A very large misconception about some military records is that they're labeled, and can not be seen by the average U.S. citizen. While a few of the almost 60 million U.S. military files in existence aren't available, many are. The issue never been so much opening those records, but alternatively, opening them online.
Nearly all of our community military records are kept in the National Workers Records Center. Before the late 1990's, much of these civil war medical records were in paper structure only. Due to the fact these documents stretched back to as early while the 1880's, providing access to the public wasn't much of a goal for the documents center.
There is a lot of debate a few years before being an online ancestry site produced a few million documents open to the public. This started some outrage from people who felt that this information shouldn't have already been produced, when in fact, the archival records were presently public; the genealogy website just digitized them so that the others could access picky information.
Since that time, and partly thanks to improvements in engineering and decreasing expenses of knowledge storage, several other enterprising organizations have walked forward to digitize most of these community archival records. To the average person, that means that individuals will find and see just about any archived military support report in minutes by opening the same information that the U.S. government accesses.
It is essential to notice, however, that not totally all files are archival records. Non-archival documents remain regarded the property of the National Personnel Files Middle, and while they're unavailable from these community databases, they're still accessible by demand underneath the Flexibility of Data Act.