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Call me crazy, but I’m confident volunteers in today’s military have more discipline and dedication than implied here:
Elaine Donnelly, of the non-profit Center for Military Readiness, warns that scrapping “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” could drive people out of the military. “Combined voluntary and involuntary losses of careerists in communities, grades, and skills that are not easily replaceable could break the all-volunteer force,” she says. An unscientific survey of U.S. troops by the independent Military Times newspapers last fall showed 51 percent opposed lifting the ban.
Let’s run with this. Why not, right? Given the age breakdown of opposition to DADT, the cohort most likely to be responsive to Donnelly’s concern are older officers, particularly colonels/captains and generals/admirals. On the one hand, the desire to continue one’s career is a powerful adhesive. On the other, if those guys end up leaving, maybe Defense Secretary Robert Gates will have his “brass creep” problem solved for him.
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Spencer, we could stop at “Elaine Donnelly.”
We already know what kind of character that woman possesses.
What Rayne said. No one needs to include any quotes by Elaine Donnelly if one seeks a fair and honest assessment of what the repeal of DADT might incur. The only reason news sources use her is to demonstrate that they show both sides of an argument, no matter how insane the one side is. Unfortunately, “Fair and Balanced” doesn’t equate to “informed.”
I suppose the proper way to evaluate this position would be to try to determine how many people specifically chose the military as a career path because it was the only one available where they could expect institutionalized marginalization of gay people. Of course, some of them would choose not to squander the time and effort invested in their career, and others would have developed more tolerant views over time, so it would be something like this:
Number of people who would leave the military because of the repeal of DADT would be the number of people who originally chose a military career in the expectation of a 100% heterosexual workforce minus those for whom repeal no longer constitutes a sufficiently compelling reason to leave.
In other words, an infinitesimal number…
M