Introduction: The Meaning and Importance of Military Resilience

The present volume embodies two major goals. The first is to bring together researchers who have studied resilience among military personnel and their families to highlight the ways resilience has been defined and describe the factors that contribute to resilience in these important populations. Although multiple definitions of resilience have been offered, enough commonality exists among them to provide the reader with some clarity regarding what constitutes resilience. Furthermore, the chapters in the present volume identify a number of personal, social, and unit factors that have been posited to predict resilience in military personnel and their families. Therefore, the reader should come away with a better understanding of how resilience is conceptualized and assessed, as well as a great awareness of the factors that predict resilience among military personnel and their families. The second major goal for the volume is to highlight applied interventions that have been developed to increase levels of resilience in service members and their families. The reader will see that although researchers differ on their precise definitions of resilience, a consensus exists regarding the factors that contribute to positive adaptation in the face of adversity (e.g., realistic optimism, flexible coping strategies, effective communication). Several training programs have been developed to enhance those factors associated with resilience. Although the evaluation of these training programs is just beginning, researchers and practitioners are starting to obtain evidence that resilience can be enhanced through training and interventions. The reader will have a better appreciation for what these training programs target and how they are expected to increase the resilience of military personnel and their families. In the remainder of this introduction, we first discuss the proliferation of definitions of resilience, provide a justification for the definition of resilience we use in the present volume, and highlight how that definition applies to military personnel and their families. We then provide a framework for understanding the determinants of resilience in military personnel and their families, along with a brief description of how the chapters in this volume fit within this framework. Finally, we illustrate how the present volume is related to but distinct from other books that have recently been published within the fields of military and deployment psychology. This discussion highlights how the present volume is relevant to multiple audiences, including researchers in the field of military psychology and psychiatry, clinicians who treat military personnel with mental health problems, leaders and policymakers within the armed services, and members of the general public who have an interest in understanding and promoting resilience in the face of extreme levels of stress.