Unit cohesion in the military is typically formed in boot camp, where all recruits are stripped of their personality and individuality to become cogs in an efficient killing machine. It is irrelevant whether a person is gay or straight, white or black, rich or poor when they are put through this process.

A more reasonable debate instead of whether gays should be allowed to serve (obviously they should, especially when recruitment rates are consistently dropping) is whether we need an efficient killing machine like today's military at all.

-- Ken Olson

My regards to David Horowitz for an incisive and precise piece on the dishonesty of politically correct thought. His words resounded with my own disdain for tautological or otherwise fraudulent arguments, and I felt compelled to share my observations as a young heterosexual military officer.

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I appreciate the necessary light Horowitz sheds on the insidious way in which political correctness lingers on in American discourse. He, as he relates, is certainly familiar with the frustration it engenders in its targets. Thus I hope that he will accept criticisms of him that arise from objection to his logic, or assumptions, as opposed to those that proceed from ideological blindness.

Horowitz's argument is predicated on an inaccurate understanding of the function of the military and the experience of military service, as well as a certain failure of inductive logic.

The first error, and most apparent to discerning members of the military forces, is the inaccurate belief that the sole purpose of the military is "to develop the most efficient killing machine that money can buy and intelligence can devise." Members of the civilian and military worlds alike are now cognizant of the fact that the military has come to serve an indispensable cultural, economic and social function as well, one that is no longer merely a byproduct of the perpetuated existence of a standing army.

The military provides both immediate jobs and long-term careers to people of all kinds, particularly people from underprivileged families who lack either the finances or the interest to attend college. It also provides a relatively stable, if not excessively controlled, environment for individuals whose behavioral inclinations might otherwise run a course that results in injury to both the individual and society. The military continues, of course, to satisfy a somewhat intangible and culturally determined desire to "serve one's country," a desire that is often linked to one's sense of family history.

Certainly it would be a confused culture that made policy decisions based on an understanding of the military that it didn't really accept. The fact is that the military is not, irrespective of the status of homosexuals in service, a pragmatic institution with anything other than a purely rhetorical "singularity of purpose." This is reflected in the variety of missions facing the U.S. armed forces today, though it has been understood in armies of past societies as well.

The most glaring and unfortunate error in Horowitz's piece is his romanticized rhetoric about "unit cohesion." Not that unit cohesion is a negligible element of either the experience of military service or strategic considerations. It is, rather, of utmost importance, as he points out. Yet Horowitz manages to malign the most often repeated and well-understood truth of combat: Men serve, and die, only for their fellow men.

Commanders in today's "values-based" military have taken to underscoring training sessions on the meaning of, for instance, the Seven Army Values (loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, personal courage), with the confession that men are motivated in times of fear, pain and confusion by their love for their shipmates, airmen or trench mates. That is the basis of "unit" cohesion.

It is confusing that Horowitz fails to address this, instead merely asking rhetorical questions about the dangers to man's innate concern for his fellows posed by an exclusive love shared between two particular men. It has been my experience that an exclusive love shared between two men would only pose a problem to "unit cohesion" if the other members of the unit were intolerant of that relationship. If anything, it seems more likely that the conditions of war invite men to transcend those barriers, and indeed, they often do. A tremendous body of literature attests to this, particularly the British soldiers of World War I (Robert Graves and Willfred Owen not the least of them).

Horowitz's personal unfamiliarity with military service is again on display when he inadequately responds to an adequate counterargument: the successful inclusion of women in service. Women are not allowed in combat units in the U.S. forces, and as such present very limited detriments to what is termed "combat readiness" or "combat effectiveness."

In my experience the inadequate compromise instituted with the "fraternization policy" has been more problematic than the mere presence of women in the military. This mirrors the problems faced by gays, who suffer more from the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy than they would from either outright exclusion or the harassment they would suffer in a fully inclusive military.

Gays suffer undeservedly from the ambiguities of the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy, as well as from the institutionalized bigotry of the military. Horowitz has, unfortunately, not done a passable job of convincing me that the bigotry and the policy are unrelated. Perhaps this is because he presents an argument that he admits "may not be a sound argument." This kind of argument, it seems, may serve well in a superficial ideological scuffle, but is otherwise worthless.

-- Daric Desautel

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