Family Days were meant to ease the stress of prolonged deployments and support families. In the Trump administration's view, they got out of hand.
During the Iraq War, the Pentagon began offering service members extra days off to reconnect with their families. It was an acknowledgement that troops needed a break from repeated deployments and the grind of being in an organization always at war somewhere in the world.
Military leaders hoped it might help ease a stubbornly high rate of suicide among service members. Now, the Trump administration is curtailing the benefit in the name of making the Air Force tougher and deadlier. Acting Air Force Secretary Gary Ashworth says Family Days, also called pass days, have outlived their usefulness and has ordered commanders to put limits on the program, which allowed airmen to wrap extra days off around federal holidays. “The Department of the Air Force is focused on restoring lethality and readiness to our force,” Ashworth wrote in an April 7 memo. “Providing a blanket designation of pass days … does not support our ability to execute the mission with excellence while maintaining our competitive advantage.” Whether this is an overdue corrective or a blow to service members’ morale and mental wellness depends on your perspective. Some retired commanders say liberal leave policy isn’t necessary now that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are over and the “operational tempo” of military life – the rhythm of deployments and redeployments – has eased. Retired Army Col. Carl Castro, an Iraq veteran and an expert on military mental health and suicide, begs to differ. As director of the Defense Department’s Military Operational Medicine Research Program, he followed the evolution of suicide research from the Iraq war on. He worries that the Trump administration's harder line on time off could boomerang, ratcheting up the stress on uniformed personnel. 'You can always wrap yourself around the combat lethality flag. That's what we always do,” said Castro, now a professor of social work and psychology at the University of Southern California and director of its Center for Innovation and Research on Veterans and Military Families. “When anyone starts with a speech like that, you know they're getting ready to screw the service member.” Guaranteed time off and other stress-reduction programs have wide benefits, he said. 'They give people time to recover. It allows them to reduce family stress. It communicates that the organization cares about the service member,' he said. “It's all those things.' 'Welcome to the military' The Family Days were on top of the 30 days per year of paid leave that Air Force personnel receive. Service members could use up to 11 Family Days per year around federal holidays. In his April 7 memo, Ashworth rescinded an earlier directive that listed Family Days for the 2025 calendar year and ordered “commanders at all levels to reevaluate their pass structures to best align with warfighter readiness.” An Air Force spokesperson said Ashworth’s memo allows commanders and supervisors to continue granting Family Days at their discretion 'when aligned with operational readiness and requirements.' What’s different is they’re no longer guaranteed. Airmen are 'encouraged to use their 30 days of paid annual leave as an important part of maintaining overall well-being, morale, and readiness,' the spokesperson said. The change sparked heated back-and-forth in a Facebook group for Air Force personnel and veterans. “Family days are a small concession if you think about all of the time they ask us to spend away from family, missed births, loved ones passing away, graduations, etc.,” wrote one commenter. “Nope. Welcome to the military. You raised your hand and it wasn’t for 4 day weekends,” replied another user. Family leave programs were established across the armed forces to help relieve stress on troops and their loved ones. During the Iraq War era, troops were in field training or specialty schools for weeks at a stretch, and deployments meant separations of six months to a year or more. The programs vary by service branch. The Army grants three- and four-days passes around holiday weekends “to increase the morale of its members, allowing for a break away from training missions,” said Army spokesman Christopher Surridge. The policy is not being revisited, he said. Still, the Air Force decision to tighten up on paid leave doesn’t bother retired Air Force Gen. Gregory 'Speedy' Martin, a former commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe and the Air Force Material Command. With the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 'we're no longer putting that kind of stress on people,” he said. 'An entitlement' Martin said Air Force crews are flying fewer hours per month on average than they once did – too few, in his view. As the nation’s military aircraft fleet ages, a reduction in hours flown could affect combat readiness, he said. 'The hours that are being flown are being advertised in the Air Force as eight to nine hours a month. Back when I'm talking about in the old days, we were flying 20 hours a month,' said Martin, a Vietnam veteran and former fighter pilot who flew 161 combat missions. 'We used to laugh that the North Koreans were flying about eight hours a month, and they were not going to be ready for combat. Here we are flying that number of sorties and giving people time off. I'm sorry, it just doesn't make sense.' He said it was unfortunate that Family Days “became an entitlement.' Instead of a fixed allotment of pass days, Martin suggested 'goal days' as a reward for outstanding performance. 'Lethality' Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth frequently suggests that the military went soft under former President Joe Biden and isn't as ready for war as it should be. Hegseth peppers his speeches and public comments with references to 'lethality,' 'warfighters' and 'warrior culture' and invokes those terms to justify controversial policies, such as his elimination of DEI programs across the armed forces, including cultural awareness months such as Black History Month and National Hispanic Heritage Month. 