Obama’s military misstep

By Grace Vuoto

In the midst of two wars, the worst economic downturn since World War II and sky-high budget deficits which threaten the nation’s long-term financial viability, President Barack Obama has ordered a review of the military’s 1993 ban on gays serving openly in the armed forces. Why now? What is the pressing national security issue that requires this debate and justifies the turmoil it will inflict on our forces? Our leader should put all his energy into addressing the ills plaguing the daily lives of the majority of the American people. Instead, he is more interested in serving the interests of the left-wing base of his party—a fringe minority with a radical agenda.

The president has blundered once again. Mr. Obama has not yet grasped that the election of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts in a Democratic stronghold—to fill the seat of the deceased lion of leftist causes, Ted Kennedy—requires him to return to the centrist policies he championed on the campaign trail in 2008. Rather, the novice leader insists on placating his left-wing supporters and attempting to make an historic mark by adopting a chic policy that is relevant to only a small fraction of our citizens.

The decision to go forward with attempting to repeal the current ban is yet another example of Mr. Obama’s poor judgment as commander-in-chief. Our current forces are stretched thinner than they have been at any time in the nation’s history. Service members are obliged to go on multiple deployments—as many as three or four times to Iraq and Afghanistan. The psychological toll has been tremendous, resulting in approximately 300,000 of our men and women who are battling post-traumatic stress disorder. In addition, there are high incidences of traumatic brain injury and other wounds, resulting in thousands of wounded warriors that will need life-long care. The army is also facing record-high suicide rates.

Hence, the physical and psychological toll of the current wars on our veterans and on their families will reverberate for years to come. If our commander-in-chief truly cares about our service members, he will lead a national debate on these matters. Our troops are stretched thin—and they need our help badly. The last issue we need to be concerned with at this time is whether or not a tiny fraction of our troops would rather be openly gay instead of secretly gay. This is frivolous in contrast to the life-death matters our troops are facing on a daily basis.

Let’s do the math. Our armed forces consist of approximately 1.4 million active duty members and 1.2 million members in the seven reserve components. Gay active duty members are estimated at approximately 65,000--a tiny percentage of our total forces. In addition, there have been approximately 13, 500 service members who have been discharged as a result of the ban since 1993, according to the nonpartisan Center for Military Readiness. Why should we now expend much time and energy on a debate that benefits so few when there are so many in the forces who are in such desperate and immediate need?

To compound matters, although the vast majority of the American people favor lifting the ban in the army, the vast majority of service members do not want the current policy to be changed, according to annaul surveys in The Military Times and an online poll conducted in summer, 2009 by the Military Officer's Association of America. Even the younger generation of service members oppose reversing the current policy. According to leftist propaganda, the younger members should now be more amenable to the change. Yet, the majority remain opposed to it. It is therefore clear that the president has no regard for the opinion of our troops nor does he care whether a major policy change will make their lives even more burdensome.

The president’s decision to pursue this is even more vexing when we consider that his entire national security and foreign policy agenda is imploding. His decision to reverse the policies of his predecessor President George W. Bush on the war on terror—such as attempting to close down Guantanamo Bay and to hold a civilian trial on American soil for the September 11 terrorist mastermind Kalid Sheikh Mohammed—is proving to be more troublesome than effective. His appeasement of strongmen such as Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Hu Jintao and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have not made the world safer, but have only emboldened evil men in their evil ways. The president has not had a single foreign policy achievement. Nor have his policies prevented terrorist strikes on the homeland.

The president’s poor judgment and track record of failure points to a sad but striking conclusion: If Mr. Obama thinks we ought to lift the ban on gays serving in the military, there is a very high likelihood that he does not know the full implications of his own empty rhetoric. This commander-in-chief is one that can only be humored, not obeyed, until there is a more capable leader at the helm of our armed forces.

-Dr. Grace Vuoto is the Executive Director of the Edmund Burke Institute for American Renewal.