2024 Air, Space & Cyber: United Force and Families: Family Readiness for Great Power Competition

The “United Forces and Families: Family Readiness for Great Power Competition” panel at AFA’s 2024 Air, Space & Cyber Conference featured Col. Charlie Norsky, commander of Delta 1; Lt. Col. Sharon Arana, Sword Athena lead at Air Combat Command; and K.C. Erredge, Air Reserve Personnel Center lead key spouse. The panel, held on September 17, was moderated by Heba Abdelaal, AFA’s United Forces & Families (F2) member. Watch the video below:

Panel Moderator: Heba Abdelaal, AFA’s United Forces & Families (F2) Member:

My name is Heba Abdelaal and I’m honored to be here with you today to moderate our United Forces and families discussion on Family Readiness for Great Power Competition. I am a recovering congressional staffer, and yes, that is the industry-wide used term for that experience, and I am a military spouse of an active duty airman. So thanks so much for having me. Thanks to Team AFA for the opportunity to get to have this discussion.

When Carrie first reached out to me about moderating this session, I really couldn’t help but reflect on the incredible support that’s shaped my own journey as a military spouse living overseas and the importance of family readiness no matter where you are in the world. Our families faced our own unique set of challenges, and the care we received was really nothing short of extraordinary. This experience reinforced for me just how important it is to take care of each other.

That spirit of care and readiness though, extends far beyond my own personal story. It is central to the ongoing efforts of the Air and Space Forces, the Department of Defense and the United States Congress. In Congress, a Quality of Life Panel and the House of Representatives spent the last year developing a series of policy recommendations that now serve as the foundation of the fiscal year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act or NDAA. In the Senate, Section 596 of their FY25 NDAA proposes a national commission on quality of life for the All-Volunteer Armed Force. Last month, Air Force Chief of Staff, General David Allvin, called on fellow airmen, civilian employees, families and community partners to work together to advance a culture of family readiness. And just last Friday, Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin released a memo reaffirming our enduring duty to America’s service members and their families as a core readiness issue. All of this tells us one thing, the care of our families is directly connected to the readiness of our forces. And as we face growing challenges on the global stage, it is essential we come together to advance family readiness.

Today we’re privileged to hear from three trailblazing panelists who are leading by example. Please join me in welcoming Colonel Charlie Norsky, Lieutenant Colonel Sharon Arana, and Ms. K.C. Erredge.

Colonel Charlie Norsky, commander of Space Force Delta 1, headquartered at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, oversees the training for space, cyber and intelligence professionals through basic training, initial skills training, advanced training courses and exercises with personnel across five different states.

Lieutenant Colonel Sharon Arana, a leader of Air Combat Command Sword Athena team, and the driving force behind Joint Base Langley Eustis Family Readiness Summit held in February of 2024. And as the team leader of Sword Athena, Lieutenant Colonel Arana spearheads a volunteer working group of airmen dedicated to identifying and addressing family-centric barriers to readiness, elevating solutions to enhance the support and resilience of our military families.

Ms. K.C. Erredge has been an advocate for military spouses and families for over 30 years, and played a pivotal role in leading the team that developed the Five & Thrive Reserve Guide, an essential resource for reserve component military families. The goal of the Five & Thrive Initiative is to bring military leaders, community partners, and military families together to tackle quality of life issues.

I cannot wait for you all to hear it from these panelists because they are really truly wonderful. So we’re going to go ahead and get started with questions. And Colonel Norsky, you’re up first.

As a Command Key Support liaison, mentor living overseas, I really have seen firsthand just how critical military leadership support is in promoting family readiness. Can you help share how your leadership in this relatively new branch helps to integrate military family readiness and support systems, especially in the evolving context of the Great Power competition?

Lt. Col. Charlie Norsky, Commander, Delta I:

Yes. Hold on. So let’s first say this, first off, thanks to Air and Space Forces Association for having us out here. This is awesome. This is really great opportunity. It’s not every day that let me have a microphone, so I’ll be really excited just to be able to talk for a minute. But Heba, I also want to thank you. So she glossed over it real quick in the question, but she’s a key support mentor, right? And so I want to thank you for volunteering to be a key support mentor, and I want to give a shout-out to all the key support mentors and key support liaisons here and anyone who’s listening. We can’t do this, we can’t do this integration, this teamwork between military and our families without the key support liaisons and our mentors and our spouses. So thank you. Thank you for what you do.

