By Thom Shanker / The New York Times The new American commander in Afghanistan has ordered a 60-day review of the entire military mission to identify better ways to separate the population from insurgents, an assessment that is expected to lead to new economic and military steps to carve fighters off from the Taliban. Over […]

By Noah Shachtman / Wired The Army has ordered its network managers to give soldiers access to social media sites like Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, Danger Room has learned. That move reverses a years-long trend of blocking the web 2.0 locales on military networks. Army public affairs managers have worked hard to share the service’s […]

By Lolita C. Baldor / Associated Press All but a few dozen of the 16,000 Marines now in Iraq will be out by next spring, the Marine Corps commandant said Thursday, putting a solid end date on a long-anticipated exit. Gen. James T. Conway said his Marine commanders are already moving equipment out of Anbar […]

By Golnar Motevalli / Reuters The majority of the 17,000 extra U.S. troops being sent to fight a growing Taliban-led insurgency in southern and western Afghanistan should be on the ground by mid-July, the U.S. military said on Sunday. A further 4,000 troops are arriving to train Afghan security forces and they will be deployed […]

How Female Soldiers Experience Deployment More women are deploying than ever before. According to the Department of Defense, almost 11% of the soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan today are female, up from just 7% during the Persian Gulf War. Like their male counterparts, military women often look forward to overseas duty. When Charlotte McClumpha, […]

Staying Involved in Your Child’s Education If deployment means you’re leaving kids at home, it may be difficult to imagine staying involved in their lives while you are concentrating on your mission overseas. But experts say continuing to be a part of your child’s life on a daily basis is an important part of helping […]

Be Careful What You Tell Yourself… We’ve all heard the saying ‘attitude is everything.’ But sometimes it can be hard to look at a major life change like deployment as anything but negative. Watch Out! It turns out that telling yourself deployment will be a horrible experience could actually make it worse. “The subconcious mind […]

From the Associated Press: The Pentagon is prepared to leave fighting forces in Iraq for as long as a decade despite an agreement between the United States and Iraq that would bring all American troops home by 2012, the top U.S. Army officer said Tuesday. Gen. George Casey, the Army chief of staff, said the […]

Heroes At Home’s Katie Dyer will be on loan to You Served Military Blog for the next two weeks. (May 15-28) It’s entirely new content…. so make sure to check out her posts and all the other great You Served Bloggers!  Read You Served.

Don’t Ignore Retirement Planning When facing a deployment, your immediate goal should be getting through the year of separation. It can be tempting not to look beyond the date when you’ll be back together as a family. But with a little planning, a deployment year can really pay off for your family’s financial future. The […]