Gays and the army

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Some news from the American DADT front (DADT = Don't Ask Don't Tell, a policy which allows gays to serve in the military only if they keep their preferences a secret. Most NATO members allow openly gay troops.)

SAN DIEGO — The new commandant of the U.S. Marines Corps said Saturday that now is the wrong time to overturn the "don't ask, don't tell" policy prohibiting gays from openly serving in the military, as U.S. troops remain in the thick of war in Afghanistan.

"There's risk involved; I'm trying to determine how to measure that risk," Gen. James Amos said. "This is not a social thing. This is combat effectiveness. That's what the country pays its Marines to do."

Last month, the Pentagon was forced to lift its ban on openly serving gays for eight days after a federal judge in California ordered the military to do so. The Justice Department has appealed, and a federal appeals court granted a temporary stay of the injunction.

Amos said the policy's repeal may have unique consequences for the Marines, which is exempt from a Defense Department rule for troops to have private living quarters except at basic training or officer candidate schools. The Marines puts two people in each room to promote a sense of unity.

"There is nothing more intimate than young men and young women - and when you talk of infantry, we're talking our young men - laying out, sleeping alongside of one another and sharing death, fear and loss of brothers," he said. "I don't what the effect of that will be on cohesion. I mean, that's what we're looking at. It's unit cohesion, it's combat effectiveness."

First of all: I have no problem with gays. In fact, I consider them to be former competitors who dropped out of the competition. I'd have no problem if all good-looking male singles but me became gay tomorrow. I'd really be fine with that. (Emphasis on "male"!)

I have also no issues with gays in an air force or navy. I accept absolutely no argument against gays in air forces and navies.

The army (and a parallel army branded as a "marine corps") is different. I poked some fun at the DADT policy problems before, but I have to admit that it's really tricky with ground forces. I avoided the topic for a year, but Amos provided now the perfect provocation for a comment. He has hit the nail without the more often associated bigotry.

There's no good reason to prevent all-gay combat units. Gays proved to be effective warriors, soldiers and leaders in history. Alexander the Great was gay, Frederick the Great was most likely gay, Thebes' sacred band was gay, many Spartans were pretty much bisexuals - the list is long. In fact, it's longer than the list about females as effective warriors or soldiers. A segregation between heterosexuals and homosexuals would probably be unacceptable for political and civilian reasons, though.
 
There's no good reason to prevent wholly gay or mixed air force or navy units. There's one really important issue which makes mixed army units very risky, though:

The general said it - it's about cohesion.

Cohesion is something which civilian pundits usually ignore in discussions about the integration of gays (and women!) into army units. That's a serious mistake. It's almost all about cohesion. Forget the shiny electronics, forget rifles and bullets. Forget tanks, forget camouflage patterns - warfare is largely about what happens in our brains. Cohesion is one of the most important symptoms of what happens in our brains in wartime.

Cohesion is the footing of an army. A unit without good cohesion is brittle, it will break under pressure and be destroyed. A unit with good cohesion can stand and survive vastly superior attacking forces and does not disintegrate even if it's forced to pull off a difficult withdrawal.

German soldiers know cohesion through the keywords "kleine Kampfgemeinschaft" and "Kameradschaft". Cohesion has been a traditional strength of German forces thanks to a suitable personnel system. It's widely considered among experts to be one of the variables which can explain the military efficiency of the German army in both world wars. Cohesion is one of the most important factors for small unit performance, and even major battles are now largely accumulations of small unit engagements.

The U.S. forces are known to be restricted in regard to building cohesion by their early industrial age-like personnel system. They have extreme difficulties to create good unit cohesion because troops cannot serve in a stable team for long. 

The Marines fare best, for they established a USMC-wide ethos and esprit de corps.

The introduction of openly serving gays is - like the introduction of females into army units - an experiment. It can be successful and it can be a failure. "Successful" would likely mean no more improvement than a slightly enlarged recruitment base, while "failure" describes a loss of cohesion which can have disastrous consequences. We won't know the result before the next military crisis in warfare. We need at least a crisis comparable to the crisis of TF Smith in 1950 to know whether the experiment was successful.

There is a huge risk in such an experiment, and this risk comes on top of the huge risks around the uncertainty about modern conventional warfare. We didn't have a top league peer vs. peer conflict for 65 years, we don't know modern conventional warfare. The closest thing we know is 70's technology conventional warfare between very dissimilar powers.
Now on top the uncertainty about the effect of gays on unit cohesion. Repeat:

"There's risk involved; I'm trying to determine how to measure that risk"

Most comments on DADT which I ever bothered to read were either partisan or quite homophobic. The article about Amos finally pushed the real issue into the public.


I don't say gays in the army are a bad thing, nor the opposite. I'm not pro or contra DADT. I say there's a real professional issue, a risk which needs to be explored and understood, maybe managed.
It would be nice if we could have discussions about females and gays in armies based on such professional issues alone, without the other diatribes.

S O

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