Nathaniel Frank, Senior Research Fellow at the Palm Center, is stepping down, and as a parting gift he has created the Unfriendly Fire Research Portal, which compiles all the research and statistics he has done on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" from his time at Palm, and from sources all around the world.
Writes Frank in the Huffington Post:
…today I am announcing that I have completed the Pentagon Working Group's work for them, five months early, and have posted it all here on this new Research Portal. Since the 1950s, research has shown there's no need to ban open gays from the military, and it's not just research by gay advocates, but by government scholars, foreign militaries, independent academics, and indeed our own military, which has acknowledged the gay ban is "inherently subjective in nature" and is the result of "professional military judgment, not scientific or sociological analysis." The point was reinforced last year when an article written by an Active Duty Air Force officer in Joint Force Quarterly, the prestigious military journal published for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, concluded "there is no scientific evidence to support the claim that unit cohesion will be negatively affected if homosexuals serve openly."
We also know that the vaunted polling of the military force is likely to tell us what several such polls have already told us: that a slight majority of military members would rather not serve with open gays, but that most are personally comfortable with gay people. Mountains of research also shows that such opinions do not mean there would be a mass exodus of soldiers if the ban were lifted, or that ending "don't ask, don't tell" would impair cohesion just because many enlisted people would rather keep it in place. The relevant question is not what do service members want (as Admiral Gary Roughead, Chief of Naval Operations, told me in February, "it is not our practice to go within our military and poll our force to determine if they like the laws of the land or not."); rather, the question is whether troops are capable of serving with gays, and research shows that they are.
Unfriendly Fire Research Portal [official site]