So I’ll talk for a minute about what we do in Delta 1, I’ll talk more about the key support liaison program and what that means to us because building that family readiness and yes, family readiness really is mission readiness, we can’t do what we do on the mission side without making sure that we have our families not just on board or understanding, but truly as part of the team. So as we started out in Delta 1, one of the first things we did was go to each of our units and talk to our command teams and then say, Hey, we would like to hear from your key support liaisons, from your key support mentors. And we’ve built that from there.

So being able to talk, we meet monthly now with our command teams, our commanders, SELs, and our key support mentors and liaisons and being geographically dispersed, there’s challenges with that. But thanks to the digital way we do things, it’s a Hollywood Squares usually on the screen where we get to talk and just be able to share best practices across the many units that we have in Delta 1, but also be able to identify the challenges that our families are facing. Some are unique to the areas that they’re in, some cut across the Delta and are things that we can work together. So that’s the first thing that I’ll say about how we build that family readiness.

The next is from a key support liaison and key support mentor perspective, we also bring them to our command team conferences. So they’re called a lot of different things, commander conferences, leadership conferences. We call it a command team conference because quite literally we bring the entire team together and we bring them together, it’s about twice a year where we do this. And it’s not even where we put the military in one room and the spouses in another room. We actually bring us all together for a couple of days to work through both mission related discussions, but also quality of life related discussions. And we’ve learned that as we go along. Some of our most fruitful discussions as a command team, as a leadership team in the Delta have been where we’re talking about quality of life issues that are solved through both the military members and our spouses and our, so really something that we’re excited about there. I’ll just take 30 more seconds if I can, Heba.

Panel Moderator: Heba Abdelaal:

Got it. Yes, sir, of course.

Lt. Col. Charlie Norsky:

And just offer just a neat example of this. It was just last week, we’re talking about doing an open house at one of our locations in the Delta.

And for an open house, what do you do? You open the doors, you bring the families in, and maybe it’s a mission brief or something, expose them to the mission. But what I saw was in this planning team, we had a planning team sitting in the conference room together, it was active duty officers, enlisted, and our civilians. It was key spouse mentors and a key support liaison all sitting literally at the table together planning through what this open house would look like. And I’ll remark one other thing about our key support liaison who happened to be in the room was an active duty E-6, right? So when we think about the difference between the Key Support Program and the legacy Key Spouse Program, it’s not just for spouses, right? It is for any member of our unit that really has a passion for investing in others and investing in our families. And so I look in this conference room and I see this team planning our open house. And to me that’s one of those wins where I feel like we’re onto something here.

Panel Moderator: Heba Abdelaal:

Thank you so much, sir. And it’s such an important point because in General Allvin’s memo, when we talk about the expansion of the Legacy Key Spouse Program and now the Command Key Support Liaison Program, we can only build programs and grow things, but we need military leaders to take advantage of those things. How do you bring in more voices? Voices of our single service members, voices of our dual military members, they can now be a part of this program. And so it’s such an important part, important point, excuse me, and thank you for raising it.

Lieutenant Colonel Arana, could you share more about Sword Athena and your mission to give voice to service members and families alike across Air Combat Command via the Family Readiness Summit?

Lt. Col. Sharon Arana, Sword Athena Lead, Air Combat Command:

Yeah, certainly. Thanks Heba, and thank you everyone for being here. And for those of you out there watching, I really appreciate the platform to spread Athena’s mission and what it is that we do. So the Athenas are a MAJCOM level group of volunteers. We do this on the side with our own time, and it’s an organization that we work with at the MAJCOM level. So Sword Athena is Air Combat Commands Athena, we were the first ones, and now there are seven other Athenas spread out there throughout the Air Force. It’s a fantastic thing. And our mission is just to identify barriers to readiness that are affecting our military members and their families as well. So this year for 2024’s Athena, which was our fifth iteration, we’re going into number six, planning for next year, but for ’24, we always had a line of effort that we called Family Support.

