Strengthening the Military Family Readiness System for a Changing American Society (2019) / Chapter Skim
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9 Committee Recommendations
9 Committee Recommendations
Pages 325-340
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From page 325... ...
; and (3) how to strengthen the broader Military Family Readiness System (MFRS)
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These operationalized definitions and indicators should utilize existing or newly developed valid and reliable measures that consider the special circumstances of families who are currently ‘invisible' to DoD (e.g., co-parenting but unmarried service members and same-sex couple households) and assess exposures to and the accumulation of adversity and how these affect families.
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From page 327... ...
Also: "the manifested capacity of families as dynamic [human] systems to adapt successfully to disturbances that threaten the function, sur vival, or development of these systems"2 RECOMMENDATION 2: To establish policies, procedures, and pro grams that will better support military family readiness, the Department of Defense should (1)
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From page 328... ...
. • Conduct a study focused on the well-being of racial/ethnic minority service members and their families, including minority military families to characterize their own well-being, their top concerns, and how well they feel the military family readiness system is sup porting them.
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From page 329... ...
Regarding longitudinal studies, to date no study has been conducted that matches military and civilian children to systematically discern how they differ and how they are similar. The CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey does collect data from both military and civilian children, but focuses only on a narrow aspect of children's outcomes, and it provides no information at all about resilience factors or the factors that predict those outcomes.
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From page 330... ...
IMPROVE MILITARY COMMUNITY AND FAMILY POLICY PROGRAMS AND SERVICES Continuous conflict over the past two decades and associated increases in operational tempo, with an all-volunteer force, have variably impacted family well-being and resulted in support needs that are more urgent for some military families, including National Guard and Reserve families. DoD has made significant investments in supporting service member and family well-being.
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From page 331... ...
With the new NDAA, Congress allows DoD to support a wider variety of career progressions by repealing age-based officer appointment requirements, removing predetermined officer promotion timelines, allowing officers to go up for promotion multiple times, and permitting officer careers to extend to 40 years of service. Such changes could ostensibly ease work-family conflict for military personnel by reducing the need for so many military moves and corresponding family moves or separations.
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STRENGTHEN THE BROADER MILITARY FAMILY READINESS SYSTEM Through its review of the evidence, the committee finds that DoD recognizes the importance of families to the military performance of service members and has built an MFRS for which there is no U.S. civilian 4 As stated in Chapter 2: "Organizational patterns -- Family members spend time together in constructive activities, the family is organized to provide effective support to its members with a good balance of flexibility and connectedness, family members play appropriate roles, and the family has adequate social and economic resources that it manages adequately."
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From page 333... ...
The neighborhoods that surround military bases are not all equivalent -- they can vary in social and economic conditions, which has implications for the strength of social networks to support military families, the quality and quantity of nonmilitary resources that families could tap into, job opportunities for military spouses, educational and other opportunities for military children, the personal safety of military families, and other factors. If military leaders and nonmilitary service providers know only about the characteristics of individuals on their installations, they may be blind to issues some families are facing in their neighborhoods and the extent to which community resources are already overtaxed by a civilian population with great needs that therefore cannot supplement military ones.
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From page 334... ...
Supplementing survey data is especially important because it can be challenging to identify, reach, and gain sufficient response rates from military families, including nonmarital partners. There are a few published reports that illustrate that some neighborhoods around military bases are much better off than others, thus suggesting that the allocation of military base resources should take this more into account than installation population size.
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From page 335... ...
To meet the diverse and ever-changing needs of service members and their families, and address the current significant gap between research and practice, DoD should strengthen the Military Family Readiness System so that it • provides a comprehensive continuum of support across medical and nonmedical providers, locations, and changing benefit eligibility; • facilitates adaptive and timely approaches to stepped-care7 delivery; • draws upon effective evidence-based or evidence-informed approaches; • integrates routine screening and assessment tools in the delivery of family support programs; • builds and employs a robust data infrastructure, for both imple mentation and outcome data, that supports a continuous quality improvement system; and • coordinates referrals and care across military and nonmilitary resources, institutions, and communities. 6 See Chapter 1 for descriptions of evidence-based and evidence-informed.
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From page 336... ...
, and through other venues, including those results which show no effect or negative effects. RECOMMENDATION 8: To support high-quality implementation, adaptation, and sustainability of policies, programs, practices, and services that are informed by a continuous quality improvement pro cess, the Department of Defense should develop, adopt, and sustain a dynamic learning system as part of its Military Family Readiness System.
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From page 337... ...
Such an effort reflects an investment in returning all military families to full functionality and provides a significant return on investment not only for those that are most affected but for all military families who trust in the resources that will be delivered under trying conditions. Programming for highly impacted military families should be incorporated as a major function of the newly established Implementation Science and Evaluation Unit in coordination with program analysts and managers.
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Of course, DoD will need to be prudent as it evaluates the options, to manage privacy and national security concerns and other unintended consequences, as well as assess whether technologies have sufficiently evolved to be able to live up to the hype. RECOMMENDATION 11: To facilitate the consistency and continu ation of its policies regarding military family readiness and well-being across political administrations and changes of senior military lead ership, the Department of Defense should update and promulgate its existing instruction that operationalizes the importance of military fam ily well-being by incorporating the conclusions and recommendations contained in this report.
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From page 339... ...
Does it aspire for all spouses or partners to effectively communicate? The committee recommends that DoD consider the research findings we have reviewed in Chapter 5 on what is required for families to be able to function effectively during service members' absences and on how to prevent maltreatment, divorce, and other family events that may prove incompatible with military service.
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