A huge belief about some military documents is they are labeled, and can't be used by the common U.S. citizen. While a number of the almost 60 million U.S. military documents in existence are not available, several are. The issue never been so significantly opening those files, but rather, opening them online.
Nearly all of our public military files are kept in the National Workers Records Center. Before the late 1990's, much of the records were in paper structure only. Considering that these records stretched back to as early as the 1880's, providing usage of the general public wasn't a lot of a goal for the records center.
There is quite a bit of controversy many years before as an online ancestry site made a few million records available to the public. That started some bounty land records outrage from those who thought that data shouldn't have now been launched, when in reality, the archival files were previously community; the genealogy site just digitized them so that the others can entry particular information.
After that, and partially because of improvements in technology and decreasing costs of knowledge storage, many enterprising organizations have stepped ahead to digitize most of these community archival records. To the typical average person, which means that people will find and view almost any archived military company history in moments by opening exactly the same information that the U.S. government accesses.
It is very important to note, but, that not totally all records are archival records. Non-archival documents remain regarded the property of the National Workers Files Middle, and while they're unavailable from these community databases, they are still accessible by request underneath the Flexibility of Information Act.