Study Examines Military Divorce Rates

In this image released by the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army soldier Jimmie Arnold watches a game of pool being played by some Iraqi men while Iraqi and U.S. Army soldiers search a house in Mansour, Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, April 10, 2007. Arnold is assigned to the 3rd Platoon Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment, 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, Wash. (AP Photo/ Master Sgt. Andy Dunaway, U.S. Air Force) (Master Sgt. Andy Dunaway - AP)

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 yearlong study by 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 yearlong 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, he said.

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.

Defense Department officials in 2005 had announced a huge jump in the divorce rate, saying cases doubled from 5,658 to 10,477 between 2001 and 2004 among active-duty Army officers and enlisted personnel.

Some officials surmised it was partly due to stresses of deployments and the department asked Rand to study it.

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. Divorce, separation 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.

"Everyone is saying that they are very, very stressed, but the genuine stress isn't necessarily leading to elevations in divorce," Karney said.