There is no reason for the Department of Defense to weigh in on the recent Dobbs decision.
There is no reason for the Department of Defense to weigh in on the recent Dobbs decision.
T he fall of great organizations happens gradually. They tend to crumble from the inside out. That is what we are seeing with the latest self-caused disaster at the Department of Defense (DOD), which has walked itself into a political minefield.
In a statement last Friday after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said that nothing was more important to him or to the DOD than “the health and well-being of our Service members, the civilian workforce and DOD families.” Emphasizing his commitment to “taking care of our people and ensuring the readiness and resilience of our Force,” Austin said that he was “examining this decision closely and evaluating our policies to ensure we continue to provide seamless access to reproductive health care as permitted by federal law.”
To begin with, there is no reason for the DOD to issue any statement regarding Dobbs. The DOD needs to adjust exactly zero policies to comply with this ruling. It does not affect service members. Yet our DOD leadership could not resist weighing in on a political issue, while taking a swipe at one of the three branches of government enshrined in the Constitution that the military is sworn to uphold. The DOD has no business reviewing and commenting on Supreme Court decisions. So why do it? The implication is so that it can find ways to provide abortions to American service members, in clear violation of U.S. law and against the intent of the U.S. Congress. If Congress wants to weigh back into this and provide funds for abortion, then that is its job. It most certainly is not the job of the DOD to question one branch of government and look to circumvent another.
Indeed, following Austin’s comments, the DOD had to issue an official response clarifying its policy. The official memorandum put out by Undersecretary of Defense Gilbert R. Cisneros Jr. softly walked back Austin’s initial statement. The opening paragraph of the memorandum references Secretary Austin’s statement and pretends to echo his message. However, the first factual statement the memo references is the federal law that restricts DOD funding of abortions. The majority of the memo rehashes that the Dobbs case does not in fact affect military service members. So why even issue a memo at all? That is made clear near the end, when the memo takes veiled political shots at the Supreme Court and issues a statement of intent to try to find ways to circumvent Congress by funding service members’ abortions. The memo states, “the implications of the Supreme Court’s decision are complicated and must be evaluated against various state laws, together with the views of the Department of Justice.” This statement seems wholly unnecessary, as the entirety of the rest of the memo keeps saying no policies need to be changed. Again, then why do we need a review?
Such actions erode the confidence the American public has in our military and damage our ability to field an effective fighting force. It is no coincidence that, the more political the DOD becomes, the more it must deal with issues such as falling respect for current military service members and difficulty recruiting new ones. An article from NBC News quotes an internal DOD survey which found that only 9 percent of the population that meets military eligibility requirements “had any inclination” to serve in the military. Now, of course, not all of this decline can be directly attributed to the DOD’s political stances. But I spent several years in an Army Recruiting Brigade. The majority of the recruits came from areas of the country with more-traditional values. Those markets were referred to as “walk-in markets,” meaning that recruiters in those areas did not have to actively seek out recruits; recruits would just walk into the stations. In areas such as the Northeast, we had to do elaborate marketing campaigns and very active outreach to schools and communities to meet recruiting numbers. It cost a lot more in time and money to get a recruit outside of our “walk-in markets.” But we can expect fewer walk-ins in the wake of a politicized DOD. After all, who wants to be part of a military that is not focused on its core mission, and is instead weighing in on political issues with stances that at least half the country does not agree with? The military has been widely respected because it was seen as one of the few organizations in our government that was not political and that members joined out of a sense of service to the nation. Now, that looks to be changing.
Regardless of your feelings about the Dobbs decision and whether you believe the right for an abortion is secretly enshrined in the Constitution, one thing we all used to agree on is that the military should be apolitical. DOD’s response to Dobbs should disturb us all. It affects something that is enshrined in the Constitution: the federal power “to raise and support armies . . . to provide and maintain a navy . . . to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces.” Respect for military service will only come back when military leadership has respect for the unique role the military is supposed to play in American society.