Clinton, Military Leaders to Square Off Over Gay Ban

Only five shaky days old, the fledgling Clinton Administration is about to face head-on what well may become one of its most bitter and divisive issues.

On Monday morning, six officials of the Joint Chiefs of Staff--the nation’s most senior military officers--will march into the White House with a single mission in mind: to dissuade President Clinton from proceeding with a plan to lift the longstanding ban on homosexuals in the military.

At stake is Clinton’s campaign promise to put an end to what he has called unwarranted discrimination against gays and lesbians. In addition, the outcome may well signal the President’s determination to take on one of the government’s most entrenched establishments. And it could set the future course for his relationship with the military.

Until recently, none of the Joint Chiefs could have imagined such a challenge to tradition and their authority. During 12 years of Republican administrations, they had become accustomed to having their way on matters of military management.

And until three months ago--when Clinton was elected at least in part because of his promise to lift the ban--none would have dreamed a battle could be lost so quickly.

But warned that the decision has been made, they have vowed to carry on the fight.

“I’m not fully expecting to be overruled,” said one of the officers who will attend the meeting. “The President ought to think once and then twice about this. I don’t know how this is going to come out, and I don’t want to predict it. At end of the day, I’ve got to salute and do my duty. But my personal conviction that this is not good for the service is going to run headlong into my desire to try to help (the President) deal with this problem.”

For now, it appears that Clinton is determined to leave most of the job of implementing the new policy to Defense Secretary Les Aspin, who has been directed to lay out a plan to eventually lift, by executive order, the 12-year-old policy that officially bars homosexuals from military service.

While Clinton has said he intends to carry out his campaign pledge, he promised in his first post-election news conference to consult with military leaders to ensure that the policy change is undertaken without major impact on the military’s readiness to fight.

Thus, for the first time, Clinton on Monday will directly feel the heat that his promise has generated among the military’s senior officers. Their concerns are myriad, ranging from a breakdown of discipline among disgruntled troops to an increased risk of HIV infection on the battlefield to concerns that they may be required to provide separate sleeping quarters and bathrooms for heterosexuals and homosexuals.

Each service chief has already raised questions that go to the heart of the military’s mission: Will soldiers follow a gay sergeant into danger without fear or doubt? Will they trust the judgment and impartiality of an officer they know is a homosexual? How will distraught parents react to the military’s new order? Will the sight of two male GIs dancing together wreak havoc in an noncommissioned officers club?

“You have got to have a cohesive, tightly knit team based on trust and mutual reliance. We want to exclude those things that would fracture a tightly structured team that will win on the field of battle,” Marine Corps Commandant Carl Mundy Jr. said in a recent interview. The military, he said, already discriminates in many ways--including by age, weight and gender--to ensure the effectiveness of its fighting force, adding that he has little doubt that the presence of openly homosexual personnel would fracture the military’s fighting units.

“It’s not the colonels and the lieutenant colonels who are asking the questions,” Mundy said. “It’s the sergeants and staff sergeants. The young people (in the service) are very concerned about this.”

Moreover, the military leaders ask, in an age of shrinking budgets and declining manpower, can the U.S. armed forces afford to make a change that is likely to impose further stresses on already strained military resources?

Will gay or lesbian military couples, who have probably long lived their lives closeted in off-base housing, now be permitted to live in the chronically scarce family quarters on their bases? Will ships have to be reconfigured for separate berthing compartments at a time when vessels are being taken out of the fleet because they are too costly to operate? With training time already squeezed, will costly new educational programs have to be instituted to sensitize troops to gay and lesbian service members?

Those are the sorts of questions that Aspin, in an emotional meeting lasting more than two hours, heard last Thursday as he gathered the Joint Chiefs for the first time.

Pentagon officials said the meeting was dominated by debate over the homosexual issue, to the virtual exclusion of other pressing military matters, including the situations in Iraq and Bosnia-Herzegovina, that were to have been discussed.

In public, Gen. Colin L. Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has sounded conciliatory notes, telling an audience of U.S. Naval Academy midshipmen recently that if Clinton follows through on his campaign pledge, “we must conform to that policy. The debate will be over.”

But until that time, Powell privately has prepared for this battle with his usual penchant for overwhelming force, said an Aspin aide following the meeting.

On Thursday, Powell argued with “tsunami-like force of reasoning” that lifting the ban on gays would erode morale within the ranks and create management headaches that will drive the best leaders out of the military at a time when the shrinking ranks need them most, the aide said.

Powell and others, in an effort to fend off what they believe are invidious comparisons with other nations’ policies, also have gathered details of how other countries who permit homosexuals in the service actually treat them.

In Israel, for instance, where gays and lesbians are formally permitted to serve, they are kept out of combat units and posted to units close to their homes so they will not have to share quarters with heterosexual troops.

“This issue is going to be with us for some time to come,” one Aspin aide predicted.

The aide added that Aspin’s approach to implementing Clinton’s campaign promise will be to sit down and draft with the senior military leaders a detailed new set of guidelines for standards of military conduct.

By putting the debate on a plane the service chiefs can deal with, Aspin hopes to blunt their warnings about the possibility that gays will pose discipline problems and erode their opposition to a change in policy.

In the end, that may not be enough if some congressional opponents of lifting the ban intervene.

Larger legal questions could draw Congress into the fray if the Clinton Administration proceeds with lifting the ban.

The military chiefs have said privately that those legal questions could pose an obstacle for rapid implementation of Clinton’s campaign promise, and some have been in contact with opponents of such a move on Capitol Hill to discuss their concerns.

Will Congress, for instance, have to formally repeal provisions in the Uniform Code of Military Justice that make sodomy a criminal act? Many lawmakers, including the influential chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), think so--a judgment that raises the prospect of a bruising and protracted battle that could cost Clinton dearly and block his ability to make good on a central campaign promise.

Aides said both Clinton and Aspin reject the argument that congressional action would be necessary. Administration experts say the sodomy statute has come to be a provision used toward discriminatory ends and would therefore become largely irrelevant in a military in which openly homosexual men and women are permitted.

The military only selectively enforces its sodomy statute, using it largely to remove homosexuals from the service. When it is applied to heterosexual service members, it is overwhelmingly used to bolster cases involving other criminal acts, like rape.

In the end, Congress is likely to drop its claim on the issue if Clinton and Aspin, in the crucial deliberations to come, can convince the military’s leaders that while they might win a battle in Congress, they are virtually certain to lose the war in the courts.

Without the continued backing of the military’s senior officers, lawmakers would almost certainly decide that they could not rally the votes to win against a Democratic President with majorities in both houses of Congress.

“We’re going to have to craft something here that is not going to please either side entirely--neither the gay activists nor the military--and both are going to have to compromise,” said one Aspin aide familiar with the deliberations. “The gays must realize that if they push too hard, they’ll get nothing because there’ll be a backlash on Capitol Hill fueled by the chiefs’ opposition. And the military leaders must realize that they can play the Capitol Hill card, and it may work, but they’ll get popped the first time a case goes to the courts.”

By late last week, the inevitability of such a compromise was beginning to settle in, at least among some of the military chiefs. When asked whether he would resign in protest over the ban’s lifting, one of those who will sit with Clinton on Monday shook his head.

“You can choose to leave, but it doesn’t change the issue,” the officer said. “Someone’s going to implement” the change.