And for this year we identified that, let’s shift that a little bit. And rather than calling it family support, we moved it to family readiness. And that was done purposefully because we wanted to highlight the fact that when we talk about operational readiness, everything that the Athenas identify and the initiatives that we work is with the purpose of removing barriers for readiness. And if we’re going to bring in families, we need to also understand that holistically a ready force includes our families as well. So hence the name change or the shift to family readiness. And then we also hosted in February our inaugural Langley Family Readiness Summit. So we were at headquarters staff over at Langley, and it was fantastic. It was an opportunity to really for the first time go directly to our family members and ask them what are the barriers that you are experiencing with things that maybe the rest of us in uniform might not necessarily see so transparently? Things like accessing educational services or healthcare and the summit was an incredible success. So much so that, yeah, we’re absolutely repeating it for ’25.

Panel Moderator: Heba Abdelaal:

I love that. And I actually have a follow-up question for you, because I think so often you hear that, “Oh, well, we have events on base and nobody shows up” or “nobody participates.” And so what’s the point of having events if nobody’s going to actually come and participate or be a part of it? But what you’ve been able to do with the Family Readiness Summit is actually give families the opportunity to have a voice and have a seat at the table and then get to see some of their suggestions and recommendations kind of move through the process and maybe even get adopted. So can you tell us just about some of the things that you’ve seen now that came up in the Family Readiness Summit that you’re going to help action for this next year?

Lt. Col. Sharon Arana:

Absolutely. We have one amazing win that recently came out. So through the Family Readiness Summit, a thing we identified was as far as healthcare access was access to Narcan. The opioid epidemic is something that is affecting our military members and our families as well. If you look at where our bases are, there is a very definite Venn diagram over areas that are being affected, unfortunately by this epidemic. So we were able to reach out to APHS, and really again, it was from one small idea, reached out to APHS, and now they are carrying Narcan online and in their stores as well. And the intent was just to remove a barrier to access for this critical medication for our families.

Panel Moderator: Heba Abdelaal:

And the thing that you raise here too is that we’re absolutely not immune to some of the challenges that we’re already experiencing in the community. So military families are impacted just in the very same way that public and society are. And yeah, that was a great win. So thanks for sharing that.

Okay, K.C., it’s your turn. You ready?

K.C. Erredge, Air Reserve Personnel Center Lead Key Spouse:

Yes.

Panel Moderator: Heba Abdelaal:

She’s so awesome you guys. So K.C., you’ve been sharing a lot with me. I have learned so much from you in the last 24 hours. I feel very, very lucky. But could you share with us a little bit about your journey, helping write and support the Thrive Guide for Reserve Component Families and how it helps connect families maybe to both resources and programs that they may not necessarily realize are even available or accessible to them?

K.C. Erredge:

So thank you, Heba, and thank you everyone. I’m super excited to be here and be able to share some information from the spouse side as far as family readiness. So I have been a military spouse for over 29, 30 years now. My husband, we were dating when we were in college, and so I was a Ratzy girlfriend.

Panel Moderator: Heba Abdelaal:

We are coining that term.

K.C. Erredge:

And he was active for nine years and he’s been in the reserve for the last 21 years. And in those 21 years, he served in four different statuses. So I feel that I’ve got a pretty well-rounded background of just about every status you can be in. And over that time, I’ve had different experiences that have shaped kind of where I’m at today.

And the first being when we first were married, he was already at his station in Tucson. I was still living in Minnesota. We got married on a Friday. We loaded up the car on Sunday, the U-Haul, put the car behind it and towed it and left for Arizona. It was the worst trip ever. It started with an exploding bottle of ketchup and continued with a U-Haul that died almost every time we came to a stop. And nobody could fix it until we hit Flagstaff, which is roughly 1300 miles from where we started.

