I want to start off by saying that these are just some ideas I have had based on my experiences in the military. They may or may not be reasonable, which is why I am posting them in Great Debates.
First of all, I would like to see gays in the military. Pragmatically, however, I know that we cannot just open the floodgates. They would be ridiculed, beaten (probably to death in some cases), and would not be respected as authority if they were able to gain rank in an unbiased manner. I believe there would be cases of mutiny. At the very least, you would not immediately find the kind of utterly honest respect for your seniors that you currently do.
You also have to consider the kind of close quarters that you find in the Navy, Marines and Army (and sometimes Air Force). In the Navy you have men stacked three high, and on ships that have been retrofitted for women, they are completely separated from the men. Despite this separation there is a lot of sexual activity. For example, approximately 10% of deployed women become pregnant, despite a no fraternization policy. [1] If gays are to be deployed you can expect them to engage in sexual activity also. But you cannot separate the gay men and women from the straight men and women, because they are by definition mates for each other. If you leave them in quarters with the heterosexual military members, then the policy of separating men and women in general becomes contradictory - if gays get to sleep in the same quarters, why can’t men and women? This is a difficult issue to resolve pragmatically, particularly if you just open the floodgates.
Having primed some of the difficulties of the issue, let me first say that I think that Clinton’s “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” policy was a brilliant compromise. I can tell you that there are gays in the military right now. I believe around 1,000 are kicked out every year for violating this policy, giving you an idea of the number that are still in. They are not being head-hunted.
I would like to now make an analogy to some classic work done in psychology. You may have heard of the Little Albert experiment, where they were able to uncondition a fear response. A similar study was done on a boy known as Peter. Peter was afraid of a white rabbit. They were easily able to overcome this fear by slowly building up Peter’s tolerance to the rabbit [2]. This should give you the idea:
Of course, P and Q are out of the realm of our discussion However, my idea follows closely from this: Start by allowing gays to fill specialty jobs such as Arabic -> English translators. Simultaneously work on the gay marriage issue on the national level. There is something on the order of 30 million veterans and 3 million active duty, making this more than a purely military issue - it is a national issue. Start opening up more and more of these specialty jobs. Then work on opening up the Air Force. I am talking a 10-20 year time line. During this time our military will become increasingly more technology and information based, and we will have less of a need for our testosterone “manly man” tradition filled past. If you disagree with me and think that their fundamental human rights are being violated (I am more interested in their safety and being treated equal, eventually) and that ought to change right now, then keep working on that. But work on this also. That way, if you aren’t successful, at least you will have made some (and perhaps all of the) progress.
[1] http://google.com/search?q=cache:-8cAYjadWh8J:www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/acsc/97-0536.pdf
[2] Classics in the History of Psychology -- Jones (1924)