Count me skeptical as to whether there is any connection between the availability of Playboy at the PX and the divorce rate within the military, but here’s a few pieces of data that might be of interest:
Rand’s National Defense Research Institute – a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the Pentagon – found in the new study that after declining from 1996 to 2000, divorces rose gradually in the following years. Divorce, separation and annulments across all branches of service rose to 3 percent of military marriages in 2005 – the same as in 1996 when Soldiers did not routinely face the battlefield deployments that are common today, Rand said in a statement. There’s no comparable system for tracking the national or civilian divorce rate, though the Centers for Disease Control said in 2005 that 43 percent of all first marriages end in divorce within 10 years.
And via the DoD: “The number of married persons in the military has steadily increased. In FY 2002, 58 percent were married, up from the 51 percent of over 20 years earlier.”