And then when we finally arrived in Arizona and we got to the apartment that we were going to be living in, he looked at me and told me that he would be leaving on Sunday to go to Korea for a week, which is not a long time, but I had lived in Arizona for approximately three hours and knew nobody. And here I was being told I was going to be left alone there, not knowing anybody. And its experiences, I felt very alone. And I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t know what my resources were. I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t have any friends. All of my family was 1700 miles back in Minnesota. And so that is kind of where my whole journey has started was I became very passionate in wanting to support and gather information and be a person that could share that with spouses because I never wanted another spouse to feel that feeling because it’s no fun. It’s icky.

So I have done that mostly as a volunteer and a mentor through what’s now the Commander’s Key Support Program. I started even when the Reserve called it the Key Family Member Program, which is a very, very, very long time ago. But it’s through that program that I started working with the resources and got pulled in. I was excited because I was gathering information from so many different resources that it’s hard to keep up because you can get resources from so many different places. And so when the Thrive Guide came out, I was like, this is phenomenal. You can get all of these resources and they’re all in one place, which is fantastic. And the Thrive Guide, and as I was looking through it, I was like, this is so awesome.

But now I’m a reserve family and I’m looking at these resources and I’m like, the only sad is that some of our reserve families and our guard families, these resources aren’t going to help them because it depends upon their status. They might not be eligible for some of these things, and that’s just going to frustrate them to come out here and look at these resources, go to them and then find out that, sorry, your spouse is in the wrong status so you don’t qualify for this.

And so I was even more excited when I got reached out to and asked if I would participate in creating this reserve guide. And so I was part of a team. We worked really hard to try and pull from all of our experiences to write about the nuances that come with being a Reserve family member and how if you are in this status, you might qualify for this benefit, but if you’re in this status, you don’t qualify it for it, but you might qualify for this other one. And so I was super excited about that. The primary thing that I like about that is that the Thrive Guide, the Thrive website, other resources such as the Air Force Reserve Command, has a connect the network guide, all of those resources are now online.

So a lot of our Reserve families, they don’t live near an installation. A lot of them are not near any installation. Some of them are just out in the country and they’re hundreds of miles from an installation. So with these resources being online, anyone can access them from anywhere. It’s not like back in the day if you weren’t near the installation, you lost out or you’re relying, I’m sorry members, but I’m going to throw you under the bus, for you to remember to bring home the information to us or send us the email. So bringing it online really helps those family members be able to connect to those resources that they’ve never been able to connect to before and gives them the opportunity to see, well, hey, I didn’t realize that I qualified to get this scholarship even though my husband is a TR, or different things like that. So I just really think that the availability of that and getting the families to be able to connect to those resources like that makes them feel much more connected and supported and more like being part of the military family.

Panel Moderator: Heba Abdelaal:

Absolutely, K.C. And you’re such a great advocate for families, so I really appreciate that.

Colonel Norsky, this December, if you can believe it, we have a big birthday coming up for the Space Force. We’ll be celebrating our fifth birthday, a whole hand. And the Space Force, if you all have been participating in some of the other United Forces and families conversations and panels, and especially the one yesterday about Shaping the Guardian Experience, wow, talk about taking a really intentional whiteboard approach to actually building culture. And building culture can be really difficult. It can be really tough, and it takes time and it takes consistent communication, honest, open, transparent communication. So you are really leaning into that responsibility, into that opportunity. How does this emerging culture about what it means to be a guardian influence the way that you communicate the importance of family readiness to your service members and their families and ensure that they feel connected to the mission of the United States Space Force?

Lt. Col. Charlie Norsky:

Yeah, thanks, Heba. So I think there’s a couple of things in what Heba just brought up. First off, with culture, you can’t downward direct it. You can’t write a memo and say, this is yea verily our culture. What you can do is help set the conditions and be that culture that you want to see. I would tell you we’ve got a couple of things that we’ve been doing that we’re seeing within Delta 1 that I think are just fantastic.

First off, you use the words culture and connection in the same breath. And I think we really are seeing this culture of connectedness starting to form. I’ll talk briefly about what we do with the patching ceremony, and there’s a reason I’m building to this, but for the patching ceremony, for those who aren’t familiar with it, our newest guardians, when they are getting ready to graduate basic training, we’ve now called it unofficially, but probably officially Space Week, we have a series of events that goes on during that week to commemorate the conclusion of their eight-week journey there in Texas. And one of those events is a patching ceremony where they receive a Space force patch on their arm, but it’s not just any patch. It was one that was worn already by a service member in the Space Force.

