WASHINGTON — The toll for a nation long at war is evident in military homes: The divorce rate in the armed forces edged up again in the past year despite many programs to help couples, and the rate now is a full percentage point higher than around the time of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
There were an estimated 27,312 divorces among roughly 765,000 married members of the active-duty Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps in the budget year that ended Sept. 30, the Pentagon said Friday.
That is a divorce rate of about 3.6 percent for fiscal year 2009, compared with 3.4 percent a year earlier, according to figures from the Defense Manpower Data Center. Marriages among reservists failed at a rate of 2.8 percent, compared with 2.7 the previous year.
Air Force Maj. April Cunningham, a Defense Department spokeswoman, said the changes from 2008 to 2009 were relatively small because of myriad programs offered by the services.
As in previous years, women in uniform suffered higher divorce rates than their male counterparts: 7.7 percent in 2009, compared with 3 percent for men.
There is no comparable annual system for tracking the national or civilian divorce rate, though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in 2005 that 43 percent of all first marriages end in divorce within 10 years.
