Thank you very much.
One of the things I think we need most, in order to tackle the challenges that are before us as a military community, is a sense of community. It's hard to achieve that. It's harder today, perhaps, than when we had bases where everybody was posted. There were some downsides to that, too. You had no privacy, in a sense.
I think the biggest risk, whether you're a soldier who's deployed or a family member on the home front, is isolation, isolating yourself from resources that are there to support you. I think it needs to be the full suite—the family, other members of the unit, the family resource centre, faith communities, etc. I think whatever problem we're facing becomes less daunting when we engage with others to tackle it together.
How do you build community when people are naturally separating themselves from one another and living in a more isolated and perhaps more virtual context? Maybe we need to focus on how to leverage virtual technology to bind people together even more powerfully than we've done in the past.
Community—togetherness—is the most essential element, I believe, to tackling the challenges that the military will face moving forward.