Today, the U.S. Army turns 251, and indeed, it has a lot to celebrate. As the first truly national institution, the Army proved that disparate colonies and vastly different peoples could unite together in one body politic. Over the next two-plus centuries, beyond fighting for and defending the United States, the Army’s discoveries, inventions, and expertise helped build the physical infrastructure that enabled the U.S. to expand continentally while keeping American families alive via penicillin and EpiPens, blood plasma, and bug spray.
But despite the Army’s reasons to celebrate, there is an aspect of today’s military that ought to give us pause: Many of America’s military families — the backbone of our armed forces — are not happy.
Despite Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s triumphant announcement to this year’s West Point graduates that 2026 recruitment numbers hit their fiscal targets four months early, there’s been a steady decrease in military families’ willingness to recommend military service to their sons and daughters. In 2016, that number stood at 55 percent, according to the Blue Star Families Annual Survey; the most recent data reveals it’s now down to 37 percent. Meanwhile, the Army’s own Career Engagement Survey shows that “family” consistently ranks among the top reasons for soldiers of all ranks and designations to choose to leave the Army. Similarly, the Department of Defense’s Office of People Analytics’ most recent Active Duty Spouse Survey showed that one in three active-duty spouses favor leaving the military — the highest percentage ever recorded.
Since the end of conscription in 1973, there’s been an open secret about America’s military, and it’s twofold. First, spousal support is the prime predictor of actual member retention or staying in the military. But even before retention surfaces as a concern, initial military recruitment has been over-reliant on “legacy service members,” meaning on a repeat cadre of military families, to fill the service’s ranks. While less than 1 percent of the U.S. population serves in the military today, over 60 percent of those who do come from military families. For the Army, that percentage is an astonishing 80 percent, with 25 percent having a mother or father who wore the uniform.
Civil-military relations professors have been fretting about the military becoming a caste system. Their theoretical headache looks to be rather beside the point compared to the challenge military recruiters will shortly have to get even those legacy young adults to their signing desks: America is already experiencing a 13 percent projected decline in 18-year-olds. Only 23 percent of young Americans meet military eligibility requirements, while only 10 percent of young adults even have a propensity to serve — one important deciding factor in that propensity being a family tradition of service.
Has the Army suddenly become unfriendly to military families? Theoretically, no. Congress assumed responsibility for military families with the passage of the Dependents Allowance Act in 1942, followed by the Department of Defense creating the Office of Family Policy in 1982, and it has increasingly accepted the reality that the well-being and readiness of military families is crucial to the strength and readiness, if not the resilience, of America’s fighting forces. The suite of programs for military families is such that in the post-9/11 years, the Pentagon bolstered the Military Families Readiness System (MFRS) to provide the support infrastructure military families need to navigate the military lifestyle’s related challenges at the level of lived daily life.
But combing through numerous studies and surveys from government, nonprofit, and advocacy groups, the Valor Institute concluded last year that it’s no wonder why the military families this system is supposed to be helping are left frustrated instead. The system in practice is messy, siloed, and fragmented, with layers of bureaucracy at every turn, and the programs’ “effectiveness is limited by a lack of coordinated monitoring and communication,” not to mention being without proper assessment measures in place to determine what is, or is not, working.
Spousal unemployment, financial stress, childcare challenges, varying quality of health-care and education systems — these have been systemic concerns within military families for decades. Even prior to Congress’s authorizing the 14.5 percent junior enlisted pay raise last year, the metrics actually show active-duty and reserve spouses’ scoring better in general than their civilian counterparts for financial well-being. While that arguably only skims the surface of a much more complex situation that involves various grades of enlisted and types of officers, as the Valor Institute also acknowledges, it does throw into relief the truth that something beyond their finances is clearly going on with military families’ sense of well-being. And that something, or perhaps the sum of those somethings, is currently costing them too dearly to stay in the military community.
When military families report on the greatest stressors chipping away at their well-being, military spouse unemployment and underemployment rank high, year after year. “PCSing” — the moves every two-and-a-half years or so that the military calls Permanent Change of Station — is one culprit with many cascading effects: Around 400,000 service members PCS every year, while many of their significant others work in occupations like teaching, nursing, and cosmetology that require licenses that don’t necessarily, or easily, transcend state lines.
