‘THIS IS NO DRILL’: CLINTON TALKS WITH JCS ON GAYS IN THE MILITARY MUST BE REAL, NOT A HUMILIATING CHARADE

(Washington, D.C.): According to
Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, today’s
White House meeting between President
Clinton and the nation’s top military
officers evidently is not
supposed to be a forum for serious,
no-holds-barred discussion about the
Clinton campaign promise to legitimate
open homosexuality in the armed forces.
Mr. Clinton evidently is not interested
in the Joint Chiefs of Staffs’ enormous
concerns on this issue; at best, the
meeting will amount to going through
the motions of
“consultation.”

On CBS News’ “Face the
Nation” yesterday, Secretary Aspin
acknowledged authorship of a memorandum
to the then-President-elect which
explicitly states that the session with
the Chiefs is “not a
negotiation….Instead, it is the first
step in the consultation
[candidate Clinton] promised.”
(Emphasis added.) According to Aspin,
what the JCS will be consulted about is
simply how a policy they adamantly oppose
will be implemented.

The Center for Security Policy
believes that two aspects of this
approach are dangerously flawed: First, it
is cynically manipulative to compel the
Chiefs to participate in discussions
about how to make something work
that they do not believe will work —
without affording them a genuine
opportunity to present their case that it
is fundamentally unworkable.
Such an approach is not only monumentally
disrespectful, it also infringes
seriously on the Joint Chiefs of Staffs’
legal responsibility to advise the
president about military matters.

Second, the Aspin memo makes clear
that Congress is unlikely to support the
president’s policy. According to the
Aspin memo, Senate Majority
Leader George Mitchell (D-ME)
“estimates that there are no more
than 30 sure votes [in the Senate]
against any…resolution” supporting
the present policy banning homosexuals
from the armed forces.
Accordingly, the Clinton Administration’s
strategy is determined to deny the
Congress an opportunity to speak to this
issue until after the President has
effectively vitiated the current policy.

The Center deems the Clinton
Administration’s management of today’s
meeting and the policy matter at its
heart to be a first, portentous test of
the new team’s larger relationship with
the military. In the months ahead,
President Clinton will likely be sharply
reducing the resources available to the
armed forces; inevitably, such reductions
will significantly affect their power
projection capabilities, their readiness
and their morale. Ironically, Mr. Clinton
seems at the same time relatively willing
to inject the U.S. military into foreign
trouble spots.

In the course of making such changes,
the President must be able to obtain —
and factor in — the military’s best
professional advice. While he may not in
every instance choose to follow it, if
Mr. Clinton refuses even to listen to
such counsel, he invites serious
mistakes, possibly entailing considerable
risk to the national interest and
unnecessary, irresponsible loss of
American lives.

– 30 –