Unfriendly Fire

by Dr. Nathaniel Frank

  THE FRIGHTENING COSTS of troop shortages—exacerbated by “don’t ask, don’t tell”—do not end here. It’s not just that the military admits unqualified people while wasting qualified gay ones; the ensuing shortfalls also end up overtaxing the qualified people who have to take up the slack where fired troops left off. The result is an overreliance on the National Guard and the reserves, extended deployments throughout the ranks, stop-loss orders delaying discharges of thousands of people prepping to return to their families, more frequent rotations, and forced recalls of civilian reservists who thought their contracts had been fulfilled. This last category is particularly troubling. As a result of the military’s failure to fill all its slots for the wars in the Middle East, in 2004 the government began what some have called a “backdoor draft,” issuing mandatory recalls to thousands of troops for deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the most controversial and taxing uses of the recalls was to force the return to duty of civilian reservists—not the “weekend warriors” who train together one weekend per month and two weeks per year, but former troops who no longer train at all. The contracts of these unfortunate Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) troops say in small print that they are subject to recall in rare circumstances. IRR soldiers, through no fault of their own, are even less prepared and less cohesive than regular reservists because they have not been training with a unit at all while out of the service.30

  The 5,674 recalls from the IRR announced in 2004 targeted specialists with needed skills in intelligence, engineering, medicine, administration, transportation, security, and other key support and logistical areas. In certain badly needed specialties, the military could have avoided involuntary recalls altogether if it had not expelled competent gay troops in exactly the same fields. For instance, during the six-year period from 1998 to 2003, the military recalled 72 soldiers in communication and navigation but discharged 115 gay troops in that category; 33 in operational intelligence but expelled 50 gays; 33 in combat operations control but expelled 106. In total, while the army announced it would recall 5,674 troops from the Individual Ready Reserve, 6,416 troops had been discharged for being gay, lesbian, or bisexual in the previous six years. Appallingly, 260 of the recalls were for medical specialists—those in the very same occupational categories as the 244 who were discharged over the first ten years of the anti-gay policy, including Beth Schissel. “If those gay service members were allowed to stay in their trained professions,” said Representative Marty Meehan, then a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee who sponsored legislation to repeal the current policy, “forced recalls in those fields would not be an issue.”31

  THERE ARE STILL people out there who argue that it’s the right thing to do to kick out gay troops because they undermine privacy and morale. But the larger question is this: Even if the presence of openly gay troops did exact a cost to straight privacy (which is, of course, already compromised in military life), that cost would need to be weighed against the damage that is surely done to cohesion by yanking gays out of the highly cohesive teams in which medical personnel train in order to save soldiers’ lives. Among the success stories of modern military medicine is the development of forward surgical teams, which provide “total team training” to doctors, nurses, and medics who will treat acutely injured patients on the battlefield. These predeployment group training methods have now replaced on-the-job training as the most effective approach to treating casualties, and the cohesion of the team is thus critical to the viability of the entire fighting force. Deputy Surgeon General Webb testified that it is this type of “clinical teamwork that makes a tremendously positive difference in the care of the wounded.” The special skills of military medical personnel are not easy to attract, retain, or replace. Of the medical corps, Webb concluded that “it is critical that we develop the appropriate programs to ensure that their expertise and experience are not lost.”

  Beth Schissel agreed. “You can’t go out on the street tomorrow and pick out someone to replace me,” she said. “You can’t just find people with my qualifications who are ready to serve as I did. I was created by [the military training] system and then discarded.” Schissel said her mentor, who went on to become air force surgeon general, was grooming her to eventually run military hospitals, the same path that Margarethe Cammermeyer was on. “He recognized what I could become” she said. “So it was a rude awakening for me to find out that I was a decorated junior officer and I couldn’t serve my country because of the person I loved.”32

  AS IF IT’S not enough to lose critical talent, compromise quality, and overtax remaining troops, there is another source of damage wrought by this policy: the tarnished image of a military that is seen by millions of Americans—gay and straight alike—as behind the curve. Indeed, it is not only gays who have been turned away from military service under the ban. Countless others are turned off by the prospect of serving in an institution that flies in the face of the principles of nondiscrimination that they hold dear. To them, the military has increasingly come to be seen as a last bastion of discrimination, a lumbering, bureaucratic institution that refuses to change with the changing times. This is not just a question of offended liberals resisting the military because it rejects their pacifist values. According to 2005 polls, nearly 80 percent of the American public believe gays should be allowed to serve openly in the military. The respondents to the poll included majorities of Republicans, regular churchgoers, and people with negative attitudes toward gays.33

  Since the Vietnam era, a “civil-military gap” has worried strategists and observers who recognize how crucial it is for both military culture and civilian society to enjoy mutual respect. Americans generally hold a high level of esteem for the armed forces; nevertheless, tensions have persisted for over a generation between a society that has grown more and more liberal in its cultural values and a military that often appears to be clinging to a world that has ceased to exist. This gap, along with an unpopular war in Iraq, strains the capacity of military recruiters to appeal to the highest quality and quantity of potential enlistees.

