Retrograde Progress on DADT

"No matter how Admiral Mike MullenI look at the issue," Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen said, "I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens."

In response to this and other statements, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has ordered the Pentagon to conduct a year-long study regarding revising the 1993 "don't ask, don't tell" policy (DADT), and has said that in the interim he will invite recommendations for the next 45 days regarding ways of rendering the current policy "more appropriate and fair to our men and women in uniform."

The words of Adm. Mike Mullen, America's highest ranking uniformed officer, have set off a flurry of response since his February 2, 2010 statement, including hostile reactions from Senator John McCain. According to McCain, the Senator is "deeply disappointed" by the decision to study DADT. McCain asserts that the decision to engage in a study is "clearly biased," because it presumes the law should be changed, and accused Gates of trying to change the policy "by fiat."

This is the same McCain who said, on Hardball in 2006:

We have the most qualified, the bravest and most capable military we've ever had in our history, and so I think that the policy is working. And I understand the opposition to it, and I've had these debates and discussions, but the day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, Senator, we ought to change the policy, then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it because those leaders in the military are the ones we give the responsibility to.

I note, again, Adm. Mike Mullen, America's highest ranking uniformed officer has just said that he opposes DADT.

Aside from the basic idiocies—violation of civil rights; instructing armed services personnel to lie, etc etc, one of the things that most puzzles me about DADT is that since it was created by Clinton's use of the Presidential Executive Order in 1993, EO 9981, I'm really not sure why it would need Congress to repeal it. I'm still trying to find out why, since other EO have been repealed by a subsequent EO.

In slightly more hopeful news, I note that Lieutenant Dan Choi, a West Point graduate and one of several Army Linguists (particularly those with Arabic language qualifications, a skill we need desperately right now) who has been removed from active duty because of DADT, has been instructed invited to resume training with his National Guard unit. Here's an NPR story about Choi's recent slight change, and here's an explanation of what it actually means.

The rapid reduction of army translators' ranks, particularly those with Arabic language qualifications, because of DADT has already been well documented; under DADT the army has fired at least fifty-eight Arabic linguists.