Morale among military troops has declined in nearly every aspect of military life over the last five years, a new survey has found.
According to the
Military Times survey of 2,500 of active-duty troops, findings indicated significantly lower overall job satisfaction, diminished respect for superiors, and declining interest in re-enlistment.
Overall, today's service members told the Military Times that they feel underpaid, under-equipped and under-appreciated.
One expert said that the survey showed that "the mission matters more to the military than to the civilian."
"For the civilian world, it might have been easier to psychologically move on and say, 'Well, we are cutting our losses.' But the military feels very differently.
"Those losses have names and faces attached to [them]," Peter Feaver, a political science professor at Duke University who studies the military, told the Military Times.
The survey found that there has been a dramatic decrease in how troops report their overall quality of life. Just 56 percent call it good or excellent, compared to 91 percent in 2009.
Since 2009, the percentage of troops who would recommend a military career has dropped from 85 percent to 73 percent, and there has also been a significant decline in a desire to re-enlist, down from 72 percent to 63 percent over that period.
Other measures also showed a deepening dissatisfaction and plummeting morale.
In 2009, 87 percent felt that their pay and allowances were good or excellent, compared to 44 percent today. Satisfaction with military healthcare has also dropped from 78 percent to 45 percent.
And the belief that senior military leadership has troops' best interests at heart went from 53 percent to 27 percent in the five-year period.
Retired Brig. Gen. Thomas Kolditz, professor and director of the Leadership Development Program at Yale School of Management, said that good leadership matters more to retention than pay and benefits.
"The traditional wisdom holds [that] what brings people into the service are the tangibles" such as benefits and bonuses, Kolditz told the Military Times.
"But what keeps them in the service are about intangibles: the feeling that service matters, good leadership. Retention is more about meaning, leadership, and pride."
The Military Times said dissatisfaction may be driven by a pervasive sense of pessimism about post-9/11 wars and a detachment from the decision-makers who dispatch them to the conflicts.
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