Unfriendly Fire
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But his argument was virtually impossible to defend, given the famous difficulty of “proving a negative,” suggesting that Moskos cared more for rhetorical flourish than sound argument. After all, it only takes one person to come out of the woodwork and point out a single example of what is alleged not to exist to undermine the assertion that it doesn’t exist. But more than one stepped forward. Dr. Reuven Gal, former chief psychologist for the IDF and later director of the Israeli Institute for Military Studies, wrote that even before Israel liberalized its policy in 1993, gay soldiers in the IDF did serve in “highly classified intelligence units” and that, even when their sexuality was revealed to their commanders, they were allowed to keep serving.45
The Palm Center’s study on the IDF found repeated instances of openly gay service in combat and intelligence positions, while noting that cultural norms continue to encourage most gays and lesbians to keep their sexual orientation private. According to Palm, “some IDF combat and intelligence units have developed a reputation as particularly welcoming to gay and lesbian soldiers and some have developed a gay culture.” One tank corps soldier said his base had “a large gay contingent” and that it was sometimes “even easier” to come out of the closet in the military “because you are protected from society. You don’t have friends from the same town, so you can be more open in the Army.” The Palm study also reported interviewing over twenty gay IDF soldiers who served in combat units, several of whom said their sexual identity was known by others in their unit. A related study, published in 2003 in Parameters, the professional journal of the U.S. Army War College, found that at least one-fifth of IDF combat soldiers knew of a gay peer in their unit, with roughly another fifth saying they “might” have known a gay peer. This suggests that hundreds of Israeli service members were serving openly.46
The Palm study concluded that the Israeli case is, indeed, relevant to the situation in the United States, even though many Israelis choose to keep their sexual identity private. In fact, such voluntary discretion is a reminder that the prospect of gay pride floats drifting onto U.S. military bases, replete with scantily clad men in pink boas, is largely the concocted fear of pro-ban champions. “The fact that many gay Israeli soldiers choose not to reveal their orientation does not indicate that the Israeli experience is irrelevant for determining what would happen if the U.S. lifted its gay ban,” concluded the Palm study. “On the contrary, the evidence shows that both Israelis and Americans come out of the closet only when it is safe to do so.” The 2003 article in Parameters discussed the oft-cited fear among ban defenders that ending discrimination would result in a mass coming out in the military. Until his dying day, Charles Moskos answered questions about why the ban should remain by throwing back rhetorical questions about whether gay pride parades in the military are going to be next. Senator John McCain wondered during Nunn’s Senate hearings if lifting the ban might lead to gay service members marching in parades with “bizarre” or “transvestite” clothing. But the fear was not based in fact. “This belief is premised on the flawed assumption that culture and identity politics are the driving forces behind gay soldiers’ decisions to disclose their homosexuality,” says the article. “What the evidence shows is that personal safety plays a much more powerful role than culture in the decision of whether or not to reveal sexual orientation.”47
Still, important differences between the Israeli and U.S. militaries remain and have provided defenders of the American gay ban with reasons to continue to dismiss its relevance. Israel is a conscription force, which means recruitment and retention cannot be jeopardized by the presence of gay troops. Owing to the small size of the country and the long periods of mandatory military service, Israeli soldiers spend less time in military quarters than their American counterparts, and more time at home, potentially alleviating concerns about privacy and unit cohesion.48
Not so the British. Discharged from the Royal Navy in 1997 for homosexuality, Lieutenant Rolf Kurth was invited to reenlist after the UK lifted its ban in 2000. During the war in Iraq, Kurth was deployed to the Persian Gulf aboard the Royal Navy’s largest amphibious ship. As it happened, American sailors also served on his ship, and Kurth worked closely with them, serving as a principal liaison for the American team. Kurth served as an openly gay man in this multinational force, and said it was “fairly well-known around the entire ship” that he was gay. His sexual orientation was “common knowledge,” a fact he confirmed by the banter of his colleagues, who playfully told him, when several men convened to discuss an attractive woman, that Kurth was clearly “not the best person to judge!” He characterized his relationship with the American sailors as “great,” saying he “got along very well with them.” He added that the Americans “didn’t behave any differently from British colleagues” toward him, even though he was known as a gay sailor.49
AFTER SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, it became far harder to take Moskos seriously when he dismissed foreign militaries as irrelevant. In addition to the UK’s forty-five thousand troops that were stationed mostly in southern Iraq since the invasion began, thirty other countries joined the coalition, many of which allowed open gay service. The coalition included two thousand troops provided by Australia, along with submarines and other naval support from Denmark.50 In Afghanistan, the number of countries contributing troops or support was even higher, numbering nearly fifty at one time. As NATO forces took over the occupation, troops from these countries took on greater combat roles.
