Abstract
The military of today faces unique challenges that earlier generations did not encounter. A shrinking percentage of the population serving in the military contributes to “drift” between military families and the general population. After more than 20 years without having hundreds of thousands of deployed troops serving extended tours of duty over the course of a decade, many organizations were caught unprepared. Families were strained by repeated, frequent, and long deployments. While many organizations were available to provide services to these service members, veterans, and their family members, it was difficult to determine how to best connect those organizations and services to the people who needed them. In this chapter, we consider the Red Cross’ response to the conflicts and lessons for the future. By being caught unaware on that long-ago September day, we failed to create a clear and easy network of access to community resources and we are still trying to correct this problem.
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Langley, K., Barber, L. (2018). Community Mobilization. In: Hughes-Kirchubel, L., Wadsworth, S., Riggs, D. (eds) A Battle Plan for Supporting Military Families. Risk and Resilience in Military and Veteran Families. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68984-5_13
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