Does Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Hurt The Military?

One of the primary arguments in favor of ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ (DADT), the Clinton-era policy which states gay, lesbian, bisexual service-members can stay in the military without being asked about their sexual orientation so long as they don’t disclose they are gay, has been that allowing gay service-members to serve openly, would harm troop “morale” and thus troop “readiness”. I am not going to go into all the reasons that would likely not be the case, but instead point out two interesting articles from Stephen Walt over at Foreign Policy.

The first article lays out why DADT is simply not realistic and ends up resulting in having fewer otherwise-qualified individuals in the military:

I can understand the short-term politics (read: timidity) behind Obama’s decision (i.e., he doesn’t want to annoy the armed services when he’s got two wars to wage, especially when both are going badly). But from a realist perspective, not allowing gay men and women to serve openly in the armed forces is a bad policy.

Realism sees world politics as a competitive realm, where states face real enemies and where military power is an important element of state’s overall capabilities. In a competitive environment, you want the very best people working (and fighting) for you, and you wouldn’t want to do anything that limited your access to talented, patriotic, and highly motivated personnel. And it’s not as though the U.S. army has got a surplus of trained Arabic speakers these days.

In the past, plenty of organizations (and some countries) hurt themselves by excluding talented people on the basis of this sort of prejudice. Ivy League schools used to have quotas on Jews and other minorities, which meant that both their faculties and their student bodies were weaker than they would have been otherwise. That was good news for universities that didn’t have these restrictions (like MIT, the University of Chicago, or CCNY), because they were able to recruit on the basis of merit and frequently outdid their hidebound rivals.

Major league baseball teams excluded blacks until Branch Rickey was smart and courageous enough to hire Jackie Robinson, and team owners who didn’t follow suit were soon stuck with less talented athletes. Would any serious NBA club try to mount an all-white squad today? But by the same logic, would any general manager exclude white players if it meant passing up on a Larry Bird, Steve Nash, or Manu Ginobili? Would Google or Apple be better off if they refused to hire a talented programmer because she happened to be black, or gay, or Catholic, or Mormon, or Republican? Not only would it be illegal, it would be stupid.

That’s not to say that Professor Walt doesn’t think that the arguments about fairness and ending such discriminatory practices, aren’t compelling in and of themselves, but arguably, some people will never be moved by that argument, although many of us will.

In a follow-up article, Walt then goes on to apply his “realist” interpretation of DADT to the larger issue of viability and success of some nations over others. In other words, do nations with less of a tendency to discriminate and more of a tendency towards tolerance in the military, government policy and/or industry end up having a better long-term competitive advantage?:

This got me thinking: might a similar logic be at work at a more global level? Specifically, does the competitive nature of international politics give some states an advantage because their political systems and social values make it relatively easy to attract and assimilate talented citizens from other countries, thereby enabling them to draw more-or-less selectively on the entire global talent pool? If so, then these states will be able to improve their relative position over time, and to the extent that globalization now facilitates people moving from place to place, that tendency should be increasing.

By contrast, states that make assimilation difficult or that discriminate on other areas will tend to be less attractive destinations for highly educated and/or entrepreneurial individuals, and these states will for the most part have to work with the citizenry they’ve got or pay a very high premium to attract talent from abroad.

It’s an interesting analysis and perhaps it should be injected into the coming political debate about ending DADT.

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