Just a few months after Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced seven initiatives to enhance service member and family well-being, the department is making steady progress, defense leaders said.

“We have done a great number of things over the last four years,” Ronald Keohane, assistant secretary of defense for manpower and reserve affairs, said during a recent event at the Center for a New American Security. These initiatives include increasing compensation for service members, working with spouses on additional employment opportunities and training and expanding access to child care, he said. “We understand the financial security element of a family is critically important,” he said.

The new initiatives include offering health care flexible spending accounts for service members, increasing spouse employment and career development opportunities and improving conditions at remote and isolated installations, among others.

Service members and families largely live within the department’s ecosystem, so getting the fundamentals down is essential, said Brendan Owens, assistant secretary of defense for energy, installations and environment.

“People go to sleep in housing that's on a military installation. … They go to work in a building the DoD owns. They drop their kids off at DoD schools or in child development centers. … They go shop at a commissary … and then they go home, right?” he said. “Their entire lived existence is inbuilt in natural environments that DoD is responsible for.”

In lock step with the department’s efforts, the Army has invested in quality-of-life initiatives for soldiers and their families, including prioritizing $3 billion for family and privatized housing across 50 Army installations, streamlining hiring at child care development centers and increasing enlistment bonuses, among others.

Some of the initiatives, including increasing free internet access in barracks, were inspired by DoD’s interactions with young, unmarried service members.

“Every time ... we’d go and visit barracks, one of the questions that I asked our [troops] ... is, ‘If you could have 10 more square feet in your barracks room or free Wi-Fi, what would it be?’ ” Owens said. “No one is going to be surprised that a 19-year-old wants free Wi-Fi.”

Quality of life strategies remain essential to readiness, Owens said. “When we put people in spaces that enable them to sleep well, to have privacy, to have security, the version of themselves that they bring to work is the best version of the warfighter that we need,” he said.