USA — Survey Will Permit Informed Decisions, Official Says

WASHINGTON — Atti­tudes of the force to be gleaned from a sur­vey on the pos­si­ble repeal of the law that bans gays and les­bians from serv­ing open­ly in the mil­i­tary will allow lead­ers to make informed deci­sions, Pen­ta­gon Press Sec­re­tary Geoff Mor­rell said today.

Mor­rell said many sto­ries that have result­ed from advo­ca­cy groups leak­ing a 103-ques­tion sur­vey e‑mailed this week to 400,000 ser­vice­mem­bers “have been inflam­ma­to­ry in the worst case, and mis­lead­ing in the best case.” 

Defense Depart­ment offi­cials want­ed the sur­vey to remain con­fi­den­tial, Mor­rell said, but the dis­tri­b­u­tion of the sur­vey to 200,000 active duty ser­vice­mem­bers and 200,000 reserve-com­po­nent per­son­nel worked against that aim. 

The sur­vey was designed to be a con­fi­den­tial con­ver­sa­tion between the a Defense Depart­ment work­ing group study­ing the mat­ter, in par­tic­u­lar, and a large rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­ple of the force, Mor­rell said. 

“We thought it would be break­ing faith with them for us to be proac­tive­ly shar­ing the sur­vey,” he said, “because what we are try­ing to do is pre­serve the cred­i­bil­i­ty and integri­ty of the answers that it elic­its from the force.” 

Advo­ca­cy groups on both sides of the ques­tion released the sur­vey, and Mor­rell said the out­side influ­ence is not help­ful to the process. 

The sur­vey is designed to get the atti­tudes of the force on how to pro­ceed if Con­gress repeals the so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law, and is not a ref­er­en­dum on whether or not the law should be repealed, Mor­rell said. The answers, he added, will inform the work­ing group’s deliberations. 

Pen­ta­gon offi­cials worked with a pro­fes­sion­al and rep­utable polling firm to pro­duce the sur­vey, Mor­rell not­ed. Rough­ly the first third of the 103 ques­tions seeks demo­graph­ic infor­ma­tion. The sec­ond third asks about pro­fes­sion­al and mil­i­tary expe­ri­ence. The final third asks how the law’s repeal might affect the indi­vid­ual being sur­veyed, he explained. The work­ing group led by Army Gen. Carter F. Ham, com­man­der of U.S. Army Europe, and Jeh John­son, the Defense Department’s gen­er­al coun­sel, already has spo­ken with 14,000 ser­vice­mem­bers, Mor­rell said. Anoth­er 33,000 ser­vice­mem­bers have inter­act­ed with the depart­ment elec­tron­i­cal­ly, he added. 

Of the respons­es to date, Mor­rell said, many includ­ed con­cerns about pri­va­cy issues. “Clear­ly,” he said, “a com­po­nent of this sci­en­tif­ic sur­vey had to deal with pri­va­cy ques­tions.” Ten sur­vey ques­tions address pri­va­cy issues sur­round­ing bathing facil­i­ties, liv­ing facil­i­ties and social settings. 

“We think it would be irre­spon­si­ble to con­duct a sur­vey that did­n’t address these ques­tions,” Mor­rell said, “because when ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ is repealed, we will have to deter­mine if there are any chal­lenges in those par­tic­u­lar areas, any adjust­ments that need to be made in terms of how we edu­cate the force, or per­haps even facil­i­ty adjust­ments that need to be made to deal with those scenarios. 

“But we won’t know any of that until we get a sense from the force of their atti­tudes,” he con­tin­ued. “It could turn out, based on this sur­vey, that there are far few­er con­cerns than we are led to believe. There could more or dif­fer­ent con­cerns than we had anticipated.” 

But Defense Depart­ment offi­cials need the infor­ma­tion gen­er­at­ed from this sur­vey to make smart deci­sions, Mor­rell said. 

“We need peo­ple to par­tic­i­pate in this sur­vey to get a sci­en­tif­ic under­stand­ing of the atti­tudes of the force, or the con­cerns, or issues or oppor­tu­ni­ties that may result from a repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” he said. 

Source:
U.S. Depart­ment of Defense
Office of the Assis­tant Sec­re­tary of Defense (Pub­lic Affairs) 

Team GlobDef

Seit 2001 ist GlobalDefence.net im Internet unterwegs, um mit eigenen Analysen, interessanten Kooperationen und umfassenden Informationen für einen spannenden Überblick der Weltlage zu sorgen. GlobalDefence.net war dabei die erste deutschsprachige Internetseite, die mit dem Schwerpunkt Sicherheitspolitik außerhalb von Hochschulen oder Instituten aufgetreten ist.

Alle Beiträge ansehen von Team GlobDef →