called the General Accounting Office), pointed out that the military “has not conducted specific research to develop empirical evidence supporting the overall validity of the premises and rationale underlying its current policy on homosexuality.” The Defense Department concurred, saying its policy was a matter of “professional Military judgment, not scientific or sociological analysis.” This judgment, admitted the department, is “inherently subjective in nature, and scientific or sociological analyses are unlikely to ever be dispositive.”18

  So the GAO conducted its own extensive study of the gay exclusion policy. Its researchers looked at seventeen different countries and eight police and fire departments in four U.S. cities and reviewed military and nonmilitary polls, studies, legal decisions, and scholarly research on homosexual service. The GAO study noted the Crittenden report, the PERSEREC studies, the liberal policies in foreign countries and police and fire departments, the discrediting of the security risk rationale, and the evolution of public attitudes toward homosexuality—another reminder that even in the early 1990s, policy makers had evidence that tolerance had grown dramatically. As a result of all these data points, the GAO recommended in an early draft that Congress “may wish to direct the Secretary of Defense to reconsider the basis” for gay exclusion. Oddly, the final GAO report deleted this suggestion, allegedly because Patricia Schroeder’s bill to end the ban—which had no real chance of passing—had been introduced.19