I know that Congress voted to repeal DADT in December, but the President and the Pentagon had to first certify that it wouldn’t harm military readiness before implementing the repeal.
So any news on where things stand right now? I haven’t heard anything about it in a while.
Also, are gay servicemembers still getting kicked out of the military in the meantime?
Everyone but the Army is mostly done with training. And the Army expects to be done by August 15th. If they don’t jump the gun and certify before the last of the training is complete, I would expect that the written certifications would be issued in August and DADT should end officially on or about September 1st.
There has been one Air Force airman who was dismissed in April. And he was supposedly given a choice to delay his hearing until after the repeal went into place. But he insisted on having the hearing now, because he wanted out. Basically he used the current rules to force them to kick him out. Outside of that I don’t think there have been any other discharges under DADT since Obama signed the legislation.
I can try to dig up some links in a bit, but I’ll just recap from memory right now. The military is currently training its members in whatever it is they need to be trained in to implement the repeal. Secretary Gates mentioned recently that “certification” could be coming soon, which would mean servicemembers would be able to serve openly as early as September. As a practical matter, dismissals from th service have been virtually stopped since October. After a court found the law unconstitutional, the ban was briefly lifted before a stay on the judge’s ruling was in place. Since then, an dismissals have to be approved by (I can’t remember exactly) either the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of that branch of service. Since October, as far as anyone can tell, only one person has been dismissed, and it was after requesting that their case be expedited.
It was approval by the secretary of branch.
I fully agree, as training MUST be performed, so the highest level executive SHOULD be the approving authority until training is complete and doctrine is obviously set in stone.
Otherwise, you’d get tens of thousands of interpretations of the regulation.
Especially from four star O-5 types, who consider their unit beyond law and regulation (sorry, personal experience with the Army on that particular issue on regulations and law, but not on THIS topic, just some LTC types who decided that he could overrule a stateside 3 star authority. Didn’t work out too well for their careers in the end.)
The idea at the highest level is, ONE POLICY. No service or specialty level variances from that policy, across the ENTIRE DoD. Otherwise, one could end up with a line Marine policy, a bearing polisher for a type 12 jet engine for the Air Force, a Navy policy and an Army policy of 28000 MOS/Unit/wind direction policies.
Full disclosure, I’m retired Army, retired last year. I’ve also worked as a contractor as an information assurance professional and got the backblast… Did the same for the Navy and got no real backblast.
SHORTEST VERSION: DADT until further notice.