And what’s more is it comes with a note from that existing guardian say, “Hey, here’s my patch. Here’s the patch that I wore. And now we know each other. Now we’re connected in some way.” And I think that’s fantastic. Just as an anecdote, when our SEL and I, Chief Norris, when we were out talking to some guardians, one of them came up to me and said, “Hey, I don’t know if you remember, but you actually put the patch on my arm during the patching ceremony.”

I was like, “Of course I remember you.” And I noticed on his other arm, he didn’t have a patch. And I said, “Hey, what’s the deal here?” He said, “Well, I’m saving up for the next patch or whatever.” I said. I said, no, no, no, no. And I took the patch off my arm, it was a Delta 1 patch, and I put it on his arm. And that’s it. I mean, I don’t have more patches to give him, right? He gets two patches, two arms. But we had that instant connection.

And then we’ve also now heard from one of our detachments that does initial skills training for our enlisted, now when they swap patches, they’ll actually sign the back of it. And so there’s almost a lineage now to some of the patches that are starting to circulate. It’s that culture of connectedness that I think is so incredible.

I walk you through that because that’s how we build connection among or between our guardians. But then what about the families? And so what I think is so fantastic is this new family pinning ceremony that we do, also part of Space Week down at BMT. And it’s made possible by the generous offer from AFA to provide these family Delta-shaped lapel pins. And what’s so incredible about it is these are pins that our newest guardians give to their loved ones who show up to their graduation ceremony. And on it’s attached to a wallet-sized card where they can write a note that says, here’s what your love and support has meant to me so far on my journey, albeit their journey is only eight weeks old. But the point is that family member, those loved ones, they are brought into the fold. They’re brought onto the team literally in day one they’re brought in and they feel like they’re part of that Space Force family. And so it’s just something that from a culture perspective, we’re seeing that desire of connectedness not just to each other, but a desire to connect our families to this service.

And then let me just say one last thing about culture. Sometimes you get these data points that are just these remarkable moments that tell you, wow, from a culture perspective, we must really be onto something. And you brought up the Shaping the Guardian Experience panel from yesterday. Here’s what I thought was so cool about that. This morning we heard from Chief Bentivegna about the guardian experience, right? Yesterday we had a whole panel dedicated to shaping the guardian experience and what that means, and it’s all through the lens of our Space Force spouses. I thought that was just phenomenal. And I’m not just saying that because one of those phenomenal spouses is my better half. It was absolutely incredible to see that. And so from the perspective of bringing our families onto the team, I just think that’s a really poignant way of illustrating that cultural shift that’s happening right now.

Panel Moderator: Heba Abdelaal:

Thank you. I’ll be honest, I texted my husband yesterday, last night, I said, “Hey, should I join the Space Force?” And he said, “We’ll talk when you get home.” So to be tuned. But yeah, I just wanted to let you know that I followed up on the conversation we had yesterday after the panel. But thank you for sharing that. I think it’s just very, very neat and a really interesting and unique way to welcome new members of the Space Force family. So really appreciate that.

K.C., so we talk some of the hurdles that you’ve shared about Reserve component families and different things about staying connected to the mission and how that’s all a part of readiness or feeds into readiness. From your perspective as a military spouse and an active volunteer, how do engagements like the Sword Athena Family Readiness Summit help provide an opportunity to not just learn about challenges that families might be facing or experiencing, but also help close some of those gaps? I feel like we talk about building a bigger table and inviting people to be a part of the conversation and discussion. And oftentimes, I’ll admit, I probably have done this unintentionally as well, we forget that not every military member or anyone who’s affiliated with military lives on a traditional installation or in a traditional military community. So help us understand some of that unique opportunity that you might get when you’re invited into conversations like the Family Readiness Summit.