In 2006, American, Canadian, British, and Afghan troops led the charge against a resurgent Taliban in Operation Mountain Thrust, the largest offensive to root out Islamic radicals since 2001. Insufficient water meant some troops had to give each other IVs to survive. Enduring heavy mortar attacks, suicide bombings, regular ambushes, and scorching desert temperatures, over ten thousand troops worked together to lug more than seven thousand pounds of supplies from the bottom of a rocky mountain range to its peak, where they had their greatest chance to best the Taliban. The powerful artillery and targeted airstrikes of the coalition took their toll on enemy forces, and by the end of the offensive, over fifteen hundred Taliban fighters had been killed or captured.51
Afterward, a NATO International Security Assistance Force, consisting of troops from nearly forty countries, took over operations in some of the most dangerous regions of southern Afghanistan, with Britain, Australia, Canada, Denmark, and the Netherlands doing the heavy lifting. That fall, Canadian forces led American, British, Dutch, and Danish troops in a bloody battle in which five hundred suspected Taliban fighters were surrounded and killed. The defeat prompted complaints by the Taliban that so many of its forces had been wiped out that it was having trouble finding sufficient leadership.52
The Canadian “experiment” with open gays was now fourteen years old, its start a distant memory for most. But the proof was in the pudding. Canada, Australia, even the Netherlands, were hardly “irrelevant.” Their combat-tested fighting forces, replete with gays and lesbians serving openly, were critical partners in the American national defense strategy, and the United States was all too happy to enlist their indispensable fire power in the wars in the Middle East. The truly irrelevant argument was Moskos’s—that these countries were not “real fighting armies.” Perhaps in 1992 they hadn’t seen much combat; by 2006, the world was a far different place. And nothing was heard from President George Bush, or Colin Powell, or Sam Nunn about cracking down on gays to preserve the fighting spirit of the “coalition of the willing.”
The presence of gay service members in multinational military units is another nail in the coffin of the crumbling rationale for gay exclusion. Since the end of the cold war, multinational forces have mushroomed. The United States has participated in at least forty joint military operations, with half involving direct deployment with foreign service members. Many of these participating countries allow open gay service, from Canada to Britain and beyond.53 Lieutenant Rolf Kurth’s service in a multinational force in the Iraq War is
only one example of documented evidence that openly gay foreign troops are actually serving right alongside Americans—without causing the kinds of disruptions that naysayers predicted would result from gay service.
Others come from training operations on foreign ships deployed in the Middle East, NATO and UN peacekeeping missions around the world, joint operations at the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Canada and the United States, the Multinational Force and Observers in Sinai, the Multinational Force in Lebanon, U.S. and foreign war colleges, training grounds, and military and diplomatic centers of operations, including NATO headquarters in Belgium. In some cases, U.S. troops are directly under the command of foreign military personnel, some known to be gay. And these cases suggest that coming out of the closet can help improve the working climate in the armed forces. In one example, Colonel René Holtel of the Royal Netherlands Army commanded American service members, including a U.S. tank battalion, in NATO and UN missions. In 2001, he served as chief military observer and chief liaison officer at the headquarters of the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea. UNMEE was tasked with monitoring the cease-fire between the two nations in the demilitarized security zone running along their mutual border. Six American service members served with him as military observers. Holtel found that when others in his unit knew he was gay, it caused “some relaxation in the unit,” reducing the guesswork and allowing people to focus on their jobs. “They are not having questions anymore about who or what their commander is,” he said. By telling them who you are, “you pose a clear guideline and that is, ‘don’t fuck around with gays, because I’m not going to accept that.’ ”54
If the presence of known gays violates the privacy and undermines the morale and cohesion of American troops, then shouldn’t foreign gays present the same threat? Shouldn’t everyone from Sam Nunn and Colin Powell to Charles Moskos and Gary Bauer be up in arms about the U.S. role in international coalitions where heterosexual troops are exposed to open gays and lesbians? The continued insistence on barring known gays from the U.S. military while inviting foreign militaries, with their open gays, to join us in military operations around the globe raises suspicions that opponents of gay service care more about the image of the U.S. military than about what works for a good fighting force. The loud silence from policy makers in the face of joint operations that bring U.S. service members into fighting teams with declared gays from other countries also shows how the pragmatic need for troop strength has finally outweighed moral qualms about the sexual purity of the American force, with no one complaining it’s been a detriment to the operation.
