Support for the 21st-Century Reserve Force: Insights on Facilitating Successful Reintegration for Citizen Warriors and their Families.

摘要

Although many studies have examined the impact of deployment on military families, few have assessed the challenges that guard and reserve families experience during reintegration. This report aims to fill that gap. This project used a survey and interviews about the reintegration experiences of guard and reserve families to better understand how these families are doing, the challenges they confront, the strategies and resources they use to navigate the reintegration phase of the deployment cycle, and what can be done to ensure that readjustment following deployment proceeds as smoothly as possible. Since 2001, the National Guard and Reserve have been utilized at unprecedented levels to fill key operational capabilities in overseas contingencies, especially in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. For many guard personnel and reservists, this has resulted in multiple deployments as well as longer deployments, often placing a strain on their families, especially as these citizen warriors try to reintegrate back into their civilian lives after returning from deployment. In our study, we regarded reintegration success as a multifaceted concept. Accordingly, we focused on three different areas that we believe are key to understanding and characterizing reserve component families' reintegration success: family well-being, resource usage, and military career implications.