Washington – Divorce in the nation’s military was no higher after four years of war than it was in peacetime a decade earlier, despite the stress of long and repeated tours of duty.
A year-long study by the Rand Corp. says divorces rose from 2.5 percent of military marriages in 2001 to 3 percent in 2005. But that is still short of a previous Pentagon theory that marriage breakups had been soaring due to the strain of fighting the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, lead researcher Benjamin Karney said Thursday.
He cautioned that the review of service records could not foresee whether more divorces will occur in years after troops leave the service.
And he also said the study on “Families Under Stress” did not look at other possible consequences, either current or future, such as increases in alcoholism or the toll on orphaned or emotionally stressed children of troops.
“The future is uncertain. The full impact of these conflicts on military families may not be known for years,” Karney said. “But in the short term, we can say that we are not seeing what everyone thought we were going to see,” on the subject of divorces.
The study came out a day after the Pentagon said it was extending the tours of all active-duty soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan – about 100,000 troops – to 15 months from the current one year. That was the latest in a series of extended deployments and repeated call-ups of reserve units that have strained the Army and its troops over more than five years of warfare.
Rand’s National Defense Research Institute – a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the Pentagon – found in the new study that after declining from 1996 to 2000, divorces rose gradually in the following years. Divorces, separations and annulments across all branches of service rose to 3 percent of military marriages in 2005 – the same as in 1996, when soldiers did not routinely face the battlefield deployments that are common today, Rand said in a statement.
There’s no comparable system for tracking the national or civilian divorce rate, though the Centers for Disease Control said in 2005 that 43 percent of all first marriages end in divorce within 10 years.
The study analyzed personnel records for about 6 million men and women who served in the military the five years before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on American soil and the five years after. Researchers also looked separately at just those who had deployed, as well as previous studies on military marriages, finding that troops who had been deployed longer had a lower risk of divorce.
More details of the study can be found online at rand.org.