K.C. Erredge:

So I think when the spouses and the families are invited, and I think it’s important to remember that it’s not just necessarily spouses, we have a lot of single airmen that their person, it might be a friend, it might be a parent, a brother, that we’re being inclusive of a loved one of that member that is caring for them and making sure that we’re actively getting the information to those people so that they can attend these awesome engagements. And I think the best way to do that is to make sure that our leadership is utilizing those key spouse or key support liaisons that they have now, and making sure that because they’ve got contacts with those family members to make sure that those families get invited and can be sharing that information with them so that they can attend and it can be a meaningful event, and they can get the information that they need that.

The thing with the Reserve is not all of those engagements that happen at the unit work for the Reserve. And I think there’s been a lot of events that, well, back in the day it was if you weren’t around the area, then you just weren’t likely able to participate in the event because it wasn’t there.

When Covid hit, we found that, hey, we’ve got this resource of Zoom and Skype and we can do things virtually. And I think since that point, we’ve had a lot of engagements that happen virtually and can include those family members regardless of where they’re located and hosting them at different times so that if we’ve got times that our working spouses can come and get that information. But I really think holding those engagements in a way that is, and thinking about the ways that our family members want to gather the information and how they consume the information and making sure that we get it to them how they want it, and are likely to engage back with us, then that definitely helps in helping them feel more connected and brought to the them.

Panel Moderator: Heba Abdelaal:

Oh absolutely. And I’m going to shout out to a teammate, Aimee Selix, yesterday on the, again, Shaping the Guardian Experience panel. I’m telling you guys, you need to go back and watch it. You’ll learn a lot. She was sharing about the conversations they’ve been hosting, consistent, regular, candid conversations with spouses and inviting leaders, military leaders to come and share about the mission. Okay, help military spouses understand, or family members, loved ones, understand the mission that their military member or civilian is supporting so that we can be great advocates for you in rooms and in conversations where we are.

Something my husband and I talk about all the time is he’s like, “Hey, what can I do to help you, Heba, as you’re going out, you’re doing all these speaking engagements, you’re doing all this advocacy. What can I do to help support you as your spouse?” And I tell him, “Joe, the best thing you can do for me is to be my advocate when you are in rooms and in conversations that I’m not in.” So we do that for each other, and we can do a better job of doing that more effectively when we’re willing to have those engagements and have those conversations and discussions candidly and openly. So I really appreciate you highlighting that and giving me the opportunity to talk a little bit about the Guardian Candid Conversations series that they’ve been doing, which has been just wildly successful as well.

And Lieutenant Colonel Arana, the diversity of families, of family structure. Not every, General Allvin mentioned this in his memo again, about how it’s not just a traditional family or military member and military spouse, they’re also civilians. There are single members, there are dual military members, and they all have a community of loved ones, chosen loved ones who support them and want to see them succeed and do well, and want to know and understand how they can be a part of that. So can you talk a little bit about just the importance of things like the Family Readiness Summit and how it helps highlight some of the different diversity that we are seeing in our military families and help you as a leader support them?

Lt. Col. Sharon Arana:

Absolutely. So I’ll start off by saying a lot of the work, or pretty much predominantly the work that we do, it’s based on this acceptance that the policies right now that we have, where they came from was a time when families didn’t look like how they look now. They were very different I, back in that day, would not be sitting here in uniform talking to you. Our families have evolved since, and our policies have not necessarily kept up with that evolution. So when we have platforms like Sword Athena and the Family Readiness Summit, and even us here talking about this, it lends a voice to the families to let them know, to let leadership know that, listen, our policies right now aren’t necessarily taken care of us.

I’ll give a quick example is healthcare. So earlier this year, there was a report that came out in the media that 50% of our installations are in areas that are designated as healthcare deserts. So by statistics, that means that about one in three of our military members across the DOD and their family members don’t have ready access to the healthcare that they need. These are important statistics for our leadership to hear and the stories that come from that, how is that affecting our families? But now let’s add, when we talk about the diversity and inclusion piece of this, let’s now add the politicization of our healthcare, and now we’re talking about on top of one in three, what about our marginalized families? What about our LGBTQ families, our families that have trans individuals, maybe families that are looking at fertility care, families that are looking for abortion access and trans access and care? These are critical healthcare issues. And on top of, again, the healthcare deserts, now our marginalized families are being doubly impacted.

