Rand Study Provides Interesting Look at Military Divorce Rates during Wartime!
The Rand Corp. recently released the results of a yearlong study on the divorce rates of the nation’s military in wartime, and the findings were surprising to some officials in the Pentagon. Specifically, the “Families Under Stress” study found that divorce in the military was no higher after four years of war as compared to what it was in peacetime a decade ago. The study found that divorces slightly rose from 2.5 percent of military marriages in 2001 to 3 percent in 2005.
A FoxNews.com story detailed how these results were short of a Pentagon theory stating that divorces among military personnel were escalating because of the stress of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. With that said, the lead researcher of this study warned that it is still hard to determine future divorce rates among military personnel. Specifically, Benjamin Karney said that the study could not predict whether more divorces will occur in the future when military personnel leave the service. Karney added that the study failed to look at other consequences, like alcoholism or the emotional toll on children of military personnel who are deployed for long periods of time.
In 2005, Defense Department officials declared a huge jump in the divorce rate of troops. Specifically, these officials said that military divorces doubled from 5,658 to 10,477 between 2001 and 2004 and attributed this jump in part to the stresses of deployment. At the request of the Defense Department, the Rand’s National Defense Research Institute began to analyze the personnel records for some 6 million and men and women who served in the military during the five years before and after the September 11, 2001 attacks on American soil.
The study found that military divorces declined from 1996 to 2000 and then gradually rose to three percent of all military marriages in 2005, which was the same percentage as in 1996 when soldiers did not face battlefield deployment as often. Researchers in the study also came to several other interesting conclusions, including that:
• Women in every military branch are twice as likely to get divorced as men.
• Enlisted service members are more likely to get divorced than officers because enlisted personnel tend to be younger.
• This study’s findings were consistent with previous wars. Specifically, a study of the Vietnam War found no correlation between deployment and divorce. A study of the 1991 Persian Gulf War also found evidence that female military personnel were twice as likely to get a divorce than their male counterparts.
