In the mad dash leftwards that the race for the Democratic nomination has become, Al Gore is proving to be a hard man to beat. A few weeks ago, he promised to overturn his own administration's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy to permit open homosexuality in the military. When Bill Bradley matched that commitment, Gore was determined to best him, and in last week's Democratic debate Gore made ending the gay ban a "litmus test" for selecting members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"I think that I would require those who wanted to serve on the Joint Chiefs to be in agreement with that policy," said Gore on Jan. 5. "I would insist before appointing anybody to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that that individual support my policy and, yes, I would make that a requirement."
This is pretty mind-boggling. It's one thing to embrace a policy that every senior officer opposes as detrimental to the military's well-being. It's worse still to undercut the legal and prudential requirement that members of the Joint Chiefs give unvarnished military advice to both the president and Congress. The implication of Gore's statement is that military officers who wanted to serve on the Joint Chiefs would have to dissemble to get the job, something perhaps more corrupting of the military than the policy of gays-in-the-military itself.
Obviously, presidents can select senior military officers who are generally in tune with their policy goals; in his major defense speech last fall, George W. Bush threatened to fire senior commanders who would not work to implement his plans for transforming the military to meet new operational and technological challenges. These are the prerogatives of a commander in chief.
Gore's litmus test, though, reveals the kind of commander in chief he would be -- one more concerned with pandering than fighting. Stating the obvious, Gen. Merrill McPeak, former Air Force chief of staff, told the New York Times, "Winning the nation's wars ought to be the primary qualification" for joint chiefs membership.
At a time when military preparedness has declined to the point where the majority of the chiefs now say they can no longer meet the requirements of American strategy, when U.S. troops are conducting three times the number of missions as during the Cold War, Commander in Chief Al Gore would turn the Joint Chiefs into the Village People and make "YMCA" the Marine Corps hymn.