Military analyst Max Boot posits two big ideas in support of openly gay military service. Yesterday, I addressed the first of those ideas — the notion that the U.S. military should act to accommodate open homosexuality because other countries’ militaries allegedly have done the same, and supposedly without incident or problem.

Today, I’ll address Boot’s second idea, which is that the U.S. military’s experience with women proves that openly gay military service would be somehow a force multiplier.

After all, Boot argues, women are ubiquitous in the U.S. military and haven’t had an adverse effect on military readiness and combat effectiveness. Therefore, he suggests, open homosexuality within the ranks wouldn’t matter either.

Not so fast. It is true that women are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with honor and distinction. However, women do not serve in frontline infantry combat units. And in air and naval combat units where women do serve, there are double standards and sexual fraternization problems.

You never hear about these problems, though, because to acknowledge or address them is politically incorrect and likely ruinous to a serviceman’s career.

Boot references James Webb’s classic 1979 essay, “Women Can’t Fight,” as somehow illustrative of how traditionalists have gotten it wrong. His argument seems to be that Webb and the traditionalists were wrong about women in combat; and so they must, therefore, be wrong about openly gay military service.

In fact, what’s remarkable about Webb’s classic 1979 essay is how intellectually bold and prescient it really was.

“I have never met a woman, including the dozens of female midshipmen I encountered during my recent semester as a professor at the Naval Academy, whom I would trust to provide those men [tough, earthy, and brash young Marines] with combat leadership.

Furthermore, men fight better without women around. Men treat women differently than they do men, and vice versa.

This is simply and indisputably true — and it is borne out by the recent experience of men in combat units who have been forced to train or serve with women.

But again, you never hear about any problems involving women in combat units because the military has learned that to acknowledge these problems is politically incorrect and unhelpful to a serviceman’s career prospects.

Now, it so happens that much of what has transpired in Iraq and Afghanistan during the past decade does not involve frontline infantry combat. That’s why, as Boot points out, women are omnipresent in both theaters of operation.

But this experience certainly doesn’t prove the value of women in combat. To the contrary: it shows that counterinsurgency warfare involves so much more than combat.

Of course, gay men are not women. Gay men can fight, and that’s the problem. The problem is that the introduction of an overtly sexual dynamic into combat units is inherently disruptive. And this dynamic becomes all the more disruptive when it has the force of law behind it.

In truth, repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” isn’t about allowing gay men and women to serve: because they can and do serve now, albeit discreetly, and without drawing attention to their private sexual lives.

Repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is about empowering the courts to promote the agenda of the gay lobby. It is about enforcing public acceptance of homosexuality, legitimizing homosexuality, altering the U.S. military’s culture and traditions, and violating the First Amendment rights of religious believers and cultural traditionalists.

Why, then, try to “fix” a problem that doesn’t exist? Especially when doing so promises to compromise the integrity and viability of our military culture, and quite possibly drive out of military service altogether some of our most important and valuable personnel?

John R. Guardiano is an Arlington, Virginia-based writer and analyst. He served as a Marine in Iraq and is still a military reservist. Follow him on Twitter. Mr. Guardiano has also written an ongoing series — “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and Don’t Even Pretend to Be Fair” – about willful media bias and distortion regarding open homosexuality in the military.

Military analyst Max Boot relies on suspect and irrelevant studies by the activist academic group, the Palm Center, to argue that openly gay military service wouldn’t be a problem for the U.S. military.

Military analyst Max Boot has a new post at Commentary magazine’s Contentions blog in which he argues that openly gay military service really wouldn’t be a problem for the U.S. military. In support of his thesis, Boot advances two big ideas both of which are wrong. I’ll address Boot’s two main points in two separate blog posts.

First, says Boot, “studies” show that open homosexuality has not undermined “unit cohesion in allied militaries, including those of Australia, Britain, and Israel.”

But the “studies” Boot references were done by the Palm Center, an activist academic group which has been actively promoting openly gay military service for years. Thus, the objectivity and fairness of these studies are in doubt. In fact, there are four big problems with the Palm Center “studies”:

First, other countries militaries aren’t comparable to the U.S. military. No other military on the planet, after all, can or will do what our military does — namely, fight and win major wars in multiple theaters of operation over a prolonged, multiyear period.

Second, the fact that other countries have allegedly muddled along with openly gay military service doesn’t mean that openly gay military service is ideal or helps to promote military readiness and combat effectiveness.

There are some things, after all, that the military suffers and endures — a stultifying bureaucracy, a rigid hierarchy, and women in some combat units — which hinder its performance, but which are ignored or swept under the rug for political reasons.

Third, it is not clear that openly gay military service is really as pervasive as Boot and the Palm Center suggest.

“Indeed, according to Thomas Mackubin Owens, with the exception of the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries,

[our NATO and allied militaries] still discriminate, banning homosexuals from service in ground combat units and special-operations forces.

Owens is a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War, a professor at the Naval War College, and editor of Orbis, the journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Owens also cites the late great military sociologist Charles Moskos, who wrote:

There is no country in Europe, much less Israel, that American advocates of gay rights would find a suitable model.

Fourth, the entire effort to “study” the issue and to gather “data” is completely misplaced; yet it dominates the debate — or at least what little debate there now is over “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”: Because in truth, only one side — those who want to trash “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” — is making an argument. Supporters of the current policy are incredibly weak and inarticulate.

The effort to gather data is misplaced because the attitudes or “feelings” of our servicemen and women aren’t at issue.

