I worked at a place that sold expensive things. Sold a thing to a guy. Had two guys show up a couple days latter to talk about exactly how he financed thing and etc. Turns out he was an just a middling engineer on the F-35 program, but they confirmed everything he told them using us.
Shows a pattern of poor judgement, and makes the applicant way, way more likely to be bribed or blackmailed.
Bankruptcy also has a court angle, which means you can, with an amount of effort that's trivial for large, nation-state intelligence orgs, find a list of all recent bankruptcy cases in, say, Southern Maryland or Northern Virginia. The CI types lose a lot of sleep over this stuff.
People in basic jobs at Twitter helped murder a journalist.
It would be cool to see makerspaces or something similar on bases. I recall there were mechanic shops (I could be misremembering) where you could bring your car to work on it and borrow tools. With tools now you could create some hiking clubs and stuff too.
Doing this stuff isn't easy though and I know when I was finished with duty and finished working out for the second time that day I really didn't have energy to do much except play video games and knock back a few beers. Creating new programs, clubs, initiatives are hard. And in the military often times you have turnover on the bases so it's hard to maintain continuity even when someone creates something. If it were up to me I'd have a cadre of 3-10 individuals who ran, funded, maintained clubs and programs for soldiers. I'll not be surprised if I find out that this already exists either lol.
Damn if only I could have done that to my parents.
(seems that wages are about $140 billion a year)
Of course the average being tiny doesn't mean it isn't causing problems for people that gamble way more than the average.
Per Navy regulations, anyone who gets a DUI is required to attend rehab. We had a Reactor Operator on my submarine who got two DUIs. He requested rehab in writing twice and was twice denied because "ship's schedule does not support". Then he re-enlisted, I can't imagine why. A few weeks after re-enlisting he got a third DUI. His wife divorced him, he attempted suicide, and then he was discharged and was allowed to keep his bonus.
Our Chief of the Boat (equivalent to Command Master Chief or Command Master Sergeant) was an extreme alcoholic and several sailors filed complaints in writing alleging that he showed up to work visibly drunk regularly, always having driven himself to work. The command ignored that too.
Extreme alcoholism, getting black-out drunk multiple nights per week, getting hospitalized for alcohol poisoning once per year, committing drunken assault and/or vandalism and having your division Chief sweep it under the rug and then extort you to re-enlist was common on my ship. I spoke to friends on other ships and it appears that this was the norm throughout the Pacific submarine fleet in 2010. Rotten to the core.
I can see the benefit to keeping the gambling addiction losses in-house but encouraging money problems and then punishing people for said money problems seems a bit like an artificially created circular problem.
MWR programs are supposed to be beneficial, not detrimental. Get them some video game consoles. Buy them all VR setups and require {n} hours of physically demanding games and game scores. It's probably less cost than the fallout from gambling addiction. VR combat training rigs, like ARMA on steroids but actually causes pain when you get hit. Surely someone here in the HN world could fund such a thing. Provide time-off and money to the top tier contestants of the VR simulators.
Oh and don't limit this to combat simulation. Implement medical training, surgical training, electrical training, construction, military vehicle repair, flight training like X-plane on steroids, space flight training, recce training, weapon repair training, etc... Let them explore skill-sets they and the military were unaware they had.