Posted on 06/15/2010 2:54:20 AM PDT by markomalley
As early as this week, the United States Senate may turn to the annual legislation known as “The National Defense Authorization Act” (NDAA) that is supposed to provide the Pentagon what it needs to defend our nation. Unfortunately, thanks to an amendment added in the Senate Armed Services Committee that would impose the radical homosexual agenda on the U.S. military, a more appropriate title for this bill would be “The Bring Back the Draft Act.”
Mind you, none of the bill’s sponsors would want it given such a descriptor. Nor are they likely to own up to the reality that their effort to repeal the present statutory prohibition on avowed homosexuals serving in uniform (popularly, though incorrectly, known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”) will have the effect of destroying the highly successful All Volunteer Force.
Yet, that is, nonetheless, the professional judgment of over 1160 retired senior military officers who joined together earlier this year to warn President Obama and the Congress of this danger.
Specifically, these distinguished officers– who included among their ranks two former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, several service chiefs, a number of combatant command, theater, and other major U.S. and allied force commanders and two Medal of Honor recipients– wrote:
Our past experience as military leaders leads us to be greatly concerned about the impact of repeal [of the law] on morale, discipline, unit cohesion and overall military readiness. We believe that imposing this burden on our men and women in uniform would undermine recruiting and retention, impact leadership at all levels, have adverse effects on the willingness of parents who lend their sons and daughters to military service, and eventually break the All-Volunteer Force.
Such a grim assessment has been informed by, among other data, the results of a poll of serving military personnel (as opposed to civilians) conducted by the Military Times. It found that roughly 10 percent of those currently in uniform would leave the armed forces if the proponents of the amendment to the NDAA succeed in repealing the current law. The pollsters reported that another 15% would actively consider doing so. In time of war, even the more conservative estimates of such losses would be absolutely devastating – particularly if, as seems likely, they come disproportionately from the critical ranks of field grade and non-commissioned officers.
Those who decide no longer to serve are not “homophobes.” They are men and women who quite understandably do not want to be put in settings of forced intimacy (foxholes, barracks, showers, submarines, etc.) with individuals who find them sexually attractive. Civilians, who polls say mostly support the idea of gays serving in the military, tend to have little idea of what such circumstances would be like. They certainly are ill-equipped to understand the impact more generally of repeal on the military culture, and the essential “good order and discipline” it requires, that would be inflicted by the sort of “zero-tolerance” policy demanded by zealots of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.
Interestingly, a front-page article in Sunday’s Washington Post provides a flavor of how problematic such arrangements would be in practice. Entitled “In Limbo Over ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’” the news item was transparently designed to promote the inevitability of repeal, and to tout the accommodations already being made by the armed forces to the anticipated post-repeal order of things.
Still, the article could not avoid the reality that there will be serious issues involving conduct, discipline, spousal benefits, housing arrangements and the ability of military chaplains to practice and minister their respective faiths. These are precisely the sorts of problems an internal Pentagon review has been given until December to assess.
But legislators more interested in appeasing homosexual activists than understanding– let alone avoiding– damage to the armed forces are insisting that the current prohibition be repealed now. In order to secure sufficient votes for passage, they adopted a cynical gambit: The repeal would only go into effect after the Pentagon’s study is done and three officials (all of whom have already made up their mind, namely, President Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and JCS Chairman Mike Mullen) give the go-ahead. The House of Representatives has already approved such a rigged game, voting recently to strike the existing law over the bipartisan objections of its Armed Services Committee and the four serving chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.
As a practical matter, the result will likely be a hemorrhage of talent from the military. If so, the Nation would be required to make one of two choices: The first would be to accept defeat on today’s battlefields– and leave the country wholly ill-prepared to deal with those of tomorrow. Assuming that outcome is still deemed unacceptable to most Americans, the only alternative would be to reinstitute conscription, better known– and reviled– as “The Draft.”
Whether they own up to it or not, legislators who vote to allow radical homosexuals to inflict their social experiment on the only military we have (in time of war no less), are on notice: As Colin Powell once famously said in another context: “You break it, you own it.” The trouble is, the rest of us will pay the possibly exorbitantly high price of such irresponsible breakage of the All Volunteer Force.
This is EXACTLY what the LEFT wants to happen!!!
A military draft is a form of slavery. The American people tolerate the idea for the purpose of fighting a major war since if we ever lost something like WW-II we'd ALL be slaves, but the idea of drafting the boy next door and telling him he has some sort of patriotic duty to go into harm's way for any sort of a geopolitical GAME is something which the American people will not tolerate and which could easily start a second civil war.
In particular there needs to be written down a minimal set of conditions under which draftees could ever be used in combat and the absolute minimum should be a full declaration of war by the US senate, and a full commitment to destroy an adversary as thoroughly as the axis powers were destroyed in WW-II.
The nation if anything would have MORE of a duty to extend the last effort to give draftees a chance to come home alive than it does professional soldiers. That might easily mean being willing to destroy an enemy city to save the lives of five or ten US soldiers and if the politicians are not willing to do that than, again, they have no business using draftees in combat for whatever they're trying to accomplish.
If a lot of the people leaving the military are NCOs a return to the draft wouldn’t fix a damn thing. I takes years to make a good NCO, the old “Shake and Bake” NCOs of the Viet Nam era were a waste.
Repealing DADT will destroy unit cohesiveness and have a negative impact on recruiting(except for the queers). This is bad policy.
Well said! Thank you.
IMO, they want to do this to agitate. They want to divide the civilians outside and divide the troops on the inside of the military. If the Left can synthesize new victim’s groups, the rest is just a matter of political polarization. Triaits of communists and facists.
What’s being missed here is the affect it could have on the lower enlisted ranks, when they are deployed far afield in COPs and OPs. My son recently returned from Afghanistan. His description of life in the outposts is that of very young men, living in filth and (of necessity) intimate conditions, who handle the stress by engaging in bumptious, vulgar, “reindeer games” toward one another. This includes referring to one another in a derogatory fashion. What happens, far afield, when one young soldier uses the word “fag” toward another in a teasing manner? It’s not hard to imagine the imposition of PC-speak upon combat soldiers by an administration bent on inserting a protected class into a culture that is not ready to adapt to the open practice of homosexuality. The Soldiers and Marines doing the actual fighting live together and act, in down-time, like the 18 to 22 year olds they are. This will result in situations where harmless “teasing” is escalated to a violation of someone’s perceived civil rights, with the concomitant application of military discipline. Combat soldiers cannot be burdened with political correctness under field conditions. The senior commanders know this, and know that ultimately, good NCO’s and officers will be held responsible for protecting openly gay servicemembers from the behavior of their peers. It is no secret that certain aspects of military discipline are left behind when a small unit is far afield under combat conditions. Men live together in filth, under conditions of little privacy, where political correctness cannot survive. In such cases, it would be too easy for comments made in joking ways to be construed as “hate speech” or threatening statements. This is what is meant when commanders say “unit cohesion will be adversely affected”. The concept is lost on the pro-homosexual element, but the effect will be very real.
They also used to draft people in “peace time” and require that they put their lives on hold to work for Uncle Same in the military.
Homosexuals openly serving in the military could also lead to a preference in promoting homosexuals in the military since, as the new demographic, they might complain that they are not “fairly represented” in leadership positions. Fast tracked promotions.
Or high up staff weenies will decide they aren’t being properly represented. Either way the result will be the same - incompetent NCOs and officers.
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