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Clarify caregiver policy

The case of Spc. Alexis Hutchinson shines a spotlight on a common Army dilemma: single parents who need someone to take the kids when mom or dad goes off to war.

There are 37,000 single parents in the Army, 26,500 men and 10,500 women. And on any given day, 8,300 of them are deployed to the war zone. So clearly, many find ways to make this work.

On the other hand, the Army has quietly dismissed an average of 125 soldiers from service each month for the past two years because of pregnancy or child care issues. That’s 3,000 soldiers who couldn’t deploy because of the kids.

Hutchinson claims she was ready to deploy until her designated caregiver — her mother — bowed out. So without another option to care for her 10-month-old son, she just didn’t show up for her plane to Afghanistan. She was arrested the next day.

Her case puts the Army in a difficult position. The brass can either coldly order her to leave her child in foster care in order to deploy, or they can discharge her and waste the substantial investment it made turning her into a productive soldier.

Discharge is the easy way out of this particular case. But simply discharging Hutchinson doesn’t address the heart of the problem.

The Army’s family care regulations push the matter down to the unit level — leaving battalion and company officers to sort these matters out, often without all the training and support they need.

The Army needs a clearer and fairer policy to address such situations and to help avoid them in the first place. It’s not fair to the thousands of single parents who have left their children for a year at a time to simply let others walk away from their service obligation.

Balancing fairness will not be easy. But clear incentives need to be in place so that soldiers understand the implications of their decisions. Soldiers who are released lose their job and health insurance and other benefits, and that should not be taken lightly. But it might make sense to draw from the West Point playbook and expect soldiers who ask out of the Army ahead of schedule to repay the Army in part for its investment.

This could force reluctant soldiers to think twice about thumbing their noses at the system — hoping they will be tossed out of the Army without any repercussions. And it would still leave the Army with the ability to waive the charge in cases of extreme hardship.