The use of multinational forces is also a reminder that armed services worldwide are trending toward what experts call “the postmodern military.” In an age of terrorist threats, where guerilla attacks are more likely than traditional acts of war, the term refers to the blurring of several kinds of boundaries, including national borders, as well as fading distinctions between the different branches of the military and even between the military and civilian society.55 Nothing has demonstrated this evolution more grimly than the Iraq War. Rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), snipers, and suicide bombers do not distinguish between civilians and designated fighters, between combat Marines and female supply clerks riding in the rear of a convoy, between uniformed military personnel and field intelligence agents. As it becomes harder and harder to tell who is a civilian and who is a combatant, and to distinguish which jobs fall into the intelligence sphere and which are uniformed, it becomes less and less rational to maintain a policy that draws lines around groups that simply don’t exist in the same ways as they did in the past. This is a fact about not only the postmodern military but the postmodern world—it’s hard to contain people and restrict behavior by resorting to familiar lines of exclusion when these old categories have a totally different meaning, or none at all.
WHAT, THEN, ARE the lessons that can be learned by studying the evidence from foreign militaries and other analogous institutions where gays serve openly?
First, twenty-four nations now allow gays and lesbians to serve in their armed forces; none has seen any impairment to cohesion, recruitment, or fighting capability.
Second, in closely allied nations such as Britain and Israel, gays actually do serve openly in the highest positions, despite claims that gay tolerance is much more limited in practice than in policy. Even in those situations where gays received unequal treatment in practice, the differences were rare and inconsequential. Based on their review of extensive evidence and their own additional interviews, Palm researchers found that unequal treatment mostly consisted of “local attempts to resolve problems flexibly” and were ultimately no different from countless other, varied responses to managing a large, diverse fighting force. There was no evidence that these infrequent and minor cases of differential treatment undermined performance, cohesion, or morale.56 The cumulative weight of the evidence from the two dozen countries that permit openly gay service makes for highly relevant, if also imperfect, analogies, which strongly suggest that the U.S. military would be no more crippled by removing gay exclusion than any of these other nations.
Third, the nations that allow open gays to serve have a wide range of different cultures and deployment obligations, which run the gamut from the conservative culture of Israel with its world-renowned, combat-tested military to the relatively liberal Dutch society with its limited combat engagements. Thus some of the countries are more socially liberal than the United States, but some, like Israel, are not.
In either case, a fourth lesson is that social tolerance, while it may be an advantage in making the transition from gay exclusion to gay inclusion, is not required for such a change to work effectively. Anti-gay sentiment, it seems, does not translate into impairment of military performance. Inevitably, there have been scattered, high-profile cases of hostility that cause management problems for commanders—cases that are frequently exploited by defenders of the ban, as happened when Keith Meinhold’s reinstatement occasionally generated tension and headlines. But just as social conflict born of a thousand other causes must be managed by effective leaders, dealing with these instances of homophobia is a part of the job; they simply are not, as some would have it, a compelling rationale to exclude an entire group from the U.S. military. Many of the nations that ended their gay bans since the early 1990s faced enormous resistance beforehand, reflecting widespread homophobia, but none of the doomsday scenarios that were bandied about came true after the bans were lifted. The Rand study reported that even in those countries where gays were allowed to serve, “in none of these societies is homosexuality widely accepted by a majority of the population.”57
This point is strengthened by looking at the historical example of racial integration. In 1943, when the military began talking about integrating black troops, the Surveys Division of the Office of War Information conducted opinion surveys and found that 96 percent of Southerners and 85 percent of Northerners opposed it. When President Truman ordered the military integrated in 1948, opposition had softened, but remained a majority, at 63 percent.58 On this issue, the military was out in front of society, and the military subculture itself was by no means gung-ho over integration. But as Charles Moskos had eloquently explained, its hierarchical, bureaucratic organizational structure makes it the ideal institution to implement this controversial policy, despite great intolerance around it. While racial integration of the military was a long and difficult process, political and military leaders did not change course because of opinion polls, and history now holds these champions of integration in high esteem for doing the right thing, both morally and militarily.
The fifth, and related, lesson is that the attitudes people express about homosexuality frequently do not predict how they will actually behave. Recall the thousands in Britain and Canada who said they simply would refuse to serve if open gays were allowed in, and the massive nonevent that resulted when they were. This discrepancy is consistent with social science data that show a poor c
orrelation between stated intentions and actual behavior in paramilitary organizations. The 1993 Rand study examined police and fire departments in several U.S. cities, which it regarded as “the closest possible domestic analog” to the military setting. Rand found that the integration of open gays and lesbians—the status of most departments in the United States—actually enhanced cohesion and improved the police department’s community standing and organizational effectiveness. A Palm Center study of the San Diego Police Department in 2001 echoed the finding, adding that nondiscrimination policies in police and fire departments did not impair effectiveness even though many departments were characterized as highly homophobic. Research also shows that heterosexual responses to gay service in police and fire departments were more likely to be positive when expressed privately than in front of their peers. Other polls on attitudes toward gays in the military show that most respondents believe their peers are less tolerant of gay service than they, themselves, are.59 These data are revealing: They show there is a widespread belief that homosexuality is viewed negatively, but when individuals are asked their own views in private, they express a more tolerant attitude.