Good Order and Discipline: The Politics of Exclusion in the American Military

How do systemic and ideational factors shape the composition and effectiveness of the American military? From the American Revolution to the present, the American military has regularly established informal and formal discriminatory military personnel policies that have limited the availability of its military manpower, diminished its ability to fill critical and undermanned military occupations, harmed unit cohesion, reduced retention of vital talent, and made it difficult for individual service members to be the best they could be at their jobs. I contribute to the debate within security studies literature concerning the formation of military doctrine by including a focus on military personnel policies with an extensive focus on the American military’s historical treatment of African American men, gay men and lesbians, women, and transgender individuals. Existing literature suggests that national security is an area of state behavior where we should least expect ideational variables to trump systemic ones, and where states are least likely to make national security decisions that act against a state’s material self-interest. This dissertation demonstrates the United States has frequently done so and placed the enforcement of prejudicial ideas and beliefs about certain groups of individuals above national security. In a mixed-methods research study, I exhaustively review existing literature on the relationship between race, sexual orientation, gender, and transgender identity with military service, conducted archival research from the Congressional Record and various Department of Defense records, and conducted forty-five semi-structured personal interviews with civilian and military elites as well as individual military service members. My findings demonstrate that discriminatory military personal policies are entirely ideational in origin and are neither a function of systemic pressures nor military necessity and are both harmful to military effectiveness and antithetical to national security. The lengthy historical content across discriminatory military personnel policies shaped by prejudicial ideas and beliefs about race, sexual orientation, gender, and transgender identity also strongly demonstrates that elites’ justifications for these policies are strikingly similar across time and the harmful effects of individual policies are not isolated events