Evidence, not emotion, fuels new ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ debate - Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

Evidence, not emotion, fuels new ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ debate

Nathaniel Frank comes right out and says it:

“The government’s conclusion that banning open gays from the military is necessary to preserve privacy, cohesion and effectiveness is wholly unsupported by the research.”

Whoa, says a skeptic — isn’t “wholly unsupported” a bit strong?

No, Frank says. And 1994’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” is a policy “our nation can no longer afford. ... We need every last soldier who is willing to sacrifice for his or her country.”

Wait a minute. How do straight service members feel about that?

Frank, a senior research fellow at the Palm Center think tank at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a history professor at New York University, has answers for both questions.

The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy “was cast — and is routinely reported — as a compromise that allows [gays] to serve in the military while regulating only their behavior, not their identity. That is, it is supposed to punish conduct, not status,” Frank says. Instead, “the policy actually bans gay people.”

He admits his conclusion — “the gay ban is based on prejudice, not military necessity” — is “not exactly news” in some equal-rights circles. Then why publish a book?

The goal of “Unfriendly Fire” is to separate the opinion from the evidence and to document both.

His methodology is scholarly: Thirty pages of footnotes. Ten years of study, visiting bases and academies. Reading thousands of pages and talking with hundreds of “officers and enlisted personnel, policy makers and scholars, government personnel and civilian advocates on both sides of the debate.”

Even with all that research and documentation, “Unfriendly Fire” is no textbook read. The Ph.D. writes without sounding academic, and the book is humanized with voices from all branches.

Yet the facts are what will stand out to some readers:

• The Pentagon’s Personnel Security Research and Education Center studies of 1988 and 1989 state that gay people “were not security risks and could serve without compromising the military.”

• A 1992 Government Accountability Office report says that the military “has not conducted specific research to develop empirical evidence supporting the overall validity of the premises and rationale underlying its current policy on homosexuality.”

• A $1.3 million government-sponsored 1994 Rand study concludes that “sexual orientation is a personal and private matter and homosexual orientation is not a bar to service entry or continued service.”

That was then. And now?

In 2004, “while the Army announced it would recall 5,674 troops from the [Individual Ready Reserve], 6,416 troops had been discharged for being [gay] 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 10 years of the anti-gay policy.”

Frank writes, “the damage [done by the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy] to service members and the military has been immense. The policy increases stress, lowers morale, impairs the capacity of both gay and straight troops to form trusting bonds with one another, restricts access to support services, and creates a culture of indiscipline.”

Cultures change. What’s ahead?

In 2008, “a bipartisan panel of retired flag officers released a report through the Palm Center that represented what [former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Army Gen.] John Shalikashvili called ‘one of the most comprehensive evaluations of the issues of gays in the military since the Rand study’ in 1993. The panel found that lifting the ban is ‘unlikely to pose any significant risk to morale, good order, discipline or cohesion.’ ”

President Barack Obama — his name is not in the book’s index — also has supported changing the policy. On March 3, in response to legislation suggested by Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., the White House said the president seeks a transition away from “don’t ask, don’t tell” that is “done in a sensible way that strengthens our armed forces and our national security.”

Frank would offer “Unfriendly Fire” as evidence.