The Kindbridge Research Institute announced Wednesday it has established the Military Gambling Awareness Committee, which will undertake the initiative of addressing and mitigating problem gambling for and its related harms in the military community.

The MGAC is led by Chairperson Marc Lucia, a Senior Military Research Associate at Kindbridge. Lucia was a Special Forces medic with deployments throughout Europe before pursuing a path in military mental health research and receiving a dual MBA and MPH from Johns Hopkins University.

“Sports betting when I was in the military was never largely talked about and it really hasn’t been,” Lucia said in an interview with Sports Handle. “And I think at this point when I talk to folks who are still in (the military), I don’t get the impression that sports gambling in the military is being considered a whole lot, and I think a lot of what drives that is the press that comes around it.

“The press that comes out around it is more focused on these slot machines, but sports betting is obviously becoming bigger and bigger issue that’s impacting people in different ways. And so it’s been an interesting time in the military space for gambling.”

The initial seven-person MGAC team assembled by Kindbridge CEO and founder Daniel Umfleet have the common threads of gambling, sports betting, and vast experience directly connected to the military.

It includes long-time public advocate for responsible gaming Brianne Doura-Schawohl, who serves as MGAC’s policy advisor; former American Gaming Association media relations director Caroline Ponseti; Richard Taylor, Senior Manager of Responsible Gaming at BetMGM; Joe Solosky, the Managing Director of Sports Betting at NASCAR; Kinectify CEO Joseph Martin; and 11-year U.S. Army veteran David Yeager.

Doura-Schawohl has served as Legislative Director for the National Council on Problem Gambling and is a military spouse. Ponseti served as press secretary for the U.S. House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. Taylor, who has been on the AGA’s Responsible Gaming Board, is a former Marine while Solosky is a Naval Academy graduate.

Martin, whose expertise is in risk-management technology and anti-money laundering, also was in the Marine Corps and the U.S. Department of State. Yeager is serving as the Education Program Director, having firsthand experience with the challenges of gambling addiction within the military and is also an intake and gambling recovery coach at Kindbridge Behaviorial Health.

One key point of focus for Lucia is to simply raise awareness about gambling within the military, period. That awareness is needed to begin addressing the challenge of finding methods and best practices to combat problem gaming, as well as coming up with best practices to promote responsible gaming.

Lucia said there has not been much research done regarding gambling among service members and limited data has been collected on the subject through the RAND Health Related Behaviors Survey that is administered by the Department of Defense. It is difficult to discern if there are any patterns by generation or even gender.

That is where Kindbridge has been trying to gather information, with much of the work coming on a state-by-state basis.

“We’re trying to partner with more states to be able to do more work across the U.S. in individual states … but then there’s the push side of it, which is what the military research associate program and what this committee is about and trying to say, what are the questions that need to be asked,” Lucia said.

“And can we be on the proactive side of this and try to lead to better policies we can put into DoD scans and offer them different perspectives than what they have heard before.”

The phrase “military readiness” often brings the tangible appearance of a well-equipped soldier in terms of weaponry. That, however, is just part of the overall make-up, and addressing problem gaming on an individual level in the context of a mental state is a place Lucia and his team are looking to make an impact.

“Stigma’s brought up around the military with mental health a lot,” he explained. “Stigma was always kind of taught to me as like something that comes from the top down. And what I noticed was that a lot of leaders would talk about, ‘Hey, I’m going to see that therapist today…’

“And so it didn’t feel like it was coming from the top. It actually felt like individuals might be saying, ‘Hey, that’s great you’re doing it, I don’t really need that.’ And so this problem kind of perpetuates somewhat at the individual level. Not saying it doesn’t exist at the institutional level as well, but there’s a heavy component of it at the individual level.”

And at the individual level is where Lucia can find the commonalities of the issues problem gaming can cause in a solider’s everyday life.

“What do we know about the military for sure? PTSD, anxiety, depression, sleep issues, all of these things,” he continued. “Well, what can we say about gambling? There’s great association between PTSD and gambling. There’s huge association between anxiety and depression and gambling.

“When you start to map that out, you can kind of connect the dots really easily: If the problem is here, the problem is (there), and they’re both associated with this other issue, is it a natural fit? And it feels like it is in the way some of the research we’ve done in the past has gone.”

The Department of Defense’s Joint Ethics Regulation “prohibits gambling on government property or while on official duty.” There are some gray areas when it comes to overseas deployment, where gambling is prohibited on U.S.-owned military installations, but there are some places not owned by the U.S. where gambling, such as slot machines, are available.

Lucia says the three key pillars to help treat problem gaming are prevention, surveillance, and treatment. He feels surveillance has been on an uptick, but prevention and treatment still need to be addressed more consistently. Responsible gaming offers a “function of prevention” in the sense of providing “resources and information to people so they’re aware of what’s going on out there and what they might be getting into.”

The resources and information at the Department of Defense, however, have yet to parallel what is offered to the betting public, and Lucia and his team are trying to fill that gap.

“If you look at the eight suggestions for responsible gambling, they offer 10 proposed solutions states should follow,” he explained. “And they rank the states; you can find out what each state does in terms of responsible gaming when you go through it. We took that concept, placed the states on a grid and said each state has accomplished these core tasks in responsible gaming. When we did that and ranked the DoD as well, the DoD ranked with only one out of 10 of the responsible gaming policies in place.

“This is a new issue and the Department of Defense may not fully have expertise in place for this. It’s kind of a nice thing … it’s a problem that’s reared its head a little bit more recently and so there’s new information about it, and we’re here to provide best practices and solutions to them.”

Lucia has high-reaching goals but realizes the need for pragmatism. He mentioned that MGAC first “needs to go from zero to one, where it starts with awareness and increases to access and everything else.”

Lucia is eager to leverage technology, an important aspect given the prevalence of mobile sports betting. It offers the opportunity to provide messaging for problem gambling that fosters “an environment where it’s OK to bring these things up and everybody is kind of aware this is a problem to look out for.”

He also mentioned prevalence in a different yet equally important context.

“I would love to see, and it’s something we’re working on right now, best cases for how to move forward with screening in a large population. But then I would also love to have a plan in place to start to get a better idea of prevalence … having something to get an idea on the scale of the problem would be huge for decision-makers in the military to be able to move forward and have a good intuitive understanding of what they’re dealing with.”