A Comparison of Civilian and Enlisted Divorce Rates During the Early All Volunteer Force

The belief that enlisted military divorce rates are unusually high is a recurring theme expressed among those living in the military community, yet quantitative data on military divorce rates remain a virtual lacuna. Assessing the degree of marital dissolution experienced by military personnel has important implications for the well being of military families and also for readiness levels and reenlistment likelihood. The all-volunteer enlisted force also happens to be an almost all-married enlisted force. This demographic transition is aptly illustrated in the replacement of the old expression, “If the Army wanted you to have a wife, it would have issued you one” with “We recruit soldiers, but we retain families” (Scarville 1990:1). In this paper, I analyze underutilized military data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and find that enlisted divorce rates in the Armed Forces are higher than for comparable civilians within a specific age range. That so little is officially known about levels of military divorce owes largely to the cross-sectional nature of most military data. To accurately measure divorce prevalence, it is necessary to follow couples from marriage formation forward, while also taking into account attrition from the military and any other changing individual-level characteristics during the period of analysis. To place such findings within their proper context, one needs a civilian baseline for comparison. However, it is rare that military surveys include civilian data. Instead, divorce percentages are often compared across the civilian and enlisted populations in the absence of controls for compositional differences. This lack of comparability can sometimes be partially remedied by comparing Pentagon data to cross-sectional data from the civilian Current Population Survey (CPS); however, there are significant inconsistencies across the datasets in their sampling design and variable structure. Using the CPS as an augmentative comparison is further compromised when analyzing divorce rates because the CPS contains variables only for “currently divorced” rather than providing dates of divorce. This paper provides a more rigorous means of evaluating the prevalence of military divorce by using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a longitudinal dataset that allows for a simultaneous comparison of divorce outcomes for both enlisted military and civilian respondents.