WASHINGTON, April 13 (UPI) -- There has not been a sharp increase in U.S. military divorces despite the last five years of war and high operations tempos, a new study says.
However, the study found the marriages of female service members are several times more likely to end in divorce than male service members.
The RAND Corp. looked at the divorce rate for the U.S. military, comparing the five years prior to 2001 and the five years after. While divorce rates have been rising slowly for the last five years, they have not yet approached the high of 1999, the study found.
That peak was followed by a drop in divorce rates in the year 2000 to a five-year low, and they are now rising in the Army and Marine Corps -- the most heavily deployed services -- to rates last seen in 1996, when the stress on the force was less than it is today. The rate of divorce, separation and annulments reached about 3 percent annually as of 2005, the study found.
"The trends reveal that over a period when demands on the military have increased markedly, rates of marital dissolution have increased only gradually," the study states.
RAND traces news reports of high rates of divorces to a spike in Army officers' divorces in 2004. Enlisted divorce rates remained the same that year, but the dramatic increase in officers' marriage dissolutions offset that number.
One of the predictors for divorce is, unsurprisingly, marriage. As marriage rates have gone up, so have divorce rates. In 2000, for instance roughly 8 percent of the military entered into their first marriage. Marriage rates rose steadily from there, reaching 14 percent in 2005, according to the study. The rate of marital dissolution has ranged between 2.5 percent and 4 percent since 1996.
More than 60 percent of the military is married.
