The US military has spent more than US$200 million to recruit and train personnel to replace troops discharged for being openly gay in the last decade, a new congressional study has found.
The review by the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, was requested by more than 20 lawmakers who were concerned about the costs of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy instituted in the Clinton administration, particularly for service members with "critical occupations" and "important foreign language skills."
The accountability office plans to release its review today. The New York Times obtained it from a member of Congress who had requested the study.
In the last 10 years, more than 10,000 service members have been discharged because they did not keep their sexual orientation to themselves as required, according to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a gay rights group that monitors the armed forces.
The Pentagon said this month that it discharged 653 service members last year for being gay, down 15 percent from 2003.
The number of men and women discharged because they were found to be gay or because they disclosed their sexuality, has fallen three years in a row, the Pentagon statistics show. Since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the rate of discharges has dropped nearly 50 percent.
In a statement included in the report, the defense department said more service members were discharged for drug offenses, pregnancy and weight problems than for being gay.
The department does not track the specific costs of investigating or discharging gay service members, counseling and providing pastoral care for them or for handling legal challenges and reviews of dismissals, the report says.
But the accounting office estimated that it cost the Pentagon nearly US$100 million, US$10,500 a person, to recruit replacements for enlisted service members who were discharged from 1994 to 2003 for being gay.
Investigators said that the total cost to the Navy to train the replacements was US$49 million, US$18,000 a service member. The report said the Air Force estimated its training costs at US$16.6 million, or US$7,400 a service member, and the Army said its costs were US$29.7 million, or US$6,400 a service member.
The investigators said the Marines declined to provide estimates. They acknowledged that the review was not complete. The figures for training and recruiting are based just on enlisted personnel.
The legal defense network said hundreds of officers had also been discharged under the policy.
The investigators also said they could not quantify the cost of losing personnel discharged after having been trained in certain areas of expertise like intelligence or languages like Arabic, Chinese, Farsi or Korean.
"The principal limitation of our analysis is that for privacy reasons we did not review separated service members' personnel records, including training histories, which has implications for estimating training costs," the investigators wrote.
Representative Martin Meehan, who sought the study, is the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Terrorism, Conventional Threats and Capabilities. He has drafted legislation that would repeal the policy on gays in an effort to enhance military readiness.
The measure, which Meehan said he would introduce next week, calls for the military to enact "a policy of nondiscrimination on the basis of sexual orientation," the first time Congress will consider such a proposal since "don't ask, don't tell" was approved on Nov. 30, 1993.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said the Bush administration will not revisit the policy, but numerous pending suits are trying to overturn it. Meehan called the policy "senseless and counterproductive," saying it undermined the strength of the military by "discharging competent service members at a time when our troops are already stretched thin."
Critics of the policy also point out that US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq have fought alongside those from countries that permit gays to serve openly.
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