DADT repeal about ideology more than policy, so the debate is only just beginning

Ryan Streeter

DADT has been repealed, and two things about the run-up to the vote don't change:

• A majority of Americans and non-combat troops supported repeal, putting the trajectory of public opinion on the side of Obama and other supporters of repeal.
• A majority of combat troops and the chiefs of the Army, Air Force, and Marine corps opposed repeal, putting the front lines of battle on the side of opponents of repeal.

The conflict created by these two opposing forces of opinion are best summed up in Sen. Richard Burr's comments on why he surprised everyone by voting for repeal: he said it's "a policy that generationally is right" because "exclusion" is rejected by a majority of Americans, and yet he "vehemently objected to making a policy change of this magnitude at this time . . . when we’ve got troops deployed."

In many ways, the tension reflected in Burr's statement explains why the DADT repeal vote was written to achieve an ideological goal of the Democrats' left wing rather than any real policy. Repeal itself is a victory, even if implementation of DADT is a mystery. The new law kicks the can down the road - leaving the same chiefs who opposed its repeal to provide counsel to the Secretary of Defense to determine how and when it's implemented. There's too much disagreement about this issue to write anything more than repeal into law. As a result, as John McCormack writes at the Weekly Standard, how and when the policy will be written is anyone's guess, since according to Secretary Gates, it may take years. So Obama's choice of a successor to Gates will be a big determinant.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said during an exchange with Senator Scott Brown said that it could be years until he'd be willing to sign off on the implementation of repeal. Of course, Gates is leaving his post sometime in 2011, and there's no guarantee that Obama's next defense secretary will be willing to wait so long to implement a policy change that the president's left-wing base has been fighting for for a very long time.

Unlike debates about gay marriage, which affects voters everywhere, the DADT debate was mainly an exercise in people outside the military trying to achieve an objective for people in the military, many of whom opposed the objective. That will surely affect how the military chiefs who opposed repeal will want to implement the policy. We haven't seen the end of the debate about how gay servicemen and women should serve in the military. It's really just the beginning.

Comments

[Our America Initiative]

How does this have to be "implemented"? Surely you just change the Army Regulations so that gay servicemen are no longer hounded out of the service?

Other countries such as our closest allies, Britain and Israel don't eject gay people from their military and they are among the best armed forces in the world. It's time we stopped wasting money and human capital on this outdated policy and the GOP Senators and Representatives who brought this about should be congratulated.