A Battle Plan for Supporting Military Families: Lessons for the Leaders of Tomorrow

This unique reference integrates knowledge culled from fifteen years of U.S. deployments to create an action plan for supporting military and veteran families during future conflicts. Its innovative ideas stretch beyond designated governmental agencies (e.g., Department of Defense, VA) to include participation from, and possible collaborations with, the business/corporate, academic, advocacy, and philanthropic sectors. Contributors identify ongoing and emerging issues affecting military and veteran families and recommend specific strategies toward expanding and enhancing current programs and policy. This proactive agenda also outlines new directions for mobilizing the research community, featuring strategies for addressing institutional challenges and improving access to critical data.

Included in the coverage: 

• Lessons learned inside the Pentagon.
  
• Merging reintegration streams for veterans and military families.
  
• The unique role of professional associations in assisting military families: a case study.   
  
• Philanthropy for military and veteran families: challenges past, recommendations for tomorrow.
  
• Rules of engagement: media coverage of military families during war.   
  
• Designing and implementing strategic research studies to support military families.
  

A Battle Plan for Supporting Military Families is of immediate usefulness to leaders, professionals, and future professionals in interdisciplinary academic, governmental, advocacy, and philanthropic areas of focus interested in the theoretical, practical, and real-life concerns and needs of military-affiliated families.

Linda Hughes-Kirchubel is director of external relations at the Military Family Research Institute at Purdue University. She manages the organization’s strategic messaging across multiple platforms and constituencies, advancing its mission in print and digital formats. The wife of a retired Army lieutenant colonel and mother of an Air Force staff sergeant, Hughes-Kirchubel joined MFRI in 2008, where she developed marketing communications and digital content management. Concurrently, she earned her master’s degree in organizational communication from Purdue ande is currently pursuing a PhD, researching marginalization, stigma and disenfranchised grief. Before joining MFRI, Hughes-Kirchubel worked as an award-winning journalist in California and Indiana, covering politics, education and legal issues.

Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth is director of the Military Family Research Institute and the Center for Families and professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Purdue University. Her research focuses on relationships between job conditions and family life, with a special focus on military families and organizational policies, programs and practices. Her research has been widely published, and has been funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Henry A. Murray Center, the Department of Defense, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the state of Indiana, Lilly Endowment, and others. She serves on the editorial boards of several major family research journals, and is a fellow of the National Council on Family Relations and a recipient of the Work Life Legacy Award from the Families and Work Institute. She served on the Returning Veterans Committee of the Institute of Medicine and the Psychological Health External Advisory Committee of the Defense Health Board.

David Riggs is a clinical psychologist who currently serves as the Executive Director of the Center for Deployment Psychology and research associate professor at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. Much of his work has focused on trauma, violence and anxiety, particularly the impact of post-traumatic stress disorder and other anxiety disorders on the families of those directly affected. He has trained numerous student and mental health professionals, published more than 80 articles and book chapters, and presented numerous papers and workshops. Previous positions include clinical research positions at the Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety and the National Center for PTSD, as well as academic appointments at the Medical College of Pennsylvania, Tufts University, Boston University and the University of Pennsylvania.