The Palm Center has issued a scathing response to former Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill McPeak's op-ed in today's New York Times about gays in the military. It reads in part:
Gen. McPeak claims that “advocates for gays in the service have by and
large avoided a discussion of unit cohesion” which ought to be the main
focus of the debate. This is simply false. There are at least twenty studies
from the last fifty years, many written by the military's own
researchers, which find that gay and lesbian troops do not harm
cohesion. As an article published by the office of the Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff concludes, “there is no scientific evidence to
support the claim that unit cohesion will be negatively affected if
homosexuals serve openly.”"Gen. McPeak also claims there is no
evidence that troops will fight more effectively when the gay ban is
repealed. In fact, research shows that the ban itself undermines
cohesion and readiness. A bipartisan study group of Flag and General Officers which
took a year to assess all of the evidence on “don't ask, don't tell”
found that commanders in Iraq are ignoring the policy and choosing to
keep their teams together rather than firing loyal gay troops. A
recent Military Times poll confirms that many commanders know of gays
and lesbians serving in their units, but choose not to discharge them,
suggesting that these leaders believe that known gays help rather than
hurt the force.Finally, Gen. McPeak has acknowledged publicly
that when there is a tradeoff between pursuing moral values and
military effectiveness, he prefers the former, even at the expense of
the latter. He opposed women in combat in the 1990s, saying he had
“personal prejudices” against expanding combat roles for women, “even
though logic tells us” that women can conduct combat operations just as
well as men. He actually told Congress that he would choose an
inferior male flight instructor over a superior female one even if it
made for a “militarily less effective situation.” “I admit it doesn't
make much sense,” he said, “but that's the way I feel about it.”
Elsewhere he repeated that his position did not meet “strict evidence
standards for logic,” but that that did not change his position, a
direct contradiction to his claim that he seeks to engage in an
enlightened debate."
You may recall that the current Air Force Chief of Staff, Norman Schwartz, thinks repealing DADT is "premature" though Air Force Secretary Michael B. Donley supports abolishing the policy.
