There's more grumbling again over Defense Secretary Gates' decision to not certify the changes required by the repeal of DADT. While I can understand the frustration, I wanted to talk about the training that seems to be the main sticking point of the certification, and what it might entail. Hopefully, everyone will have an idea of why it takes a while to get it right.
First, there's the simple fact that there are a lot of people in our military: Almost 1.5 million active duty and 1.5 million reservists according to Wikipedia. Just training that many people, especially with a large number of them either in combat or supporting combat, is a large feat. It would be like trying to count the number of children running around Chuck E. Cheese.
More important than that, though, is the type of training. I've seen people say that if they were in charge, all they would say is "Stop being a bigot." But that wouldn't help, even if every person were to suddenly just decide not to be one. Racism, sexism, and the other -isms are hard to deal with because they are not necessarily something you can just put a finger on. Let me explain.
Having been in the military, and now - though not on a direct route - working for a government contractor, I get to take lots of training on being sensitive to the feelings of others and how my actions can affect the well being of others. One of the things they push is that any type of harassment in the workplace is not based on the belief of the person causing it, but on the belief of those receiving it. Which of these statements do you think is a form of harassment:
"If you would dress a little more exciting, you might get that raise."
"It's OK, people like you tend to take a little longer to learn something new."
"Let me get that, Old Man. I wouldn't want you to hurt your back."
If you answered all three, you win a prize. The third one is a bit subtle, and and context will play a lot into it. That one came from some training I recently had to do on age discrimination. It wasn't the only comment in the video, and while none of the individual comments in the video would have probably been seen as discriminatory, the whole set was.
Like I said, I was in the Navy about 15 years ago. I remember very well some of the things we talked about, things that were only discussed because a heterosexual group of males were off away from everyone else. (Nothing bad, but what do 25ish year old males talk about when they're cocooned on a ship - sex naturally.) Things that wouldn't be proper to talk about when women or gays are around, or more appropriately, not at all at work. But how many talks like this would it take before some of the gays and lesbians started to feel "different", which should not be a feeling they should have while working.
And I'm not saying it will take forever, because it won't. But I'll let you know something I realized the other day. I am a software developer. It's taken me 13 years to go from being in the Navy to working at this government contractor job. And because they are a government contractor, they are bound by rules about hiring and discrimination, and training. And because of that, this job is the most diverse job I have ever been at. I see more software developers and other engineers that are women at this job than I have anywhere else. Women are on the construction crews. I saw a women mowing. A number of the managers are black, or women, or possibly both (I've only been here for a month). I think everyone woman who got a math degree in the seventies is working at my job. I'm now working with as many female programmers here, one, as I did in my entire previous developer history, and I think that's only because my group here only has seven people in it.
Understand that ending discrimination takes more work than "stop discriminating." Some of the things people have been doing their entire lives may actually be discriminatory, and they just have not been told it. The training has to be done.