Military marriages are weathering five years of stressful war deployments, as judged by the Pentagon’s statistics on divorce.
When two simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan required a flood of repeated overseas duty for the Army, Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy, the active duty divorce rate stood at about 3.5 percent. Today, five years later, the figure is 3.4 percent.
While divorces in the Army and Marines, who provide the bulk of troops for Iraq and Afghanistan, ticked up slightly, the steady overall rate shows that military husbands and wives are coping with the war on terror. In fact, the divorce percentage for National Guard and Reserves, who have deployed at a rapid pace, is even lower, at 2.7 percent. It was 2.6 percent in 2004.
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