Oh for fucks sake. Military service is not a feel-good Hallmark channel movie. It’s not a fall-back jobs program that accepts anyone. It’s the entity that fights the wars of the United States. Life and death. It is the last place that we should be changing rules to accommodate this sort of shit.
What’s next? Find a place for quadriplegics? That autistic guy who can only communicate by biting people? Certainly we can find some sort of niche job that they can do even if it means creating new units and new accomodations to suit them, right? Because the important thing is that they get to be part of the team, not that they be able to pull their weight and be worthwhile to a military.
I think this sort of thought is a luxury we’ve got because we’re such a dominant military force that no one seriously thinks about the consequences of deliberately weakening ourselves for some feel-good bullshit. But make no mistake - the military is serious fucking business, and when they’re needed, lives are literally at stake.
Maybe some day in the far future we’ll see a war between a country with a traditional military that steamrolls over one with a bunch of people with a variety of disabilities and identity disorders and they can feel really good about their inclusiveness while some able-bodied 18 year olds mow down their rainbow flag hug squad.
That’s one reason. Another is that a large portion sees military service as a right as well as an obligation - the right to serve your country, the right to take part in Israel’s most important shared cultural touchstone, and the right not to have a big gap on your CV that will dissuade potential employers. So you have people like the developmentally-disabled kids who hand out uniforms when I show up for reserve duty, this blind guy I know who served as an Army Radio archivist, and my little brother, who was in a hiking accident a few months before he was supposed to start his service, which left him almost completely paralyzed from the neck down. My brother, after eight months of rehabilitation and another half a year of bureaucratic wrangling, managed to enlist as a clerk in the navy, and due to his brilliant mind, ironclad motivation and near-superhuman people skills, eventually became an officer in Naval Intelligence, the most severely disabled person in IDF history ever to earn an officer’s commission. It made the front page of Israel’s biggest newspaper and everything.
So no, I don’t think these people’s service, and that of many more like them, harms my country’s military readiness and ability to win wars. I’d even venture to say that the opposite is true.
I know in the Canadian Armed Forces, every trade in the military is expected to be a soldier first. A Deaf person would not meet the universality of service requirements. I have no illusions about the abilities of the Deaf, my oldest sister was Deaf since birth and she would absolutely agree with me.
There are, however, Deaf civilians that work for DND, because there is no expectation for civilians to also be Soldiers.
They could take it to court, if they could get a hearing.
It seems to me that there may be some positions in which lack of hearing could be advantageous. How about field artillery, when everybody else is wearing ear protection the deaf soldier could go about his business without fear of getting startled by fire. Or they could be computer specialists or programmers, cooks, mechanics, or whatever. How many times would a deaf cook on a submarine be called upon to personally fight? Never.
How many times could a deaf cook sink his ship because he didn’t hear the fire alarm in the kitchen and the fire spread out of control quickly before we realized “hey, this is a dangerous, important job where lives are on the line, not a Lifetime movie about someone with a disability got to do what they want”?
There are no situations in which being deaf is an advantage. Artillery teams need lots of communication. A translator above a submarine displaces a needed a crew member, or sign language training displaces more valuable training, or special accomodations displace needed safety or combat systems.
How do you think it will affect the morale of a crew to know that they’re serving with a guy who may perform some critical role for their safety but he can’t perform it well because he doesn’t have the capability? Think they’ll get warm fuzzy feelings about what a great heartwarming story they’re creating? Or do you think they might think being able to count on the people whose hands their lives are in having all the faculties to do their jobs might matter to them?
A volunteer organization that selects people based on suitability, who may be called upon to work at their absolute best and require all the capabilities a person possesses, whose capabilities for the job may be life or death, is the very last place we need this touchy feely bullshit.
Submariners - including cooks - have to be able to understand a lot of verbal instructions that have nothing to do with fighting an enemy.
