DADT Has Cost Taxpayers $600 Million
The news today was not shocking, but it still was gross and unfair.
“Senate Republicans Block Repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’”
The Republican Party likes to scold the nation about fiscal mismanagement, as if Republicans were not the grand architects of the worst economic meltdown since the Depression. In light of the vote today on ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ it is going to be even more difficult for the conservatives to prove they care at all about dollars or sense.
After all, ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ is sure-fire way to waste money, and lots of it.
Since DADT came into force in 1993, some 14,000 service members have been discharged under the policy—the equivalent of an entire division of warfighters. Investigating and processing each case has its costs; so does recruiting and training each replacement. How much? A 2006 commission organized by UCLA’s Palm Center and led by former Defense Secretary William Perry put the total cost of each discharge at $42,835, meaning the policy has now cost the U.S. taxpayer around $600 million.
That’s not pocket change, especially for a military scrounging for savings. It’s also no small matter at a time when the military’s recruitment standards for age, education, physical fitness and moral standards have been steadily declining. In the last two years alone the Army and Marines have granted an unprecedented number of “moral waivers” to recruits with previous felony convictions.
The result, Mr. Laich acidly notes, is that “we would rather have in our military middle-aged, overweight, undereducated felons than fully qualified, experienced patriots who happen to have a sexual orientation that some people find troublesome.”
Nor does it help that DADT has given top universities a handy alibi to exclude ROTC from their campuses, and the students at those schools a reason not to serve. Would lifting DADT increase recruitment at schools like Harvard and Yale? Probably only at the margins. But it would help end the poisonous estrangement, with all its larger political consequences, between America’s military and our intellectual elites.
