Selling a Newly Out Armed Forces

http://www.villagevoice.com/2012-06-20/news/selling-a-newly-out-armed-forces/

When the United States moved to an all-volunteer military force in 1973, the Pentagon started to treat military service like a business. Recruitment became a top priority and has been ever since. Now the top brass are trying to sell the American public on another innovation, an out-and-proud, post–"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" military.

By all accounts, they're doing a pretty good job of what Tim Haggerty, director of the Humanities Scholars Program at Carnegie Mellon University, describes as a "soft sell." "The Pentagon is seeing great success with a low-key approach," he says. "They are saying to civilian America: 'Look, military order and chain of command take precedence over personal opinion. It's business as usual at military bases around the nation.'"

Top military commanders had the advantage of predicting the eventual end of DADT—which everyone knew was only a stopgap, with our military eventually joining every other Western democracy's nondiscriminatory policy. "There was a lot of conversation about when the policy would go away, not if," Haggerty says.

Military recruiters and Pentagon PR honchos had long ago realized that "repeal wasn't going to undermine the military leadership or break the all-volunteer force," says Aaron Belkin, who teaches political science at San Francisco State University and does research on civil-military relations for the Palm Center. In fact, the Pentagon told recruiters they could accept gay and lesbian recruits as early as July 2011—months before the repeal went into effect.