  The most obvious roots of resistance to the American military lie in the anti-war movement of the 1960s and the disillusionment bred by the Vietnam War. But the Reagan years rebuilt a good deal of support for the military, and by the 1990s it was discrimination against gays and lesbians that gave many the sense that the military was a bulwark of conservative intolerance in a world whose values and attitudes were quickly changing.

  Resentment toward anti-gay exclusion came to a fore following the Persian Gulf War when Americans learned that known gays had been sent into battle and then fired on their return. In 1993 hundreds of graduates and faculty members at Harvard stood and turned their backs on Colin Powell when he delivered the college’s commencement address. The military’s image remained plagued by ongoing embarrassments throughout the 1990s and beyond, rooted in the perception that it refused to evolve with the times. During the 2000s, revelations of the discharges of critical specialists like Arabic linguists exacerbated the situation, as the stupidity of kicking out the most badly needed personnel became a recurring joke on late-night talk shows.

  It also didn’t help matters when Americans learned the air force had sought $7 million to develop a “gay bomb” that would turn enemy soldiers into inept homosexual warriors. The idea was to break down the unit cohesion of hostile armies with a chemical aphrodisiac that would make their soldiers more interested in one another than in toppling the United States. Though the gay bomb was never developed, the idea shone a light onto the mentality of military officials who continued to believe both that people could be turned gay and that homosexuality would destroy a fighting force. Nor did it help when the Palm Center revealed that, as late as 2006, military documents still defined homosexuality as a “mental disorder”—along with retardation and impulse control disorder—more than thirty years after the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses.34

&
nbsp; Resistance to military intolerance was not solely the purview of idealistic, liberal college students. Mainstream commentators and small newspapers throughout the country found the military’s ouster of gay troops during the war on terrorism to be utterly confounding. “Military Dumb in Any Language,” read the headline of an editorial in The Charleston Gazette. “The Pentagon has let prejudice come in the way of the fight against terror,” read the editorial. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution called the policy “ludicrous” and wrote that it was “utterly inconceivable that our government would compromise the safety of the nation” by firing nearly ten thousand troops just for being gay. “The current policy lacks common sense,” editorialized USA Today. In May 2005, the neoconservative columnist Max Boot wrote in the Los Angeles Times that he had reversed his position on the gay ban. “The fight against gay rights is hurting the fight against our real enemies,” he argued. “In the struggle against Islamic fanatics, we can’t afford to turn volunteers away.”35

  Such indictments, which reflected broad distaste for the military’s intolerance, had real consequences for recruitment. It was not just that people were turning away from the military; in thousands of instances, recruiters themselves have been turned away, deprived of the opportunity to reach the students they needed to fill empty slots in the armed forces—all because the policy on gay troops violates the laws or principles of school districts and colleges across the country. Indeed, there is little greater evidence of the damage to military readiness wrought by “don’t ask, don’t tell” than the exile of military recruiters from high school and college campuses nationwide.

  Undersecretary of Defense Charles Abell told Congress that “part of the challenge we face” in closing recruitment shortfalls is in getting “influencers”— parents, teachers, coaches, and other adults with a direct impact on the choices made by young people—to “understand the nobility and the true nature of” military service.36 Such high-minded ideals are difficult to maintain when the pall of discrimination hangs over the institution. Of course, some influencers think more highly of the military precisely because it seeks to free its ranks from known homosexuals; but as four-fifths of Americans oppose discrimination in the military, “don’t ask, don’t tell” has become a drag on the enthusiasm influencers are likely to show in nudging young people toward military service.

  Far and away the largest concentrated pool of potential recruits for the military is America’s high schools. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” ripped into this pool and cordoned off countless high school students, putting them out of reach of military recruiters. In many cases, military discrimination directly conflicts with a school’s nondiscrimination policy, prompting efforts to restrict recruiters’ access to campus. Until they were forced by law to abandon their position, for instance, all San Francisco schools had banned recruiters because of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Nationwide, more than two thousand high schools have sought to deny military recruiters access to students or student information in the last ten years, and the Pentagon acknowledged that in just one year, high schools barred military officials from recruiting on campus more than nineteen thousand times.37

  When high schools refuse to cooperate with the armed forces, the consequences for recruiting can be serious. The military’s constrained ability to appeal to the nation’s young people made it harder to fill its shortfalls and contributed to the reduced standards of incoming troops. The result, as described in a House Armed Services Committee report, was “higher operational risks, reduced readiness, and increased stress on both deployed and nondeployed forces.” The services, it said, “are not able to attract sufficient high-quality recruits to maintain the quality force so critical to readiness.” The committee concluded that “further reductions to recruit quality standards present a very costly and dangerous risk to military readiness.”38

