Military families and deployments abroad in Italy. In search of adequate answers for a new issue

Abstract

The Italian case can be defined by means of the image of the three-sided revolution: from draft to AVF, from national to international oriented military, from all-male to mixed military. These great changes have given rise to a professional military with a lifelong career with frequent deployments abroad and formed by soldiers who are not single males anymore. Because of the rapid process of routinization of abroad deployments and the growing number of military families, the Italian military institution has been caught relatively unprepared, and it has been able to offer a kind of emergency psychological support in case of dramatic events, but less able to give rise to routine forms of family support for those situations where problems are much less tragic but anyway stressing for the private life of families affected by the professional activity of deployed soldiers. In this chapter, results from a qualitative inquiry are presented about military family situation, mainly as far as problems arising because of international deployments are concerned. Research observations have been taken from families where one member (usually the husband) belongs to units where deployment is a continuous problem to live with, but where the socio-cultural area where the unit is settled is different. Due to the country morphological structure, the territorial distribution of units gives rise to two different types of territorial family situation: a strong majority of deployable units are settled in the North of the country, whereas the large majority of soldiers comes from southern regions, that is from 500 or 1,000 kilometers of distance; but some units are on the contrary settled in the southern regions, and in these cases soldiers are really “locals.” This means that in the first type of unit, military families are often similar to migrant families, where both spouses come from far away and are cut off from their social and parental networks, or the young soldier gets married to a “local” girl and the new family can take advantage from the presence of parental and friendships ties of one of the two partners; in the second type, families and soldiers are locals, and they can maintain their basic social integration, their parental and friendship networks. This variety permits to understand to what extent deployment affects family life in situations where primary social support can be a solution, or it is absent and should be provided by the institution itself or by the society at large. Because of this variety, a number of different solutions can be tested to support military families, so that they can choose according to their true needs.

Citation

Nuciari, M. and Sertorio, G. (2009), "Military families and deployments abroad in Italy. In search of adequate answers for a new issue", Caforio, G. (Ed.) Advances in Military Sociology: Essays in Honor of Charles C. Moskos (Contributions to Conflict Management, Peace Economics and Development, Vol. 12 Part 2), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 263-280. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1572-8323(2009)000012B016