ABSTRACT
This brief chapter reviews the history of military-sponsored life-course research and provides examples of how the intellectual constructs of the life-course perspective can be used to analyze and understand the “human dimension” of military operations and functions. 1 Using core life-course principles and concepts—lifelong development, historical time and place, timing in lives, linked lives, human agency, transitions and trajectories—that are described more fully in the introductory chapter (see Wilmoth and London, Chapter 1 of this volume), we discuss how the life-course perspective might be applied to help improve life outcomes for military service members and their families. Throughout the chapter, we suggest military-relevant questions that seem well suited to life-course analyses, explanations, and, perhaps, preventive and clinical counseling practices for those who are likely to experience or already have experienced combat. By highlighting these connections, we aim to make the case that it is not only within the scope of the mission of the U.S. military services to fund and develop practices that are informed by life-course research, but that it is imperative they do so.
