Army Steps Up For Families

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
Middletown (NY) Time Herald-Record
October 31, 2007 By Alexa James, Times Herald-Record
West Point — In his first six months as Army Chief of Staff, Gen. George Casey Jr. traveled across the country, asking soldiers' families what they wanted from the Army.
What could the military create to make their lives better? What could they do to keep them enlisted?
The answer was always the same.
"(They) don't want fancy new programs," Casey told a crowd of officers, cadets and children gathered at a youth center at the United States Military Academy yesterday. "(They) want us to fund what we've got."
Casey was on post yesterday, along with Secretary of the Army Pete Geren, to sign the new Army Family Covenant, a mandate to improve family programs at military installations worldwide. It means bigger schools and day-care centers, better housing and health care, and more career and personal opportunities for the families attached to soldiers. The covenant also comes with money — $1.4 billion in 2008 to rebuild, refurbish and staff this higher standard of living.
This, Geren said, was the Army's belated commitment to catch up with the demands of today's soldier in an "era of persistent conflict."
"We're in the seventh year of the war in Afghanistan, as you all know better than I," Geren said. "We're in our fourth year in Iraq. We're in uncharted territory."
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the largest and longest conflicts the nation has faced using an all-volunteer force. To sustain the numbers it needs, the Army will have to win the hearts and minds of its troops' families.
Folks like the McKearns, who have hopscotched back and forth to Germany with Col. Mark McKearn for the past 10 years. "When you're overseas," McKearn said, your installation is your "little America." Families need to know they can count on the same programs and opportunities wherever they go.
"What is $1.4 billion to me?" McKearn quipped. "It's a lot of money, depending on how you sweat it out."
At West Point, the Family Covenant money will sweat out as extended day-care hours, more paid staff, a $5 million child-care center and streamlined health care. Casey said the Army is also working to foster better career opportunities for uprooted civilian spouses.
The whole package sounded pretty decent to Senior Cadet Daniel Hickok, 22, of Washington state. "I'd very much like to make a career out of the Army," he said, but he also wants a wife and kids and has seen the toll deployments have taken on other Academy alums.
Two of his friends were married shortly after graduation, he said. A couple of years later, only one couple is still together.
More than half the Army's soldiers are married, and more than 700,000 kids are tagging along. At West Point, roughly 1,200 families and 1,700 children use family services on post.
"The challenges grow with each deployment," said Geren, and the deployments won't end soon. "That's not something we're going to leave behind and go back to the way it used to be."
Army Family Covenant signing ceremonies, like the one held yesterday at West Point, will take place at every Army installation in the world in the upcoming months.
 
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