Congress must fund research on military families — including the Reserve and Guard

November was the month of the Military Family, but how much awareness was placed on the family members of those who serve in the National Guard or the Reserve? Military families — active duty or the reserve components — sacrifice a great deal in support of their service members and America’s national security. Much of what is known about the effects of their sacrifice comes from studies funded through the Department of Defense. Good work is done through this contracted research, and what we’ve learned has helped to guide policy-making and programmatic development for military children and families.

Unfortunately, data on which these policies and programs are based come primarily from studies of active-duty families and children. For example, the 2016 RAND Deployment Life Study sampled 2,724 families with children, but only 721 — or 26 percent — of the study participants were associated with the Guard or Reserve. 

A 2019 report, Strengthening the Military Family Readiness System for a Changing American Society, from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, highlighted several gaps regarding military families and military readiness, including a lack of longitudinal data on stress and resilience in military children, lack of neurobiological research on the development of stress in military children and, interestingly, the lack of evaluation of any program offered by the military family readiness structure to active or reserve families. 

The 2019 report also failed to highlight gaps in knowledge about or services provided for children from reserve components and their unique family needs. This report also did not address the possibility that the family readiness structure for reserve units may need to differ from that of the active component, given their unique needs and their inability to access resources that are readily available to the active-duty families.

One critical reason that so little is known about reserve component children and families is that little research funding is available to examine their needs. The 2008 report from the Commission on the Guard and Reserve made this point — and noted that there is a lack of funding for family programming in general for those in the Guard and Reserve. The National Institutes of Health does not receive targeted funding for such research, nor does Veterans Affairs or the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP), which in 2020 was funded at $1.4 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service. 

Our organization, Reserve Organization of America (ROA), proposes the establishment within CDMRP of a Military Family Well-being Research Program that would align with CDMRP’s initial congressional charter to “foster novel approaches to [biomedical] research in response to the expressed needs of its stakeholders,” which includes military families from all components. We propose an initial funding level of $100 million, with 50 percent of funding levels targeted exclusively toward studies focusing on family members of the reserve component. An initial focus would be to identify military service-linked stressors that impact physical and mental health, as well as sources of resilience of these family members.  

DOD-funded research rarely expends resources to understand the needs of the reserve components, which make up over 40 percent of the force and are essential to military operations, as we have seen during two decades of war and civil crises. For example, civilian health care providers have no scientifically-based research on which to guide the identification of military family-linked stressors or hazards that might help in diagnosing a child’s illness, whether a physical or mental one.

Additionally, when there are small amounts of private research funding, it is often difficult to access the reserve component family member; in the past, federal research dollars were returned because of an inability to identify and gather the necessary numbers of research participants. Clearly, the lack of a publicly available, defined process for an externally funded researcher to obtain the necessary permissions to conduct research within this population is another gap. Fixing this problem is well within the ability of DOD. A simple mandate to have a publicly accessible website with identified points of contact for each component, along with a defined process to gain both human research protection program approval and component approval, would go a long way to fix this access problem.

Those who serve in the Reserve and National Guard — and their families — are less visible as military members to the average American than those on active duty. They live in civilian communities and many hold civilian jobs. The term “Twice the citizen yet out of sight” extends to the family as well as the service member. These families voluntarily sacrifice for our nation but too often are ignored. We understand way too little about their unique stressors and expend little effort creating programs to meet their needs.  

Congress must examine this disparity and take steps to correct it. 

Peggy Wilmoth, PhD, RN, is a retired Army major general and National Health Services officer, Reserve Organization of America (ROA).

Jeffrey E. Phillips is a retired Army major general and the CEO of the Reserve Organization of America (ROA).