CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – She served at the naval station at Keflavik, Iceland, and in the cold and darkness of the arctic winter fed quarter after quarter into slot machines on the U.S. military base. Some nights Senior Airman Lenyatta Tinnelle won. But over the course of a year she lost $28,000.
She was later court-martialed for writing bad checks by the same military organization that installed and operated the slot machines.
The four branches of the armed services operate about 8,000 slot machines located in 94 facilities overseas, and John W. Kindt, a professor of business and legal policy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, wonders about the wisdom of sanctioning gambling among military personnel.
“The impacts of video poker and slot machines on military personnel can be devastating, especially to those with a gambling addiction,” Kindt wrote in an article published in the Northern Illinois University Law Review.
Kindt cited a 2001 Department of Defense survey that concluded that 2.2 percent of military personnel, or 30,000 people, had experienced at least three gambling-related problems in their lifetimes and showed other indications of “probable pathological gamblers.”
This is much higher than the national average of between 0.77 and 1.6 percent for the U.S. population estimated by the National Gambling Impact Study Commission.
Kindt said that the slot and video poker machines offered at military bases overseas “are known as the crack cocaine of gambling, creating new addicted gamblers.”
Slot machines have a checkered history in the military. They were present as long ago as the 1930s on some bases. In 1971, Army Secretary Robert F. Froehlke ordered the removal of slot machines from every Army post and base, citing a “corruptive influence.” The Air Force joined the Army in destroying thousands of machines, while the Navy and Marines kept their machines.
Seeking new sources of funds for their recreation programs, the Army and Air Force got back into the gambling business in 1981 after assuring Congress that there would be new “tight controls to prevent fraud and malfeasance.”
While there have been no allegations of corruption, Kindt wrote, the more pernicious problem is the official stamp of approval given to gambling by military authorities. Even recreational gambling can be a serious problem for young military families whose incomes are so low that they qualify for food stamps.
Efforts to get objective data on gambling activity in the military have been difficult, Kindt pointed out. The most recent study in 2001 analyzing the impact of video gambling on soldiers, was conducted by the Pentagon’s Morale, Welfare and Recreation Department, the very group that uses about $127 million from slot-machine profits to underwrite activities at servicemen’s clubs.
Especially in this age of terrorism, the military should not be crippled by personnel potentially unable to fulfill their missions, especially when the financial payback is a minuscule part of the military budget, Kindt said.
“The U.S. armed forces should reinstitute the ban on electronic/video gambling devices and slot machines due to the cost of training military personnel, related suicides and the costs of reducing military readiness as thousands of new personnel become addicted or problem gamblers,” the Illinois professor concluded.
His article is titled “Gambling with Terrorism and U.S. Military Readiness: Time to Ban Video Gambling Devices on U.S. Military Bases and Facilities?”
