At a House Armed Services Committee
hearing on Thursday, testimony by the military's four service chiefs
left Chairman Buck McKeon reeling.
Last year, Congress approved and
President Barack Obama signed into law a bill that ends the policy
that bans gay and bisexual troops from serving openly, known as
“Don't Ask, Don't Tell.” But the policy won't end until sixty
days after top Pentagon leaders and the president certify that the
military is ready for the change.
House leaders sidestepped the House
Armed Services Committee, which
was considered hostile to the effort, in their first attempt to
repeal the Clinton-era law, advancing a repeal amendment on the floor
of the House. A corresponding committee in the Senate, however,
fully vetted the amendment.
McKeon, a Republican, said the process
left him “troubled.”
“As a result of the rush to judgment
that bypassed this committee, Congress was denied the opportunity to
ask questions and identify weaknesses in the repeal implementation
plan,” McKeon said in his opening remarks Thursday. “Now, we are
confronted by an implementation process that is moving quickly to
completion of the education and training phase.”
He went on to describe the four service
chiefs as opponents of repeal, a clear indication that he fully
expected the four men's testimony to support his own publicly aired
opposition.
“Our primary interest today is to
ensure that the senior leaders of each service have the opportunity
to communicate their current views about implementation of repeal,”
McKeon said. “Several of the service chiefs have expressed
reservations about the timing and potential impacts of repeal during
a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee and we want to
understand if our military leaders remain concerned about the
prospect of full repeal of the law.”
“The one outcome that must be avoided
is any course of action that would put the combat readiness of our
military forces at risk.”
The service chiefs, however, proved to
be uncooperative witnesses, testifying that they had yet to run into
any major problems.
Marine Corps Commandant General James
Amos, an outspoken opponent of repeal last year, acknowledged that
“there hasn't been the recalcitrant push back, there hasn't been
the anxiety over it from the forces in the field.”
“And I'm looking specifically for
issues coming out of the tier II and tier III training and to be
honest with you, chairman, we've not seen it,” Amos testified.
The nation's top Marine Corps officer
previously said he could not endorse repeal of the law because the
distraction might endanger the lives of Marines in combat.
The other three service chiefs also
testified that training was going well.
“Our training is going very well,”
Admiral Gary Roughead, chief of naval operations, said. “In those
areas that we detected may be at moderate risk – the expeditionary
forces – it is not at the level we had originally forecast.”
“The types of questions we are
getting reflect the maturity, professionalism and decency of our
people,” he added. (A video montage of the hearing compiled by the
ThinkProgress.com blog Wonk Room is embedded in the right
panel of this page.)
The hearing appeared to soften McKeon,
who said: “My concern was more the procedure of how it was all laid
out. But that's past and now we're moving forward.”