Probably simply due to the high levels of respect the military enjoy in the US. For some reason the patriotism and desire to serve of military officers is generally presumed as a given until proven otherwise, unlike almost any other state employee.

If Congress is dominated by the opposition and barks loudly, WH or JCS may cave because there are other issues in the pipeline that need trading off. If Congress rolls over, especially if the public image given is that the JCS wants the policy change, it is a done deal.

So–yay for open gays in the US military! They will still kill “bad” people just as much dead as a straight soldier. The question then is not so much about who does the shooting but why they are doing it.

I suppose the experience of the W. Bush administration ought to have corrected me on that.

Thanks.

L

What you can expect is a bunch of Congressional GOP moralizing pontificators and their media mentors getting their collective panties in a twist over this.

But I’d like to at least show some of my working. According to this Centre for American Progress report on the topic (which forms the basis of my understanding), the executive order is the initial instruction which provides cover and guidance to the other agencies enacting the repeal, and can do the trick on i ts own for a while (under stop-loss), but isn’t in and of itself a permanent solution. Is this a valid analysis?

There’s also an interesting question about mandate (and Obama appearing to overreach his by acting without Congress), but that’s more a perception problem than one of reality.

L

An executive order is all that is needed. Congress can (and will) make a fuss about it, but as C-in-C he calls the shots (which Clinton did when he instituted the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy over the wishes of both the Joint Staff and Congress). Here Obama has both SecDef and the Chief of the JCS on his side, and they, not he, raised the matter before Congress. At a time when the military is scraping the barrel for volunteers (although recruitment picked up in 2009 after six consecutive years of shortfalls), especially amongst officer candidates, they can use all the talent that they can get.

Two points worth mentioning from my personal perspective. 1) the intelligence services have no problem with “out” gays as colleagues, since they cannot be blackmailed as easily as closet gays or married heterosexuals; 2) having had a female Naval officer as a partner for five years, including a time when she was the XO then CO of two different units, I can relay the view from her perspective that when it comes to sexual harassment it was hetero male on female that constituted 95% of all cases; followed by hetero female on male, female on female and male on male in that descending order. So I do not think that bunking or taking showers together is going to lead to any orgies and a drop in morale, so long as gays maintain military discipline, suffer and die in the same measure as their “straight” counterparts (quotations because there is plenty of freakiness in the hetero soldier community)–and they will.

I’m not an expert on the topic, but I think the President can go almost all of the way on his own authority (with the approval of the Joint Chiefs and operational command), but for it to be properly and legitimately done the Uniform Code of Military Justice needs to be amended, since that’s where the “misconduct” of homosexuality is defined. I believe that can only be amended by act of Congress.

L

Not to say that an Act of Congress wouldn’t be the best way to do it, but the idea that this is not a matter for the President is far less true than it is for, say, healthcare.