Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said he is worried about low morale in today's military and believes it may take years to fully tackle the problems affecting the overall mindset and outlook of the force.

"This is as important as anything. I have tried to make that as big a priority as we have in this building, with all our commanders, with all our people all over the world," Hagel said in a Jan. 21 interview with Military Times in his Pentagon office.

"After those 13 years of war, what has happened is, various parts of the institution ... have worn down, have been strained and under considerable stress and you need to pay attention to that."

One important symptom of the problem, Hagel said, is that "our suicide rates are not showing great progress." An estimated 288 active-duty service members took their own lives in 2014, similar to the 286 reported suicides in 2013.

Hagel said he believes many factors are contributing to waning morale. Among the biggest is the defense budget cuts that are forcing individual units to scale back training, leading the services to eliminate jobs and prompting Congress to consider cuts to troops' pay and benefits.

"What is more important to a family of a service man or a woman than health care for their children or education for their children if there is uncertainty about that?" Hagel said.

Another factor weighing down morale is the pessimism that many troops feel about how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have turned out, Hagel said.

A Military Times survey of 2,300 active-duty troops last year found morale indicators on the decline in nearly every aspect of military life. Troops report significantly lower overall job satisfaction, diminished respect for their superiors, and a declining interest in re-enlistment now compared to just five years ago.

Hagel, who is the first former noncommissioned officer to hold the Pentagon's top post, will step down soon after two years on the job. During his tenure, he has launched several major initiatives aimed in part at addressing potential morale problems, the long-term impacts of which, for the most part, remain unclear at this point.

They include:

  • Completing an internal investigation of the sprawling military health system. The review found some hospitals failed to meet quality and patient safety standards and some were failing to properly report incidents when medical errors harmed patients. The review ordered several facilities to fix those problems.
  • Responding to a spate of scandals involving senior officer misconduct in 2013 by appointing a two-star admiral to serve in a newly created position to directly advise the defense secretary on ethics and misconduct issues.
  • Completing a top-to-bottom review of the nuclear force after widespread morale and misconduct problems surfaced in the Air Force's missileer community, including cheating and drug use. That resulted in several key changes in how that career field is managed.
  • Overseeing a forcewide effort to improve sexual assault training, increase reporting and improve victims' services.
  • Launching a broad review of the military's criminal justice system, which remains underway.
  • Launching a review of the military medals and awards system to ensure that today's troops are recognized most appropriately. That also remains underway.

"I am proud of the progress I think we have made," Hagel said. "I do not think it starts to show up for a while because it takes time to fix it. You are not going to fix some of this in a year or two years, but you can get at it. You can start to turn it around. You can start to reassure people. You can do the things that you need to do to make the institutional changes that we can make."

About Andrew Tilghman

Andrew Tilghman is the executive editor for Military Times. He is a former Military Times Pentagon reporter and served as a Middle East correspondent for the Stars and Stripes. Before covering the military, he worked as a reporter for the Houston Chronicle in Texas, the Albany Times Union in New York and The Associated Press in Milwaukee.

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