An article in today’s Boston Globe once again points up what was painfully obvious.

WASHINGTON -- Recent graduates of the US Military Academy at West Point are choosing to leave active duty at the highest rate in more than three decades, a sign to many military specialists that repeated tours in Iraq are prematurely driving out some of the Army's top young officers.

According to statistics compiled by West Point, of the 903 Army officers commissioned upon graduation in 2001, nearly 46 percent left the service last year -- 35 percent at the conclusion of their five years of required service, and another 11 percent over the next six months. And more than 54 percent of the 935 graduates in the class of 2000 had left active duty by this January, the statistics show

Thirty five percent is a huge and frightening figure. It means fewer majors, colonels, and generals 15 to 20 years down the road. West Point doesn’t just train officers; it trains tomorrow’s leaders. That means fewer skilled leaders to defend the country then.

It’s not enough to just talk about young officers leaving, because there’s only four or five officers in a company. We’ve discussed this before, pointing out that among enlisted men not just first-term soldiers were declining to reenlist, but also seasoned experienced NCOs with 10 to 15 years service were abandoning their chosen profession because of the stresses caused by back-to-back combat deployments.

James Dunnigan wrote about this problem in May, 2005:

The U.S. Army is losing its lieutenants and captains at the rate of 8.7 percent a year. Indications are that this rate will increase. The main reason is the prospect of constant overseas assignments, without their families, for the duration of the war on terror. This causes problems with the officers families. Then there is the pull of better job prospects in an improving economy. The prospect of losing over ten percent of your junior officers a year is compounded by the fact that a disproportionate number of these will be those with the most combat experience.

A third factor in the exodus is the dislike of the army’s “force protection” fixation. The army puts a lot of emphasis on keeping casualties down. But a lot of the combat commanders interpret this as doing as little as possible. This, despite the fact that those commanders who get outside their camps a lot, reduce enemy activity and American casualties. But these aggressive tactics come with some risk, and many battalion and brigade commanders (lieutenant colonels and colonels) are more risk averse than the captains and lieutenants (company and platoon commanders). Once you hit lieutenant colonel, you are making the army a career, and are less inclined to take chances. But captains and lieutenants can afford to take chances, and are put off when their bosses are not.

In the quicksand war of the Iraq occupation there are no tangible ground gains to be reported to the troops and the American public as a yardstick of success. Gains cannot even be quantified by body count, as was tried unsuccessfully in Viet Nam, because the public only thinks of the American body count. Dead Iraqis, whether resisters, insurgents, “foreign fighters” dead end Ba’athists or innocent women and children are meaningless in a sense because they are “over there” and Americans at home have no sense of identification with them. But they instinctively understand the image of dead GIs, even if Mr Bu$h has ruled they are not permitted to see photos and videos of them being unloaded every other day at Andrews Air Force Base.

In the small towns they note that Jimmy, the high school quarterback three years ago, came home in a coffin, and remember that two months ago Mary Beth, the young girl who used to work at the pharmacy and belonged to the National Guard, was buried. Mary Beth had two little girls, who now have no mother. These are the things that are understood and remembered in towns and cities all over the country.

As Mr Dunnigan points out, many junior officers leave the service for better opportunities in civilian life, but it’s unlikely EM make their decision for that reason.

The Boston Globe again:

In most years during the last three decades, the period for which West Point released statistics, the numbers of graduates opting out at the five-year mark were between 10 percent and 30 percent, according to the data.

The rising exodus is blamed on a number of factors, including the economic lure of the private sector. But interviews with former West Point superintendents, graduates, and retired officers pointed to another reason: the wear and tear on officers and their families from multiple deployments.

The stress on families is a key point because the operational tempo has caused massive discord among the wives and children of younger officers and EM. A wife with two or three children under 10 doesn’t want to run the household by herself with her husband away every other year, worrying daily about him and trying to do the jobs of both mommy and daddy. Who can blame them?

Our Army – 10,000 cuts.