WASHINGTON, D.C., Oct. 9, 2007 -  The Army is undertaking a variety of initiatives to improve the quality of life for soldiers and their families, officers involved in the programs said.
 
Several members of the panel on “Support to Soldiers and Families” on Oct. 9 at the Association of the United States Army repeated the truism that “a soldier joins the army, but the family decides whether to stay.” So as military families suffer under the stress of multiple deployments, measures to ensure that families are well taken care of become more and more important, the panelists said.
 
“More than half our soldiers are married and the greatest factor in deciding whether to continue their service is quality of life,” said Ronald James, the assistant secretary of the army for manpower and reserves affairs.
 
Soldiers in the Army Reserve, for example, are deployed about every three years. As the reserve force thus becomes an operational force, the army needs to make sure that its family programs – which are usually centered on military bases – are also available to a widely dispersed population on a sort of “virtual installation,” said Lt. Gen. Jack Stultz, Jr., chief of the Army Reserve and commanding general of Army Reserve Command.
 
To do that, the Army has signed memoranda of agreement with organizations like the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars, which can coordinate with the Army to provide support for families who need help while a soldier is deployed, Stultz said.
 
The Army is also trying to make a “seamless” health care system for reservists so that families don’t have to switch back and forth between their private health care insurance and the military TRICARE system, which can cause significant headaches for families who might have to change doctors every time the soldier is deployed. That may mean the Army would pay part of a reservist’s private health care premium, or that the army could pay for TRICARE for a soldier all of the time. Both solutions would have the advantage of making it more attractive for employers to hire and retain reserve soldiers. They would of course be expensive, Stultz added.
 
“We’ve got to think creatively – if we have an operational force we’ve got to come up with a solution,” he said.

 
POC:
John Grady
Director of Communications
Association of the U.S. Army
(703) 907-2613
jgrady@ausa.org