When The US Military Loses, It’s The Gays’ Fault

by tristero

It’s a free country, true, but nothing gives you the inalienable right to promote your fact-less bigotry in the New York Times. Unless you hate gays:

Combat is not a contest between individuals, like poker or tennis; it is a team event whose success depends on group cooperation and morale. So the behavior that concerns us is not individual achievement but the social dynamics of relationships and groups. The issue is whether and how the presence of openly declared homosexuals in the ranks affects the solidarity of the unit.

We have already seen the fault lines form in the current debate: the individual service chiefs have expressed reservations about Admiral Mullen’s views. This lack of cohesion will likely make the Joint Chiefs less effective in the latest round of this debate.

Armies have to care about what succeeds in war. Sometimes they win or lose because of material factors, because one side has the greater numbers or better equipment. But armies are sure to lose if they pay no attention to the ideas that succeed in battle. Unit cohesion is one such idea. We know, or ought to, that warriors are inspired by male bonding, by comradeship, by the knowledge that they survive only through relying on each other. To undermine cohesion is to endanger everyone.

I know some will see these ingredients of the military lifestyle as a sort of absurd, tough-guy game played by overgrown boys. But to prepare warriors for a life of hardship, the military must remain a kind of adventure, apart from the civilian world and full of strange customs. To be a fighter pilot or a paratrooper or a submariner is to join a self-contained, resolutely idealistic society, largely unnoticed and surprisingly uncorrupted by the world at large.

I do not see how permitting open homosexuality in these communities enhances their prospects of success in battle. Indeed, I believe repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” will weaken the warrior culture at a time when we have a fight on our hands.

Got that, everyone? The reason that “permitting open homosexuality…will weaken the warrior culture” is because…because…because….well…it just will.

No. That’s not fair to Merrill A. McPeak (Merrill A. McPeak?? You kidding? And they think Barack H. Obama is a weird name!). He’s saying that in combat, you have to have unit cohesion or you might get hurt, even killed, even lose.

Wow! When you put it like that, DADT makes perfect sense. Let me explain:

No doubt unit cohesion is very important. And how can you have cohesion in your unit if, while the enemy is shelling you, the guy next to you suddenly decides this is the perfect time to tell you he’s loved you since the moment he saw you in the shower at boot camp? I mean, aside from everything else, how are all the other guys gonna feel, right? Like they’re not worthy or something. Talk about a morale-killer, and just when you need your morale to be at its highest.

And let’s face it, you just know that’s gonna happen all the time. You just can’t count on the openly gay guy to keep his mind focused on the bullets whizzing about him. And why, you ask, is that? Because YOU are right there and YOU ARE SOOOOOOO HOT! Because unlike normal young heterosexual men, homosexuals have only one thing on their mind: sex, sex, and more sex. Even when they’re being shot at, even when they’re defusing roadside bombs, even when the missiles raining on their heads are turning everyone around them into bloody, nidorous, non-cohering blobs. Don’t you get it? That’s a turn on! That’s what get these deviants off!

Think I’m crazy? Need proof? Why, just look at what happened to the Joint Chiefs! Why, the mere IDEA of repealing DADT is so divisive that they’ve already started to lose their mojo. Therefore, gays shouldn’t serve openly in the military. QED.

Now that’s an argument that’s fit to print. On the stuff that lines birdcages.