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Top leaders of the military have recommended that the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) ban on homosexuals serving in the military be abolished, claiming that it would not unduly impair military effectiveness. However, the Pentagon study of the matter leaves substantial doubt as to that conclusion’s veracity. My doubts are principally as to the impact on combat effectiveness. Unless armed combat has vanished as the principal role of the military and the concept of “boots on the ground” has become obsolete, that is important.

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates released a long-awaited Pentagon working-group report on the repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy enacted under President Bill Clinton. Most troops, the review found, would not object to a repeal. Some troops made strong arguments in favor of repeal. As one service member noted, "We need all available men and women who are willing to serve their country, no matter what their sexual orientation is." Another said, "We shouldn't turn people away because of things they do in their private life." One gay service member noted that a repeal would "take a...

Top leaders of the military have recommended that the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) ban on homosexuals serving in the military be abolished, claiming that it would not unduly impair military effectiveness. However, the Pentagon study of the matter leaves substantial doubt as to that conclusion’s veracity. My doubts are principally as to the impact on combat effectiveness. Unless armed combat has vanished as the principal role of the military and the concept of “boots on the ground” has become obsolete, that is important. ..snip.. To the extent that elimination of DADT was not a political/ideological matter to be resolved...

Long before the Pentagon’s report on the expected effects of repealing the current law prohibiting open homosexuals from serving in the U.S. military was released, the conventional “narrative” had already been established thanks to leaks by anonymous individuals “familiar with the report’s conclusions.” That narrative holds that repeal of the current law would create “few risks” for military readiness, retention, and recruiting. The conventional narrative makes much of the claim that most of the service members surveyed believe that repeal would not have a negative impact on military effectiveness. The key to “overcoming resistance” to repeal of the current law,...

Press coverage of the new Pentagon Don't Ask Don't Tell report suggests that large majorities of U.S. servicemen and women wouldn't mind the repeal of the military's current policy on gays. Don't believe it. What the report actually shows is that the military is deeply divided over the policy, both between the service branches and especially between those who have served in combat and those who haven't. Did you know that 59 percent of Marines who have served in combat say repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell would have a negative effect? And that 45 percent of Army respondents who...

WASHINGTON – Senate Republicans threatened Wednesday to block virtually all legislation until expiring tax cuts are extended and a bill is passed to fund the federal government, vastly complicating Democratic attempts to leave their own stamp on the final days of the post-election Congress. "While there are other items that might ultimately be worthy of the Senate's attention, we cannot agree to prioritize any matters above the critical issues of funding the government and preventing a job-killing tax hike," all 42 GOP senators wrote in a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. The 42 signatures are more than enough...

Instead of leading with how Army Private First Class Bradley Manning may have jeopardized national security with his document dump to WikiLeaks, NBC's chief Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski, in his profile of Manning on Tuesday's Today show, told viewers he was the "most unlikely suspect, with a youthful smile" and portrayed him as an abused victim of the military. Miklaszewski used the New York Times' Ginger Thompson in his report to tell the tale of young man who apparently decided to avenge the abuse he had taken over the years, dating back to high school, by selling out his country.

If you’re looking for someone to blame for the Wikileaks scandal, a good candidate would be President Bill Clinton. He was the one who, in 1995, signed an Executive Order removing “sexual orientation” as a grounds for denying someone a security clearance. Had that policy never been revoked, homosexual soldier Bradley Manning would never have had access to our national secrets and could not have leaked them. According to news reports, Manning decided to turn traitor after a fight with his boyfriend, which somehow motivated him to send hundreds of thousands of confidential documents to Wikileaks leader Julian Assange, who...

WASHINGTON – The Pentagon study that argues that gay troops could serve openly without hurting the military's ability to fight is expected to re-ignite debate this month on Capitol Hill over repealing the 17-year-old "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Officials familiar with the 10-month study's results have said a clear majority of respondents don't care if gays serve openly, with 70 percent predicting that lifting the ban would have positive, mixed or no results. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the findings hadn't been released. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm....

As the Senate returns to Washington to debate such matters as the Pentagon’s homosexual exclusion policy, major media coverage of the disclosure of thousands of sensitive U.S. Government cables by WikiLeaks has curiously and conveniently ignored the homosexual orientation and anti-American motivation of the alleged leaker, Pfc. Bradley Manning, now in prison ...

