Have you ever wondered how many male military spouses there really are?
About 47,000. The analysis is described below.
A couple of months ago a Navy officer wrote about her non-military spouse and concluded "Today, more than 200,000 women serve in our nation's armed forces. It's unreasonable to think that many of these women are either only married to other military members or are single. Yet the image that still comes to mind when the word military spouse is mentioned is the prototypical, military stay-at-home wife."
I've been a male military spouse since 1986, but we were a dual-military marriage. Women were only in the armed forces in single-digit percentages and separated sooner than men due to combat restrictions. While a male military spouse was unusual enough, the vast majority (including me) were also servicemembers or veterans. It was almost unheard of to find one who'd never served in uniform.
That was over 25 years ago. What about this millennium?
When I started writing about military retirement and financial independence, I spent hours researching military retirees and their bridge careers. One source is the annual Department of Defense Demographics Report, and the most recent version (2012) is over 200 pages of number-crunchy goodness from the Defense Manpower Data Center. The marital details begin at page 42 and continue on to page 95.
First, a little perspective: although the drawdown has whittled away at the numbers a little since 2012, there are still about 2.7 million Americans in uniform. (This does not include NOAA or the U.S. Public Health Service.) Just over 1.4M of them are on active duty (including over 40,000 in the Coast Guard) and another 1.3M are in the Reserve or National Guard (including "gray area" retirees who are not yet receiving their pensions). Despite more than a decade of war, the 2012 military was smaller than the 1990s drawdown forces and will become even smaller by another ~5%.
I'll focus the rest of this post on the active-duty forces of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. (The Coast Guard's demographics are tracked by the Department of Homeland Security.) Just over half of the servicemembers are married, which is a slightly higher percentage than America's civilian population. Nearly 70% of the officers are married and over half of the enlisted, although military marriage rates have dropped a bit since the 1990s. Annual divorce rates have risen from ~2.5% in 2000 to nearly 4% in 2012 but may have peaked in 2011.
In 2012, just over 91,000 active-duty women were married. (That's 11% of the 778,000 active-duty marriages, even though women make up nearly 15% of the four active-duty forces.) There were also nearly 88,000 servicemembers (of both genders) in dual-military marriages. DMDC's report doesn't break that dual-military marriage data down by gender, so I'm going to make the (insensitive) assumption that about half of the 88,000 dual-military married servicemembers are women: roughly 44,000 women servicemembers who are married to other servicemembers.
Subtracting 44,000 women in dual-military marriages from the 91,000 military women who are married implies that there are about 47,000 male military spouses.
Although those male spouses are not in uniform now, some of them could be military veterans. The demographics report doesn't break down that data, either, but roughly 9% of Americans in each year throughout the last century have been military veterans. I crunched the numbers on annual separations and retirements as well as the military marriage percentages, but the assumptions aren't precise enough to draw any conclusions. It's probable that a small minority of those 47,000 male military spouses are veterans, and perhaps only a fraction. I'm keeping an eye out for the 2013 Demographics Report, and I hope they include more data!
About Doug Nordman
I retired from the Navy over 12 years ago after 20 years in the submarine force. My spouse spent 17 years in the Navy's Meteorology/Oceanography community and eight more in the Navy Reserve. Both of us are enjoying our beach-bum retirement in Hawaii, where we were first stationed in 1989. Our daughter just started her Navy career as a surface warfare officer on a destroyer.
I wrote "The Military Guide to Financial Independence and Retirement" to share the advice and stories of over 50 other servicemembers and veterans. All royalties are donated to military charities (over $9000 so far), and we're collecting more material for the second edition. Stop by Militay Guide to share your story and learn more about gaining financial independence!