  The committee’s recommendations reflected its understanding that the recruitment ban held by the nation’s high schools in protest of the military’s discriminatory policy was a major hurdle in meeting its personnel needs. It advised adding up to $200 million in federal funds for recruitment and encouraging localities to “provide military recruiters the same access to high school students that is provided to other prospective employers.” It also took pains to note that more money could achieve only limited gains in meeting recruitment goals, and that a “broad range of reforms outside those of military pay and compensation” would be necessary to resolve the shortfalls.39 The “broad range of reforms,” however, was never broad enough to incorporate a reconsideration of the gay ban, whose presence directly contributed to the shortfall and recruitment problems.

  Thus the huge recruitment hurdles faced by the military are, in some regard, self-imposed, or at least avoidable. The policy violates both the values and, frequently, the regulations or laws of school districts and colleges across the land, prompting a costly, embarrassing, and needless battle between the military and the schools they are seeking to tap for service. As long as the Pentagon continues to fire gay and lesbian service members, recruitment will suffer because many high schools will refuse to cooperate with the military, or will cooperate only when forced to at the hands of a self-defeating law that further alienates many of the people it seeks to attract.

  The situation with colleges is similar to that of high schools. One congressional study found 140 institutions of higher education that denied military recruiters access to campus. Resistance to military recruitment was so strong that Congress decided it had to pass laws to force schools to accept military recruiters on campus. Angered by what many saw as an expression of protest against the military, Congress decided to flex its muscle in response. It passed a law that yanked federal funding from any college that refused to grant recruiters access—even when doing so would violate long-standing antidiscrimination clauses held by the universities. In introducing the legislation, Representative Gerald Solomon of New York, its sponsor, said that if universities did not like the military, that was their prerogative. “But do not expect Federal dollars to support your interference with our military recruiters.”40

  Of course, the universities that barred recruiters did not necessarily dislike the military, nor was their objective to interfere with military recruitment. They were obliged by their own policies, and frequently by external policies such as those set by the American Association of Law Schools (in the case of law schools), to limit employer recruiting to those who signed forms stating they followed nondiscrimination clauses as laid out in university rule books.

  In 1996, the so-called Solomon amendment was expanded, revoking Defense Department funds for any college or university with an “anti-ROTC policy.” Over the next several years, the law was repeatedly fine-tuned to put more teeth in the arsenal of the federal government. It was expanded to deny funding not only from the Department of Defense but from a host of other agencies, including the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education.41 By 2002, the law’s sway had quietly metastasized, growing into a spiteful punishment—as evidenced by the denial not just of Pentagon funds but of grant money from whatever federal sources the Congress could control.

  That year, just before school reopened for the fall semester, Harvard Law School announced it would end its long-standing ban on military recruiters. The newly strengthened and enforced Solomon amendment threatened to eliminate hundreds of millions of federal research dollars from the entire university if the law school continued to honor its nondiscrimination policy. Following the attacks of 9/11, well aware that the United States was gearing up for military action and might suffer from restricted recruitment access to American campuses, the air force had reviewed the list of schools deemed to be in compliance with Solomon’s demands. Harvard fell short, it decided. The school was told it was no longer in compliance and if it did not reverse course, the air force would recommend to the secretary of defense that it cut off funding to the entire university because of the law school’s sins. In a lette
r to the law school community, Dean Robert Clark wrote that he had struggled mightily with the issue, but that ultimately Harvard stood to lose $328 million each year in federal funds that went to student aid, faculty pay, and scientific research that was earmarked for finding cures and treatments for life-threatening medical conditions.42 The money took precedence over the principle of nondiscrimination, and the Congress had succeeded in strong-arming Harvard into doing its bidding.

  The Solomon amendment has created some of the most asinine situations to come out of the military’s gay ban. As the United States became a war nation, government reports began calling for greater cooperation between national defense agencies and the educational system, including universities. One such report, the Pentagon’s 2005 white paper, “A Call to Action for National Foreign Language Capabilities,” called for government-sponsored research into innovative academic approaches to language specialization— precisely the kind of research that the government threatens to cut off if universities, in accordance with their nondiscrimination policies, refuse to let military officials recruit on campus.43

  But the absurdities began earlier. In 1996, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that “don’t ask, don’t tell” violated the state’s nondiscrimination law protecting gays and lesbians. The result was to let stand a University of Connecticut Law School rule that blocked the military from recruiting on campus. Yet for a different reason entirely, the university had to retain its ROTC unit on campus: Federal law required it, as a land-grant college, to teach military tactics, something accomplished by the ROTC program. Thus a state law required giving the armed forces the boot, which meant the loss of federal funds for the university, while a federal law required bringing them on board, which would be a clear violation of the state law that canned recruiters in the first place.44