It was childishly easy, according to the published chatlog of a conversation Manning had with a fellow-hacker. "I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like 'Lady Gaga' … erase the music … then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing ... [I] listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga's Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history." He said that he "had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months".

OCEANSIDE, Calif. (AP) -- They are the few, the proud and perhaps the military's biggest opponents of lifting the ban on openly gay troops. Most of those serving in America's armed forces have no strong objections to repealing the "don't ask, don't tell" law, according to a Pentagon survey of 400,000 active duty and reservists that is scheduled for release Tuesday.

The Air Force’s top uniformed officer is calling the Pentagon’s yearlong study into the implications of repealing the ban on gays in the military “healthy” and “informative.” Gen. Norton Schwartz, the Air Force chief of staff, said Tuesday he already has offered suggestions “for edits both on substance and tone” after reviewing the draft report on the impact of scrapping the Clinton-era “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. “The study was a good process; it was healthy; it is informative,” Schwartz told reporters at a breakfast meeting. The Air Force chief declined to offer any specifics, stressing his commitment to keep...

Today, Tea Party Nation, along with over 180 other Tea Party Groups, Leaders and Activists released a letter to the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill. Last week, GOProud, a non-Tea Party group, sent a letter to Senator McConnell and Speaker to be Boehner, claiming to speak for the Tea Party movement. It was signed by 16 people. We decided to send a letter that speaks for the mainstream of the Tea Party movement. This letter is going Senator McConnell and Congressman Boehner today. It has been signed by over 180 Tea Party Groups, Leaders and Activists. Here is the letter:...

Signaling the growing seriousness of the Obama administration's commitment this year to ending the military's ban on gays serving openly in the armed forces, the Defense Department said Sunday that it will release a long-awaited report on the matter earlier than planned because senators are eager to vote on whether to repeal the policy. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has ordered the report to be released on Nov. 30, one day earlier than planned, "to support Congress's wish to consider repeal before they adjourn," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Sunday. The Senate is slated to vote again on a defense...

God bless Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James F. Amos. Despite incredible pressure from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense, and the entire Washington-political-media complex, Amos is courageously standing up for his Marines. The man refuses to buckle and bow to the pressure. The Chairman, the Secretary of Defense and the political-media complex all want to bully the Marines into accepting open homosexuality within their ranks. They simply cannot fathom why anyone would object to this “enlightened — [and politically correct] — view.” Of course, there are very good reasons — rooted in human nature,...

Sen. John McCain on Sunday laughed off his wife’s appearance in a television advertisement challenging his own position on the policy barring gays from serving openly in the military, “I respect the First Amendment rights of every member of my family,” the Arizona Republican said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” when asked about his wife Cindy McCain’s appearance in a star-studded ad released this week by the group NOH8, in which she seemed to call for the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

Cindy McCain announced that she is against the repeal of "Don't ask, don't tell" one day after she appeared in a video where she lends her support to end the ban on gays openly serving in the military. Earlier this week, the former Presidential candidate's wife appeared in a video campaign for the group NOH8 railing on the United States' controversial military policy – a policy that her husband supports. "Our political and religious leaders tell LGBT youth that they have no future ... They can't serve our country openly," she said on the video. (snip) But on Friday night,...

Speaking in a video for an ad campaign aimed at ending the bullying of gay teenagers, Cindy McCain, the wife of Senator John McCain of Arizona, broke with her husband and called for a repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. In a new public service announcement for NOH8, a group devoted to promoting the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, Mrs. McCain faces the camera and says: “Our political and religious leaders tell L.G.B.T. youth that they have no future.”) “They can’t serve our country openly,” says Mrs. McCain, whose husband, a Republican and veteran...

Cindy McCain has delivered a double-barreled rebuke -- to the military's "don't ask don't tell" policy -- and to her husband, one of the policy's leading supporters. She chose as her forum a new anti-bullying public service video sponsored by a California gay and lesbian rights group. ...Her appearances, totaling less than 15 seconds in the two and a half minute film, are interspersed between those of other celebrities, who also decry policies and attitudes that condone anti-gay bullying.