What is at issue is the introduction of an overtly sexual dynamic into military units, and whether that will help or hinder military readiness and combat effectiveness. And for that we don’t need “data”; we simply need to understand human nature and our recent (but much covered-up and ignored) U.S. military history.

In my next post, I’ll refute Boot’s second point, which is that the military’s experience with women shows that accommodating open homosexuality would not be a problem. Boot misconstrues the role of women in the military and thus is wrong about open homosexuality within the ranks.

John R. Guardiano is an Arlington, Virginia-based writer and analyst. He served as a Marine in Iraq and is still a military reservist. Follow him on Twitter. Mr. Guardiano has also written an ongoing series — “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and Don’t Even Pretend to Be Fair” – about willful media bias and distortion regarding open homosexuality in the military.

The decade-long attempt to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons may have entered the final round on Sunday when Iran announced to the world it intended to build ten new uranium enrichment sites.

“This is really a statement of defiance,” a former senior Israeli atomic official told The Wall Street Journal, “telling the world we are going to go ahead with our nuclear program.”

The Iranian government’s statement came only two days after the world’s major powers condemned Iran’s nuclear program, which, despite Iranian denials, is believed to be producing nuclear weapons. China and Russia joined the United States, France, Britain and Germany to support an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) resolution ordering Iran to stop construction on the uranium enrichment plant near Qom, a secret facility whose existence President Obama revealed last September.

Due to the international criticism, Iranians are now threatening to pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and reduce cooperation with the IAEA, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog. North Korea is the only other country ever to have pulled out of the treaty.

According to news reports, the Iranian decision to thumb their nose at the U.N. and world opinion and construct new nuclear fuel refinement facilities was made Sunday evening at a cabinet meeting chaired by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinijad. The Iranians will start work on five of the new sites within two months and at an unspecified future time on the remaining five.

It is believed the reason for the extra facilities is to allow Iran to build more nuclear bombs. One military analyst says U.N. weapons inspectors and the U.S. Department of Defense are of the opinion Iran currently has enough enriched fuel for one nuclear weapon. Iran would like to have several more in order to present itself as a “credible threat.”

The Iranian announcement signals a defeat for President Obama’s ‘soft’ approach towards the Islamic Republic’s leadership. In an interview with Dubai-based Al-Arabiya satellite television network last January, Obama said Iran’s leaders would find the extended hand of diplomacy if they “unclenched” their fists.

“As I said in my inauguration speech, if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us,” Obama said.

But as early as March there were already signs that Iran was in no mood to unclench and drop the rock it was holding in the form of its nuclear weapons program. That month, President Obama released a video, wishing the Iranians a happy New Year, which, in Iran, falls on the first day of spring. In return for his friendly overture, the American president received from the Iranian government nothing but a demand for apologies for America’s past transgressions, real or imagined, against Iran.

Sunday’s statement simply proves what most have suspected all along: One cannot talk to the Iranian leaders and that they are simply stringing out negotiations to complete their nuclear arms program. And the fact the Iranians still celebrate the 1979 American embassy seizure every November, a flagrant and criminal breach of international law, shows they do not want to talk to the United States in particular and are still willing to flout international norms.

Essentially, Iran’s leaders are religious fanatics who believe they have been chosen by God to establish a Shiite hegemony over the majority Sunni Islamic world and then, hopefully, over the whole planet. Of the world’s one billion Muslims, about 220 million are minority Shiites, of whom the largest number, about 62 million, live in Iran. Pakistan contains the next largest community of Shiites at 33 million, while India is third with 30 million and Iraq fourth with 18 million.

Iran’s mullah regime sees possessing nuclear weapons as instrumental to its plans for world domination. Nuclear arms would also add significant muscle to Iran’s security in a part of the world where any sign of weakness or vulnerability could be dangerous. Iranians have not forgotten how Iraq took advantage of Iran’s revolutionary turmoil to launch a devastating eight-year war against it in 1980. And like Russia with its former Eastern European satellites, Iran would also use nuclear weapons to intimidate weaker neighbors.

The Asia Times columnist, Spengler (a literary pseudonym), gives another reason why Iran is not afraid to seek confrontation over its nuclear weapons program. Iranian demographics have sunk to West German levels of about 1.6 children per woman, which would make waging a war in 20 years impossible. Iran currently has enough young men to embark on a military adventure, whether internally for nuclear weapons acquisition or externally against the Sunni world, while in twenty years it won’t.

Iran’s heavily-subsidized economy is also imploding. Like Argentina with its 1982 Falkland Islands’ invasion and Germany in 1939, economically it is now or never for Iran to make a grab for the ring. In a year’s time it may be too late, especially if oil prices drop dramatically again. Besides, again like Argentina, a military adventure would probably cause those Iranian people actively opposed to the regime to put aside their economic and political grievances and rally around the country’s leadership in nationalistic pride.

But if Iran wants a fight, it will most likely get one. The Islamic regime’s Holocaust-denying leadership has openly stated it wants to erase Israel from the map. Facing such a naked threat to their country’s existence, one military publication states the Israelis are now openly discussing using a missile attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. While Israel’s Jericho missiles can carry nuclear warheads, they also can be equipped with a conventional warhead. An attack by Israeli warplanes is also a possibility.

The Israelis already have American backing for such a strike if negotiations fail, as they appear to have. American Vice-President Joe Biden said in an ABC interview last July America would not prevent an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. And since the only other option would be a nuclear-armed Iran, the Israelis will now likely ensure this last round ends in a knockout.