Then there is the always thorny issue of childcare. Many military spouses are de facto single parents for extended periods of time, with 74 percent experiencing a spouse deployed for longer than 30 days. Since the military profession is a 24/7 rather than a traditional 9-to-5 job, and the military mission always comes first, the non-military spouse is forced to wear all hats on limited information and at a moment’s notice. Childcare assistance is thus not a luxury but often a stark necessity.
Unemployment, finances, childcare, and difficult-to-navigate health-care and education systems cannot by themselves explain the sharp and sustained decline in family satisfaction with military life since 2012. But there may be the beginnings of an answer hiding in plain sight within another line of inquiry on the annual Blue Star Families survey: When looking at issues related to “morale, belonging, the nation’s support, and the future of service,” Blue Star Families researchers discovered that the strength of morale among active-duty service members was directly correlated with their sense of work-life balance, and that both morale and positive assessment of personal work-life balance directly correlated with the likelihood to recommend service.
What a “normal” work-life balance even looks like when one’s job is fighting wars is a dissertation for another day. But the survey respondents gave a clear indication of what they meant when, months before anyone had an Operation Epic Fury in mind, 83 percent indicated “it was likely or very likely the U.S. would be involved in a major conflict in the next 3–5 years.” But it’s the following revelation that should give us pause: More than half of those active-duty respondents “did not think the general public would be prepared to support military families if the U.S. were to enter a major conflict.”
Without a strong sense of assurance bolstering their confidence that military families would receive the long-term support they would need in the event of their soldiers participating in war-level operations, military families are reluctant to remain in an already-taxing environment, let alone recommend to their military-age children embracing such a lifestyle. Lack of patriotism is hardly the contention here.
The great camo-clad elephant in the base housing living room then cannot be avoided. Military families have reluctance about future conflicts because it was they and their families who shouldered the burden of a nation at war for nearly 25 years. Despite not donning the uniform themselves, the families of post-9/11 service members have already done tours of service. And all the evidence points to one understandable fact: However patriotic they might be, they are simply exhausted.
Since 2015, anxiety and depression have been measurably on the rise among military spouses. Finding community, friends, and social and/or peer support is a difficulty they feel particularly keenly, according to a just-released study by the Institute of Military & Veteran Family Wellness. The rate of suicide among military spouses has also risen steadily since 2011, according to the DoD’s report released in April, and these spouses are young: More than 80 percent were under age 40. In 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, 146 military family members, including 98 spouses and 48 dependents, died by suicide. Whether or to what extent any of these were influenced by the lockdowns and strictures of the Covid-19 years remains opaque. There’s still much that we don’t know about military family suicides, with DoD’s 2023 report being the first that had enough data to even begin to examine reliably long-term trends within this demographic.
Notably, what we do know is that a rising rate of suicide among male spouses is contributing to the overall rising numbers, accounting for nearly two-thirds of military spouse suicides. And according to DoD’s report, “the findings are significant because both the military and veterans’ populations have experienced increases in deaths by suicide in the past 25 years coinciding with the decades-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
A 20-plus-year war that is already fought can’t be somehow magically erased from post-9/11 military families’ lives, no matter how much any president, defense secretary, politician, or recruiting officer might wish to. But however uncomfortable to the modern political and analyst class the lessons of those 25 years might be, when it comes to the “Force behind the Force,” the lesson cannot be clearer. America’s military families will not again be willing to shoulder the burden of fighting America’s wars while America itself goes shopping.
The wages of Donald Rumsfeld’s gamble to fight the Global War on Terror without expanding the military and multiplying the numbers of uniformed shoulders to carry it has now come due. His sleight of hand, to heavily operationalize the traditional “reserve” forces of the National Guard and Reserves instead of raising troop levels, only created a “wicked problem” with its own cascading difficult consequences that those two military components are still attempting to figure out. That extends now to the fraying, unofficial pipeline of military recruitment that the all-volunteer force has relied on for decades, the military family.
And that is a part of the 251-year-long record that the U.S. Army — and the rest of the armed forces — have to contend with in practical terms, whether one fiscal year’s recruitment numbers are momentarily trending up or downward.