Military Divorce Rate Holding Steady -3/1/2008

[Smartmarriages]

Military Divorce Rate Holding Steady
The Associated Press
February 29, 2008
By PAULINE JELINEK 

> _Army chaplains have trained some 60,000 active duty and reservists in the
> "Strong Bonds" program for strengthening personal relationships.


WASHINGTON (AP) ‹ The divorce rate in the armed forces held steady last year
at 3.3 percent, a surprising finding given the stress that marriages are
under during persistent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some veterans questioned whether the figure, reported by the Pentagon,
presents an accurate picture. But defense officials credited efforts in
recent years to support couples enduring uncommonly long separations and
other hardships because of those wars.

The divorce rate represented more than 25,000 failed marriages among the
nearly 755,000 married active duty troops in all military branches between
Oct. 1, 2006, and Oct. 1, 2007, according to statistics provided to The
Associated Press.

The Defense Department data showed that the Army, the service with the
largest number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, had a rate of 3.2 percent,
unchanged from the previous year. That amounted to 8,748 divorces among the
approximately 275,000 married soldiers.

Last year was the deadliest yet for U.S. troops in the wars. In addition,
Army couples had to cope with extended separations because tours of duty
lasted 15 months rather than 12 months.

Those longer deployments and multiple tours required of many troops have
been widely blamed for unprecedented stresses on military couples. Spouses
at home must manage families and households without their partner. The
strain also has contributed to higher suicide rates and more mental health
problems among troops.

"We all agree that there is stress on the families. It's just not
manifesting itself in these numbers," a Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Les
Melnyk, said about the divorce statistics.

The biggest exception was a rise in divorce rates among military women. For
years, their marriages have failed at twice the rate of men in service.

Though firm numbers were not available in the new data, Army divorces in
2007 appeared to occur in about 8 percent of service women's marriages and
2.6 percent of men's.

There is no comparable system for tracking civilian divorces.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the divorce rate for the
general population was 3.6 per 1,000 people in 2005 ‹ the most recent
statistics available; that was the lowest rate since 1970.

The per capita divorce rate is different from a second method of calculation
‹ the percentage of marriages that eventually will end in divorce or
separation. The CDC said that year that 43 percent of all first marriages
end in divorce within 10 years.

Todd Bowers of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America said the wars are
having a crushing effect on military marriages and producing a rising number
of breakups that are not being tracked because they involve people who have
left the service.

"When you look at their numbers ... there's a piece of the puzzle that's
missing," Bowers said of the Pentagon statistics.

Army spokesman Paul Boyce said the military divorce rate is not higher
because there are "strong programs ... and a sense of real teamwork among
the families."

For example:

_The Marines have offered workshops to teach couples to manage conflict,
solve problems and communicate better.

_The Navy started a similar program, using weekend retreats for couples.

_The Army has started paying for what it calls its "Family Covenant," a
broad initiative of services and facilities to improve the quality of life
for military families nationwide and overseas. It includes improving health
care, schools, housing and child care to relieve stress on spouses.

_Army chaplains have trained some 60,000 active duty and reservists in the
"Strong Bonds" program for strengthening personal relationships.

_Troops also get mental-health training in a program called "Battlemind"
that teaches about common problems to expect at home as troops readjust to
domestic life.

The Pentagon data does not count actual divorces, but rather takes the
numbers of married troops in each service at the beginning of the budget
year and the number of married troops at the end. The difference is the
estimate of marriages that ended during the year.

Because people come and go during the year ‹ new recruits join, retirees and
others leave ‹ those counted at the beginning of the year are not all the
same as those counted at the end. This calculation method, however, has
remained the same over the years, so officials consider the year-to-year
comparison valid.

The numbers also do not speak to troubled but intact marriages. In a mental
health survey taken in Iraq in late 2006, 20 percent of troops questioned
said they or their spouse were planning a divorce, compared with 15 percent
a year earlier.

A study last year showed divorces after several years of war were no higher
than in peacetime a decade earlier. It came to the conclusion partly by
analyzing personnel records for some 6 million men and women who served in
the military the five years before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the
five years after.
On the Net:

    * Defense Department: http://www.defenselink.mil

Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press.

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