Allowing gays to serve openly in the miliary "would not be the wrenching, traumatic change that many have feared and predicted," said Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates.

At a news conference today, after the release of a 9-month Pentagon study. 

He said it was a “matter of urgency” that the lame-duck Senate vote in the next weeks to repeal the law.  If not, Mr. Gates predicted fights in the courts and the possibility that the repeal would be “imposed immediately by judicial fiat.”...

... Gates acknowledged the higher levels of “discomfort” about repealing the law among those in the combat branches of the military. He said that those findings remained a concern to him as well as to the chiefs of the service branches, but that the concerns were not insurmountable as long as any repeal was carried out carefully and with what he said was “sufficient time and preparation to get the job done right.”