Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is back in the news again, and in the spirit of the Monkey Cage, I started thinking about what social science had to offer this debate. MC Guest Blogger Pat Egan weighed in at Politico’s Arena on the likelihood of the policy actually being changed this time around:
Regardless of how you feel about whether “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” should be repealed, one thing is clear: the stars are much better aligned in 2010 for allowing openly gay personnel to serve in the military than they were when Bill Clinton developed the policy in 1993.
Public opinion has moved strongly in favor of the idea (from 44 percent support in a 1993 ABC/Washington Post poll to 75 percent in the same poll conducted in 2008). For the most part, the Obama team has not become identified with the kind of culture-war issues that so quickly engulfed the Clinton agenda. Whatever you think of Obama’s “surge” strategy in Afghanistan, it has provided some cover against the charge that he’s a squishy dove on military policy. And perhaps most important, the Joint Chiefs (or at least their chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen) are on board—not just reluctantly, but unequivocally, as we saw in Mullen’s testimony today before Congress.
Over in the Weekly Standard, William Kristol weighed in with something that looked like it was calling for empirical evidence, noting that “questions about the effect of open homosexuals on unit morale and cohesion in training and combat situations remain relevant”. My response to Kristol, posted at Politco’s Arena as well, took issue with his argument in the following way:
Exactly what are those questions? Is Kristol suggesting that men and women in the our armed forces will be unable to do their jobs properly if they know that that one of their colleagues are gay? I’d think he could have a little more confidence of in the professionalism of the soldiers in “the most professional force in the history of our country”.
At a time when, as Kristol notes, our “men and women in uniform are performing heroically in two wars”, how could it possibly serve our national security interests to dismiss some of them – regardless of their performance as soldiers – on the basis of their sexual preference? Talk about a blow to morale: watching good colleagues who have volunteered to serve their country lose their jobs for nothing more than what other consenting adults they choose to date.
Of course, at the end of the day, neither Kristol nor I presented any evidence to back up our arguments. I happen to think my assumptions – our soldiers are professional enough to carry out their jobs even if they happen to find out one of their colleagues are gay, and that morale might be hurt for seeing colleagues fired for reasons related to sexuality – are more valid than his assumptions, essentially that our soldiers will be unable to do their jobs as well if they realize they have gay colleagues.
So this is where The Monkey Cage comes in. I wanted to ask readers whether or not there was any social science research out there about the performance of soldiers who have served in units with openly gay soldiers, and whether this has had any discernible affect on unit performance. Any evidence from countries that allow openly gay soldiers to serve in the military? Kristol says questions are still out there – maybe we can help answer them. (And yes, I realize I wandering into that same ambiguous space I addressed last spring when posting on the ethics of research on the efficacy of torture, but since I’m not the one actually conducting the research and simply calling for people to respond with research already conducted, I feel like I’m on safe enough ground here. Plus the blogging format ensures that anyone who has research to share will be heard in the comments section.)
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This post by Stephen Walt contains some links to evidence (I haven’t checked them out yet): http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/02/02/obama_keeps_a_promise
Well, there was this country that performed a huge social experiment on our behalf. Suppose we found the country whose military was most like ours and asked them to integrate gays in their armed services instantly, just so we could see what would happen. That really happened. Ok, not the part about them doing it for us, but is there any military in the world more like ours than the British? For the last 10 years, they’ve been effectively running a huge social science experiment for us by allowing gays to serve openly. During this time we’ve invaded two countries with them. So guess what, they’ve had essentially no problems.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/world/europe/21britain.html
Though I tentatively support ending the current policy, I must note that even after the policy ends there would still be “good colleagues who have volunteered to serve their country [who] lose their jobs for nothing more than what other consenting adults they choose to date.” What you should expect is that the military’s anti-fraternization policies will be strengthened and more rigorously enforced than now. If I were forced to guess, I’d guess that the net result would be more dismissals, but we’ll have to see.
Hi, A long long time ago I worked with Aaron Belkin who’s article in Armed Forces and Society is a good reference point for this discussion.
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”: Does the Gay Ban Undermine the Military’s Reputation?
Belkin Armed Forces & Society.2007
This is only tangentially relevant and I don’t have any citations handy, but my recollection of Robert Putnam’s “hunker down” thesis — that people in diverse environments withdraw into homogeneous groups and trust levels fall — is that the big exception is contexts in which integration, equality, etc. can be effectively enforced by the leadership. Like, say, the military’s experience with racial integration post-World War II, which may be on point here.
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