When the Pentagon’s leadership announced a process to end the military’s ban on open gay service before Congress, Defense Secretary Robert Gates played the cautionary role. Gates told senators that he would put together a study group, led by Army Lt. Gen. Carter Ham and Pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson, to study the least-disruptive ways to end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
That study hasn’t concluded. Nor has the Senate taken up Joe Lieberman’s (I-Conn.) bill to repeal the ban. But Gates has some unilateral tools at his disposal, and this week he intends to use them.
“He will announce changes to the way the current law is being enforced that make it more difficult to begin investigations and kick people out,” said a defense source who would not speak for the record ahead of Gates’s announcement. Spokesman Geoff Morrell hinted in his briefing yesterday that Gates would make some changes, but did not specify any.
Gates has speculated for at least a year that he was considering unilateral steps, ahead of a congressional repeal, to ease the burden “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” places on gay servicemembers. Civil-rights groups have urged him to take such steps, particularly on the process for beginning investigations of servicemembers’ sexual orientation that can drive people out of the military. It’s not clear yet when this week Gates will make the announcement, nor is it clear yet just how enforcement will change. But those who worried that there would be no movement on “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” in 2010 while the study commences, despite President Obama’s call for repeal this year in his State of the Union, can probably take heart.