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2, 10, 100? I know about two from the news, perhaps there were others. I highly doubt we were well staffed and then 'gayed' our way to being under staffed.
The DADT policy isn't set by any military branch. It's imposed on all the military by civilian leadership.
Case in point... a lot of gay activists will go into recruiting offices with recording devices, say they want to join and then announce they're gay. When the recruiter informs them they can't process they report "discrimination!".
Fair enough. It's not the fault of the recruiter for following the rules. But there was one case I know of where the recruiter said, "I didn't hear that" and they reported that as well. They basically dimed him out for being willing to look the other way. Kind of counter productive to their cause, wouldn't you say?
You can't blame the military for a policy they don't control. And you can't blame its members for enforcing it.
GOBAMA!
by USArmyParatrooper on Tue Nov 06, 2007 at 07:40:22 AM PDT
[ Parent ]
...for following the orders of the civilian leadership. IMHO it's one of our strengths that we have a professional military rather than a politicized military.
I blame the civilian leadership for 100% of the fiascoes we have gone through in the war, including firing linguist/translators. If I'm not mistaken, the case I'm aware of was something like 8 out of a group of 16. Arabic, Farsi, and Korean, among others.
As for gay activists going into recruitment meetings with tape recorders, that's just plain wrong and frankly disgraceful. The way to deal with the policy is to bug the civilian leadership about why we are turning away 5 - 10% of the potential enlistees over an issue that most soldiers decided didn't matter long ago. "What matters isn't who they sleep with but how they do their job and how they perform under fire." I'm sure you've heard people say that more than once. It's time for the people in Washington to get the message.
Here's another one for you. The rates of pay for linguist/translators used to be higher for difficult languages, e.g. where there is a different alphabet, or where it's a pictographic language such as many of the Asian languages. About five years ago the policy was changed to make it the same for "difficult" languages as for "easy" languages such as Spanish, French, Italian, and German, that people might have picked up from their families or friends or learned in high school. You can bet this was a major disincentive to people to learn difficult languages.
Following that logic they shouldn't pay cryptanalysts more than collectors, heh.
What worries me is, if America concedes the losses in Afghanistan and Iraq, some of the citizens will blame the military rather than the civilian leadership. That would be majorly demoralizing and could set the stage for further erosion of both American influence abroad and of the Constitution at home. You & yours don't deserve that kind of crap. We need an accountability moment for the draft-dodgers who have been running the show on the civilian side.
by G2geek on Tue Nov 06, 2007 at 12:56:27 PM PDT
For having a true understanding of our military and its role. Many of the posts and diaries on here seem to have a negative view of the military and it's mostly based on false perceptions.
I'm a social and fiscal libtard to the bone. But I'm also an alpha male, pro-military "America @#$% yeah!" kind of guy.
by USArmyParatrooper on Tue Nov 06, 2007 at 06:59:58 PM PDT
wide narrow
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