So when you go back to how is it that leadership and what can they do, I really think it’s listening to these stories and understanding that, again, we all embody the military, right? It is not just those of us in uniform, but it’s our people at home. And at the end of the day, our folks at home, that’s our priority. And what that looks like, you need to listen to those stories and understand that those definitions are changing. Therefore, our policies need to shift and adjust in turn as well.

Panel Moderator: Heba Abdelaal:

And have a dear friend who talks a lot about how the definition of family belongs to our Airmen and Guardians. I think that’s just such an important quote to keep in the back of our mind as well. Okay. We’re coming up on time here. We’re going to go fast, okay? Lightning rounds. But Colonel Norsky, before we do our final kind of lightning quick round, I would love to hear from you what you might have to share about how you might see military families helping bridge the gap between military and society and what steps are being taken to ensure that Space Force families and loved ones aren’t just aware of the Space Force mission, but also are engaged with the service.

Lt. Col. Charlie Norsky:

Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So when we talk about bringing the families into the fold, and hopefully, one of the things I’ve tried to convey is how from day one, we try to bring those families onto the team, well then what? So what we’re envisioning inside of Delta 1 is a more formal developmental and investment mechanism for our spouses, particularly, along several different lines of effort, if you will. We can pick mission understanding first, right? Unfortunately, and I’ve been guilty of it too, you don’t necessarily talk about what you do. You don’t talk about the mission. And then our spouses, our families are left wondering, what is it exactly that I’m supporting? And so what if we had the ability to maybe more formally and more deliberately inform them about what we do? Think of courses almost on Space Force mission areas, on Space Force units, things that are ought to be accessible to our family so that they have a deeper understanding about what it is they’re actually supporting. So almost thinking of it in a collegiate model, if you will.

You can also look at it even from a readiness lens. In the uniform capacity, we get readiness training regularly, and it’s taught by a master resilience instructor. And so we know how to be resilient as military members. Well, what about on the home front? And so what we’re working through is what does this look like then maybe to formally teach resilience to our spouses, to our families, because resilience really starts at home.

Now, take that another step further, and why can’t spouses be master resilience instructors? I can tell you it’s not science fiction. My amazing bride is a master resilience instructor. She’s done that. And so what we want to be able to do is formalize this so that it’s not just pointing a family member or a spouse towards a resource and say, go over there for this information. It’s, hey, come over here. Let’s talk about this. Let’s work through this together. Let us grow, maybe even formalize some formal mentorship, between spouses who have been there, done that, and some of our brand new ones. And so this spouse development initiative is something that I think we’re really excited about being able to roll out. And of course, we’re also exploring partnerships with the Thrive team, for additional capability and capacity, something that might lend to it being more sustainable in the long term.

Panel Moderator: Heba Abdelaal:

Well, that’s a teaser, so stay tuned again for that. You guys have lots of follow-up homework from this session. I know hopefully we have just another couple of minutes here to follow up. I gave you all a final question prompt. You’ve been preparing for that. We’re going to take it to one word. This is a test. As we wrap up the discussion, I’m going to invite each of you to offer a final thought in a word or three words, a phrase, on how we can all play a role in creating positive family readiness, not just within the military, but extending to the broader community and society. What is one thing we can do today to make a positive difference for families and their readiness as we navigate the challenges of great power competition? Colonel Norsky.

Lt. Col. Charlie Norsky:

All right, you set up to three words?

Panel Moderator: Heba Abdelaal:

Up to three words, yes, sir.

Lt. Col. Charlie Norsky:

It would be embrace your why, and I will tell you, mine is sitting right there.

Panel Moderator: Heba Abdelaal:

Love that. All right. Lieutenant Colonel, Arana.

Lt. Col. Sharon Arana:

I would say accountability. I think in accountability as in our own personal accountability and also holding our leadership accountable to make sure that they’re protecting our families and ourselves as well.

Panel Moderator: Heba Abdelaal:

Thank you. Appreciate that. And K.C.

K.C. Erredge:

Connection. And introverts too.

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