New Military Parental Leave Policy Causing Headaches for Unit Commanders

In 2022 the National Defense Authorization Act vastly expanded parental leave entitlements for service members. Soon after, reports surfaced that soldiers had been forced to delay or break the leave into shorter periods in order for them to be able to participate in required training or other duties. And, in the latest development in this saga, just two months Army Secretary Christine Wormuth issued a directive that only general officers can deny soldiers parental leave.

Since about 100,000 babies are born to military families every year, the new leave policy for secondary caregivers (not the mother) results in the equivalent of 25,000 fewer servicemembers per year, the equivalent of two missing Army divisions from DoD.

Needless to say, this situation is not of the Army’s doing. The new 12-week policy was introduced into legislation by Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Il) and Rep. Jackie Speir (D-Ca). It resembles the Federal Employee Paid Leave Act, which was expanded in 2020 to provide 12 weeks of parental leave for civilian federal employees. And, while there are some similarities between federal employees and military servicemembers, there are also a lot of differences.

Unfortunately, this new law overlooks the unique challenges and needs of the military relative to the more predictable and staid civilian jobs that exist in the federal government. Military units and commanders contend daily with unexpected missions, the need to maintain a constant state of readiness, and heavy training requirements. Many military personnel serve in highly specialized positions, such as unit armorers, cyber warfare specialists, and avionics technicians, of which a unit may only have one. When a service member is absent for four to five months in a year—and his or her direct commander has little or no ability to work out a plan that minimizes the consequences of the service member’s absence—it’s likely he or she will return having missed a myriad of required training events and needing extensive make-up to be ready.

Each military service has its own policy for approving and denying this new leave. The Army requires a general officer to deny leave requests. Others, such as the Air Force and Space Force, allow more junior commanders to deny parental leave for the “exigencies of the military service.”

Though perhaps done with the best of intentions, there is no indication that the impact of this policy on military readiness was ever weighed. And considering the military’s ongoing recruiting challenges, it was reckless not to think more carefully about how an expanded leave policy would actually be put into practice. Indeed, the new policy puts leaders in impossible positions where they must accomplish the mission without the necessary people.

Some argue that expanding parental leave can help boost recruiting and retention. And while that’s almost certainly true for recruits and service members who will benefit from parental leave, it’s also true that the experience of being overworked due to compensating for absent servicemembers in a unit may make the military less attractive for others.

No one would argue that service members don’t deserve time to spend with the newest members of their families, or that this new policy isn’t well intentioned. But the new policy seems poorly calibrated to meet the challenges confronting the military today, and the Department of Defense owes the American people a candid assessment of how this new policy could negatively affect readiness, endangering American families of all stripes.

Thomas W. Spoehr, a retired Army lieutenant general and former director of the Center for National Defense at The Heritage Foundation.