Overshadowed in some of the more serious concerns with the Army's latest mental health assessment results (declining morale, and not enough counselors to help deal with that) was the news concerning more marital problems among troops and a rising divorce rate in the ranks.
But those issue could prove to be just as costly to service leaders as the topics directly affecting troops' ability to perform their jobs.
For the last eight years service officials have repeated the mantra of "Recruit a soldier, retain a family." Part of the reason behind the services' high retention rates in recent years has been the emphasis put on family support programs, and top Pentagon leaders insist that whenever they visit with troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan their top concern is always that their families back home are being taken care of.
But repeated deployments and years apart obviously takes a toll on that. When given the statement "I have a good marriage" by pollsters, less than 58 percent of the soldiers responding agreed with the statement. That's way down from 2003 (79 percent) and down almost 10 percent in just the last two years.
The percent of married soldiers contemplating or undergoing a divorce has also increased fairly steadily over the last six years, with more than one in five soldiers now breaking it off with their current spouse.
The Army in recent years has hired 46 new marriage and family therapists, but the mental health assessment team recommend taking that even further: covering family counseling as a medical benefit under TRICARE, increasing the number of counselors to work with spouses and families, better researching the effects of deployments on marriages.
Without those moves, the Army may find more soldiers losing their spouses and more reasons for distractions from back home while they're fighting overseas.
When will additional resources be enough?
*I am an Air Force major attending Army Command and General Staff College. My comments here are my own and do not represent the US Air Force, the US Army, Army CGSC or the Department of Defense (DoD).*
As noted in the mental health assessment reports mentioned above, the "intentions" for divorce or separation are on the rise, both in OIF and OEF. This is indicative of overall Department of Defense divorce rates which have slowly increased over the last few years.
The DoD's divorce rates are now on par with the national divorce rates which, per a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Vital Statistics Report (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr57/nvsr57_19.pdf), have actually declined since 2006.
At what point do we realize that more needs to be done to improve morale and reduce divorce in the military than just throwing more counselors or resources at it? Even as we drawdown in Iraq and buildup in Afghanistan, multiple deployments will continue to impact our families.
The Air Force recently went to a banding or tempo-based Air and Space Expeditionary Force (AEF) construct for deployment cycles. It is supposed to provide predictability for career fields in different bands or tempos. Predictability is good, but if I am deployed every six months or more, how does that really improve the impact on my family? The Air Force designated July 2009 to July 2010 the "Year of the Air Force Family" to emphasize their importance to the overall mission. Even with this focus, if the current deployment tempo does not change across the military we will have even bigger morale and retention issues in the future.
As deployments continue into the forseeable future and resources continue to dwindle, what will be the ultimate impact of divorce or separation on the force? We need to address these problems as they are identified, but at what point do the costs outweigh the benefits? I encourage open discussion on this subject to provide awareness, garner support and maintain the importance of our families in the success of the US military.