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Congressional calendar endangers repeal of 'don't ask, don't tell'By Philip Rucker and Ed O'Keefe Washington Post Staff Writers Saturday, December 4, 2010; 7:11 PM This was supposed to be the year that the law banning gays from serving openly in the military would be repealed. President Obama and the top Pentagon brass made clear their distaste for "don't ask, don't tell." Polling suggests the nation has moved past it. The Democrats who control Congress, as well as some Republicans, are ready to overturn it. And last week a final potential obstacle was removed when an exhaustive Pentagon study found little...

Top leaders of the military have recommended that the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) ban on homosexuals serving in the military be abolished, claiming that it would not unduly impair military effectiveness. However, the Pentagon study of the matter leaves substantial doubt as to that conclusion’s veracity. My doubts are principally as to the impact on combat effectiveness. Unless armed combat has vanished as the principal role of the military and the concept of “boots on the ground” has become obsolete, that is important.

The top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee is accusing the Obama administration of putting a political "spin" on the results of a months-long review of the 1993 law banning openly homosexual men and women from serving in the military, saying he wants to hear directly from senior officers on the issue. During an interview in his House office on Thursday, Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Calif., echoed his GOP counterparts in the Senate, who earlier in the day used the first of two days of hearings on a proposed repeal of the gay ban to criticize the Pentagon's review and...

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates released a long-awaited Pentagon working-group report on the repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy enacted under President Bill Clinton. Most troops, the review found, would not object to a repeal. Some troops made strong arguments in favor of repeal. As one service member noted, "We need all available men and women who are willing to serve their country, no matter what their sexual orientation is." Another said, "We shouldn't turn people away because of things they do in their private life." One gay service member noted that a repeal would "take a...

The chiefs of the Army, Marines and Air Force warned Friday that implementing a repeal of the policy banning gays from serving openly in the military would be more difficult than a Pentagon study has suggested, challenging the assessments of other top military officials in the administration. Gen. James Amos, the Marine commandant, offered the most critical comments in a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee and recommended against a repeal at this time. He said the Marines would carry out a change in policy if Congress votes for it but said the shift has a "strong potential for...

Top leaders of the military have recommended that the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) ban on homosexuals serving in the military be abolished, claiming that it would not unduly impair military effectiveness. However, the Pentagon study of the matter leaves substantial doubt as to that conclusion’s veracity. My doubts are principally as to the impact on combat effectiveness. Unless armed combat has vanished as the principal role of the military and the concept of “boots on the ground” has become obsolete, that is important. ..snip.. To the extent that elimination of DADT was not a political/ideological matter to be resolved...

Gay Rights: The purpose of our military is to kill people and break things when necessary. It's not a tool for social engineering. Wartime is not the time to repeal "don't ask, don't tell." Repealing the "don't ask, don't tell" policy begun under President Clinton in 1993 is neither a legislative nor a military priority while we are engaged militarily in Iraq and Afghanistan and knee-deep in a jobless recovery where the issues of national debt and tax cuts should be paramount. Yet liberals drowning in political correctness consider it a priority, as does Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who...

That makes 60 votes for cloture, assuming Reid can keep the entire Democratic caucus in line. I’m not aware of any defectors yet but Tester, McCaskill, Ben Nelson and a few other red-state Dems who are up in 2012 will be thinking awfully hard about this vote, needless to say.Two big qualifiers, though. Collins, at least, is sticking by the GOP’s plan to vote no on everything until a deal is reached on the Bush tax cuts. Brown’s statement doesn’t address the subject, but since he also signed the Republican pledge to make the tax cuts top priority, presumably he’s...

WASHINGTON – Bucking the Pentagon's top leaders, the chiefs of the Army and Marines urged Congress on Friday not to allow openly gay people to serve in the military, at least not while troops are at war in Afghanistan. The generals publicly rebutted their own bosses and the White House, arguing that it is too risky to change the policy now. That gave political ammunition to congressional Republicans trying to retain the ban known as "don't ask, don't tell."

Democrats hoping to move forward with legislation other than tax cuts shouldn't look to centrist Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) to break the logjam. Collins said again on Friday that, while she would vote with Democrats to end the military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy, she wouldn't do so until a debate over tax cuts has been resolved. "Once the tax issue is resolved, I have made it clear that if the Majority Leader brings the Defense Authorization bill to the floor with sufficient time allowed for debate and amendments, I would vote to proceed to the bill," she said in...

