Study: Military gays don't undermine unit cohesion
By tankertodd Posted in Culture — Comments (11) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
This is crap.
Call it a product of a panel of retired generals with liberal guilt. You know, the Wesley Clark Foundation.
These yahoos, including one who allegedly implemented the policy under Clinton in 1993, assert that gays in the military don't hurt unit cohesion. Unfortunately their study has one seriously fatal error: it cites Israel and Great Britain as their case studies.
That's great if you can prove that Americans are the same as Israelis and/or the British. But we know that Americans aren't the same, so they can't possibly make their conclusion. Americans are more religious and more conservative at least.
They would have done much better to study American military units that had homosexuals discovered and looked at their morale before, during, and after the person was separated.
I for one think that eventually this policy will be overturned if the mores of American society continue on their trend. But don't cite nonsense studies to prove your point. Go do the heavy lifting. But I guess that doesn't befit members of the Wesley Clark Foundation (Beltway Chapter).
The 1,235,834th attempt to equate opposition to homosexuality to racism.
Blather.
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Apples and oranges
Having said that, the military is not a laboratory for social experiment. If putting black and white soldiers together would have proven to cause overwhelming problems, then different units might have been best, but thankfully, it worked out well.
It worked because people were held accountable for making it work, it didn't just magically happen. Similarly, if the officer and NCO corp put a few extra boots to tail ends, I suspect having openly gay folks serving would work out (eventually) just as well, per the UK, Israel, etc.
Rather than the dishonest tactic of trying to draw an equivalence between racial and sexual-preference integration in the Armed Forces, try thinking of it in terms of sex.
Combat-worthy soldiers are usually young, fit and at the prime of their lives in sexual attractiveness. That's the reason why co-ed units by-and-large struggle to maintain their cohesiveness over the long term. Relationships beyond that of a comrade-in-arms are inevitably formed, and along with them come love triangles, jealousies, resentments, favoritism (or charges thereof) etc. - all poisonous to unit cohesion.
Brothers are not allowed to serve in the same unit for the same reason as the situation above would present. Take the case of L/CPL B. Jones and SGT A. Jones, brothers serving in the same platoon. Their unit is under fire and B is the guy best suited to perform the task that would most likely get them all out alive to complete their mission.
However, B's chances of making it back alive is low. So A has a devil of a choice to make - send his brother out to do what needs to be done and risk him not coming back, send someone else who is even less likely to succeed and make it back, or seek another solution under the limited time they have to get out.
Now, imagine the same situation with a SGT H. Johnson and CPL C. Jameson, lovers (C could be either Christopher or Christine). And Johnson is faced with the same choice as SGT Jones above. Heck, to complicate things further, CPL D. Jackson (D could be either Daniel or Danielle), the SGT's rival for Jameson's affections is also a member of the platoon.
The study above may show that a concern for such a situation is not so significant judging from the British and Israeli experience. However, I have my doubts about how "open" the actual soldiers involved actually are about their being gay to their squad mates.
"First you win the argument, then you win the vote." - MARGARET THATCHER.
So let's start winning the argument.
If you can't ken the difference between sexual orientation and race then I'm not sure what you're doing in this conversation.
Maybe if gay soldiers were required to room in the women's barracks I might go along with it. But we don't quarter men and women in the same rooms and have them share the same latrines for a reason.
"A man does what he can and endures what he must."
Your analogy is exactly the same, up to the point where the homosexual person of your gender pats you on the butt, or gives you a look that makes you extremely uncomfortable. What you are becomes different than what you do.
I have no clue if that scenario happens, but the perception is that it would happen, and we know that perception sometimes is reality. Until that perception changes, then we have to support the ban.
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From a brief perusal of this Defense Studies Series book on the Integration of the Armed Forces. In particular from skimming the concluding chapter 24 about the objections to this integration,
The armed forces should not be a laboratory for social experiment - check
Separate units superior - check
Inferior unit performance due to effects on interpersonal relationships - check
Different races better suited for different jobs - check
Personal discomfort due to mixing - check
I won't pretend that the similarities in objections immediately disprove such objections in the case of openly homosexual soldiers, but it is food for thought. I can accept the unique concern here about romantic/sexual relationships impacting performance although the experiences of Britain and Israel do seem to belie this to some degree. In any case, my curiousity has been addressed.
serve in the same units? It seemed to work well for the Ancient Theban Sacred Band. They were the only force to beat the Spartans on the battlefield twice.
"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle
I served in the Air Force from 1982-1988. In my barracks, there was a male who was flaming gay. I say flaming because he spent far too much time in the showers watching others clean themselves. Needless to say, he was confronted by the entire team and learned to use the latrine when no one was around. Call me and my squadron mates homophobes all you want, however, his behavior was dispicable and unwelcome which gets at the heart of this study.
Morale was pretty poor for this fellow, and our barracks, because of his sexual preference. He was not a true part of the team nor did anyone go out of their way to make him a part of it. While we were forced to endure him out of esprit de corps, the cohesiveness of the unit was compromised by this one individual.
When a bunch of men are thrown together and must expose themselves as we did, it is not natural for them to become sexual with one another and not fair to force upon them deviant behavior. Just calling it what it was.
That said, there are some parts of the tail that it makes no sense at all to have levels of exclusivity that parts of the tooth have.
Translators, for example.
Man is free at the moment he wishes to be. --Voltaire
How do people who support the argument that allowing homosexuals to serve openly will destroy morale differentiate this objection from those who argued identically in regards to interracial army units? There certainly were plenty of people whose "sensitivities" were offended by serving alongside members of other races at the time of those decisions. However, I think we would agree that integration was not only right but also beneficial, no?