'Our unity and purpose are instrumental to meeting the department's warfighting mission. Efforts to divide the force – to put one group ahead of another – erode camaraderie and threaten mission execution,' he wrote in January. Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Michael Longoria, a former special operations commander, welcomes Hegseth's rhetoric. He also shares his view that extra days off should be earned, not guaranteed. Longoria commanded the teams that provided close air support to ground troops in Afghanistan after 9/11 and later when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. The long, costly occupation of both countries instilled in him a commitment to rigorous training and to caring for troops and their families. He noted that between deployments to Iraq, soldiers at Fort Hood in Central Texas would spend weeks in demanding field exercises. 'Well, I mean, that's like a deployment,' said Longoria, a Houston native and Lamar High School graduate who served in the Air Force for 30 years. 'Well, you know what? After we cleaned up everything and hot-washed everything, people need to take a couple days off.” He said the new policy on Family Days gives commanders the ability to do that. 'I still think there is flexibility that commanders will have to do the right thing by their people. I really do,' he said. 'I don't think that they will have lost anything.' Castro drew a different conclusion from his time at Fort Hood, where he worked with soldiers struggling with trauma and depression from their combat experiences fighting the insurgency in Iraq. From 2003 to 2007-08, the 1st Cavalry and 4th Infantry Divisions were deployed to Iraq, returned and went back into combat three times. Castro said while they were back at Ford Hood, those troops put in long days in the field preparing for the next combat tour. At the end of the day, commanders would hand down “tasking orders” that would keep soldiers busy well into the evening taking care of logistical chores and other work. Family Days took some of the edge off the stress by giving troops predictable time off, he said. Suicides by uniformed personnels totaled 5,663 from 2016 through 2024, and an average of 629 per year. The highest figure during that period was 702 in 2020. Last year, the number went down for the first time in eight years, to 577. Castro said it would be unwise to draw conclusions based on a one-year drop. 'Until you see a three- or four-year decline, you can't say they're declining,' he said. 'Kind of a scary thing' The Air Education and Training Command, headquartered at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph, said in a statement that it has “fully implemented” Ashworth’s directive. A spokesperson said commanders and directors still have authority to grant “pass days” to uniformed personnel, and that 'in all leave and pass considerations, readiness and the capability to continue the unit’s mission remain a primary consideration.' Retired Army Maj. Gen. Charles Rodriguez, a former adjutant general of the Texas National Guard, said that although Family Days allow military families to plan time off together, it is not always practical to grant extra days off on holiday weekends, when some units may be preparing for a major exercise or a deployment. 'There's not that many Rambos in any of the services. It's an entire system and an organization of great complexity that needs all kinds of people with all kinds of skills,” Rodriguez said. “They need a little bit of relief from time to time,' he said, but added, 'It may not be smart to say every federal holiday is a four-day holiday. That's kind of a scary thing.' Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Alan Peterson has studied troop stress and suicides for decades as chief of the division of behavioral medicine at UT Health San Antonio and director of its STRONG STAR Consortium, the nation’s largest combat-related research effort on post-traumatic stress disorder. He doesn't think the new Air Force policy will have a significant impact on troops' mental or emotional health. He spent 21 years on active duty, including tours of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq from 2004-05, and said he never got a four-day weekend. 'I see this as a way of kind of getting back to what had been the policies in the past,” he said. Another Iraq vet had a different view of the matter. Travis Pendleton, a West Point graduate, served in Iraq from 2006-08. He has vivid memories of the stress he and other soldiers endured. Repeated deployments drove many competent soldiers out of the Army, said Pendleton, 43, of Austin. “If you were one of the line units, the unsustainable training tempo was itself a lethality problem, because you couldn't retain good people,” he recalled. “Guys who had better options left, and the stresses that come on families degraded soldier readiness.” From his perspective, the Family Days long available to Air Force personnel were not a luxury. He said he had “a dim view” of Ashworth’s decision to curtail them. 'On its face, it sounds ridiculous to me,' he said.
Pentagon Air Education And Training Command Department Of The Air Force Army Air Force Material Command Defense Department Center For Innovation And Research On Veterans An University Of Southern California United States Lamar High School Joint Base San Antonio Texas National Guard STRONG STAR Consortium West Point 1St Cavalry 4Th Infantry Divisions Gregory ``Speedy'' Martin Carl Castro Gary Ashworth Longoria Pete Hegseth Trump Travis Pendleton Charles Rodriguez Alan Peterson Michael Longoria Rambos Joe Biden Brig. Gen. Iraq Afghanistan Fort Hood Central Texas U.S. Air Forces Europe Vietnam North Koreans Houston Randolph UT Health San Antonio Austin Iraq War Black History Month National Hispanic Heritage Month Family Days Military Operational Medicine Research Program Facebook DEI The Family Days
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