The texts arrive to us late at night and just before dawn, from women as sleepless as we are. They are military spouses, increasingly alarmed that the Pentagon’s rhetoric around “readiness, lethality, and warfighting” masks a deeper shift — one that sidelines the very people who hold our force together: military families. These women turn to us for reassurance, not only because we each spent over three decades as military spouses but because our husbands once served as service chiefs.
