Hate is Not an Army Core Value

After General Peter Pace said in an interview a few weeks ago that homosexuality is “immoral,” I posted a comment to this post over at Lawyers, Guns and Money expressing my view that integrating homosexuals into military service is really a leadership problem:

Those who argue that some citizens should be excluded from military service because their presence would hurt “unit cohesion” are saying that current soldiers should be able to decide with whom they serve. This is bravo sierra–the military is not a country club whose members should be able to blackball undesirables.

 

As a tank platoon sergeant I faced a variety of obstacles to unit cohesion, including affairs and arguments over women, unpaid gambling debts, racism, gang membership, laziness, and simple personality conflicts. The biggest one was the constant squabble between single junior enlisted troops who lived constricted lives in the barracks (daily inspections, etc), and the married soldiers who lived off post and lived much more freely (and also got time off for things like sick family members).

 

The point is that conflicts will always arise among any group of people large enough to complete a destructive military mission, and leaders–like General Pace–have the mission of solving these problems. This turns out to be easier than one might think, since most soldiers, even when slighted, know when they are being treated fairly and when they are not, and they know good leaders when they see them. Good leaders can create cohesive, effective units from diverse raw materials. Saying that military units cannot integrate homosexuals into cohesive units is the same as saying that our armed services have too few effective leaders.

 

What strikes me as most interesting is not that General Pace is comfortable classifying a non-trivial number of his own troops as immoral. It is that there is a mission that he can’t or won’t complete because of morality or ethics, but this mission has nothing to do with killing thousands of innocent civilians or breaking the Marine Corps he leads. It regards instead his refusal to validate sexual preferences his religion demonizes.

 

Who is the immoral one?

In other words, I argue that sexual orientation is simply another aspect of human behavior that unit leaders must address when integrating citizens from diverse backgrounds into military organizations of every size. It is no different on a moral scale than disputes between single and married people or soldiers of various religious faiths or ethnic backgrounds. Soldiers of different backgrounds will disagree with this view, as they will about whether ethnic background matters, but the state should not exclude any group from service because current members resent them. Moreover, leaders like General Pace have more important moral conundrums to think about than some private’s sexual preferences. At any rate, Professor Lemieux at LGM thought this comment interesting enough to post it on the front page of his blog. Continue reading →