Suppose there were a nuclear reactor accident - is someone supposed to interpret with sign language for him the whole time?
It gets even worse in situations where the cook cannot see people. Suppose the cook is taking a shower, but there’s a fire aboard the ship. Someone begins pounding on the door of the shower, shouting, “Fire! Get out of the shower right now!” But the deaf cook, taking his shower, can’t hear a thing.
Depends on several factors. Here in the US, military endstrength has been cut by almost 10% over the past few years. So, there’s the question of a diminishing labor pool and what jobs you want to prioritize for military personnel.
Also, the compensation for military personnel is generally higher than for Federal civilian workers. As a very general rule of thumb, the median service member here makes at least 20% more than the median Federal civilian employee. Cite, see figures 1 and 2. The noncash compensation of military service members is even more, as in, it’s not even close. So a member of the armed forces will pay nothing for medical services at a military hospital, a Federal civilian is paying several thousand dollars a year out of his own pocket for private health insurance (which includes the various co-pays and other fees not applicable to military hospitals).
The other issue is that there’s fundamentally a different career path for filling “desk jobs.” As others have noted, military personnel typically use shore duty to break up a career so that you aren’t spending more than roughly half your career in more combat-related positions. So for a desk job in which you want someone with varied experience (e.g., maybe a Navy submarine officer overseeing contracts to upgrade sonars or something), putting military personnel in those jobs can certainly have benefits.
The other option is that civilians in Federal service typically have long careers with far less moving around. If you put a civilian in that job overseeing contracts for submarine sonars, odds are they are going to stay a lot longer than two-three years. They might do that for ten or fifteen, maybe their whole careers. You’re going to get a civilian who will learn where all the bodies are buried with respect to those sonars, and use that knowledge for a long time.
Back to the OP, I’m just not clear why a deaf individual, if pegged to serve some kind of desk job, would need to be in uniform to be successful in that position.
Eh, I was career Army and theoretically there’s some number of desk jobs deaf people could do just fine. The reason this isn’t done is because every member of the military is expected to complete their branch’s equivalent of basic combat training (BCT in the Army, Boot Camp in the USMC etc), and thus theoretically in times of need anyone from any MOS could, if necessary, but put into a combat role. In reality that almost never happens, but it’s the logic behind this. Because truthfully a person with a disability like deafness would be a major liability during BCT or Boot Camp, dangerously so, and would be unable to complete it without significant special treatment.
You could certainly make an argument that we don’t need this approach, but there’s a long history of tradition for this way of doing things, and I don’t imagine the courts would ever interfere with it.
Well the military can routinely DQ you for relatively minor medical problems, even ones that wouldn’t come close to meeting disability status in civilian life. For example if you have cancer, even one that has been treated and in remission, that is usually DQ with only a minor list of exceptions.
I know here in Canada we are exempt because everyone in uniform has to meet universality of service. Everyone has to be able to be a soldier. I know from chats with US military there is something similar in place in the US.
It’s not purely a cost thing, although paying civilians to peel potatoes and work in the chow hall is definitely cheaper than even having E-1s do it, it’s more a matter of retention in the all-volunteer military.
I think there’s a presumption that people join the military to fight, or to learn certain trade skills like aircraft maintenance or electronics repair, etc… So if you take people who volunteered with the intention of doing that kind of thing, and they spend most of their enlistment serving food or mowing lawns or whatever other stuff that they used to have conscripts do, that guy is a lot less likely to re-enlist when his time is up, and the military sees the training they invested in him walk out into the civilian world.
If they put effort into trying to have their soldiers/sailors/airmen/marines do the things they signed up to do, then they retain more soldiers and have a better force as a result.
In my father and father-in-law’s day, there was a lot of shit-work that the draftees did, mostly because there was a huge pool of cheap, available manpower that could be stuck doing KP, because they were there, and it didn’t cost the military any more. ( the USAF taught Dad how to make bang-up French toast, FWIW)