I think you're being a bit generous as well with making assumptions about people's level of intelligence(by this, I mean that I don't think most people are smart enough to look at things the way you are and realize that it can be beneficial to them, but they should still be discrete). Sure, a majority would likely remain in the closet, but there is a small portion of these young soldiers that are stupid and think they're bullet proof, and that nothing will ever happen to them. They'll come out and announce it loud and to everyone....that small percentage that will be very open. And they will be harassed. Mercilessly. They will be physically abused as well as verbally abused.

And you know what will happen? People will look the other way. People will look the other way as long as possible. People will look the other way until someone dies or something happens to make one of the cases very very public. And when it goes public...it's going to reopen the debate about whether or not DADT should have been removed in the first place.

I think that given time....and by time I mean something like 10 years or longer, that thing will improve. But is the cost really worth it? You can get by just fine in the military being gay and in the closet. It's not like there's a DADT task force running around trying to out all the gays. The people that get booted out....well I suspect that in most cases there is more behind it than them just being gay.

On a side note, I'd be very curious how many people get booted out that are really and truly gay, and how many are people just pretending to get out. I never saw a single person get out because of DADT, but I certainly knew a lot of people that considered publicly pretending to be gay for long enough to get booted out under that rule.