The state's new Senator wades into the debate over gays serving openly in the military. U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin's, D-W.Va., first appearance on the Armed Services Committee came as the panel took testimony on the repeal of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy from the members of the some of the nation's top uniformed officers The Joint Chiefs of Staff told the committee they thought repeal would be divisive to troops in wartime, and suggested pushing it back to at least 2012. This comes in stark contrast to testimony Thursday from their boss, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the...

An actual read-through of the results shows much greater combat troop opposition to repeal than the initial public statements would have you believe. According to an early media report of the just released Pentagon study on elimination of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) it was recognized that it “might cause some disruption at first but would not create widespread or long-lasting problems.” In the absence of any explanation of “some disruptions,” “at first,” and “widespread or long-lasting,” and the lack of reference in that assertion to combat effectiveness, that is not entirely comforting. Some top leaders of the military have...

Before Congress.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs Chair Adm. Mike Mullen have been strong backers of a repeal of 'don't ask, don't tell.' But the heads of the Army, Marines, and Air Force ... The heads of the US Army, Marines, and Air Force recommended against repealing the "don't ask, don't tell" ban on openly gay troops, at least in the short-term, in testimony on Capitol Hill Friday – clearly dissenting from the secretary of Defense and the nation’s top military officer. The Air Force chief of staff, ... impact military effectiveness. He called some of the assessments endorsed by...

Long before the Pentagon’s report on the expected effects of repealing the current law prohibiting open homosexuals from serving in the U.S. military was released, the conventional “narrative” had already been established thanks to leaks by anonymous individuals “familiar with the report’s conclusions.” That narrative holds that repeal of the current law would create “few risks” for military readiness, retention, and recruiting. The conventional narrative makes much of the claim that most of the service members surveyed believe that repeal would not have a negative impact on military effectiveness. The key to “overcoming resistance” to repeal of the current law,...

Marine Commandant Gen. Jim Amos and Air Force chief of staff Gen. Norton Schwartz will tell a Senate panel Friday they do not recommend Congress change the law to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. “Based on what I know about the very tough fight on the ground in Afghanistan, the almost singular focus of our combat forces as they train up and deploy into theater, the necessary tightly woven culture of those combat forces that we are asking so much of at this time and finally the direct feedback from the survey, my recommendation is...

This isn’t really aimed at the troops, I think. Rather, he and Gates have simply reached the end of their respective ropes with McCain’s endless backpedaling on “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Maverick’s chief concern at today’s hearing was that servicemen will quit in droves if forced to serve alongside gays in combat. Mullen’s reply: Oh well. “Should repeal occur, some soldiers and Marines may want separate shower facilities. Some may ask for different berthing. Some may even quit the service,” Mullen said. “We’ll deal with that.”… “We treat each other with respect or we find another place to work. Period,”...

The two biggest stories this week are WikiLeaks' continued publication of classified government documents, which did untold damage to America's national security interests, and the Democrats' fanatical determination to repeal "don't ask, don't tell" and allow gays to serve openly in the military. The mole who allegedly gave WikiLeaks the mountains of secret documents is Pfc. Bradley Manning, Army intelligence analyst and angry gay. We've heard 1 billion times about the Army translator who just wanted to serve his country, but was cashiered because of whom he loved. I'll see your Army translator and raise you one Bradley Manning. According...

Sen. John McCain, one of the strongest opponents of repealing the ban on allowing gay and lesbian service members from serving openly, said he is open to changing the law – just not now. At the outset of the first of two high-profile Senate hearings on repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law Thursday, McCain (R-Ariz.) said it “may be premature” to make a change at this time, as he questioned the quality of the Pentagon study that recommends the force would be amenable to repeal. McCain’s support is critical to the Obama administration’s hope to pass the legislation.

John Brummett comments further today on Sen. Mark Pryor's emergence as a vigorous voice of right-wing Republicanism in the case of gays in the military and immigrant children. Pryor, who got cancer and fundamentalist religion along the way, always has leaned to the considerable right of his father and to the more-distant right of his mother. Now he positively plunges in that direction, somewhat imaginatively, actually, strongly suggesting that his natural leanings have been accelerated by fear of the Republican sweep that took place in his state a few weeks ago and which presumably could threaten him four years hence...