Military transition extends beyond the administrative process of leaving the Australian Defence Force. Preparing personnel throughout their service to understand their skills, explore civilian pathways and build identities beyond the uniform can improve long-term wellbeing, employment and community participation. A life-course approach also protects the substantial public investment made in every person who serves.
Leaving the military is a challenge for any service member. The process of becoming a soldier is intense. It involves the hardening of the body, building physical fitness and resilience, and the cognitive reshaping of the individual from civilian to soldier. We are just starting to learn this is a life course phenomenon – our transition begins at sign up, not when we decide to leave. This is something the Australian Defence Force (ADF) and military researchers across the globe are just starting to come to terms with.
Nonetheless, the rubber hits the road when one decides to separate. Let me introduce you to Mark, a former infantry soldier who was discharged from the ADF in the 1990s. His is just one story, and there are different challenges for every rank, service, and mustering. This is just one:
Mark joined the ADF at 17 and completed basic training at 1RTB in 1988 at 18. His corps preference was Medical Corps, but he was allocated to the Royal Australian Infantry. Mark was a sound soldier. He achieved well at Initial Employment Training at the School of Infantry and was posted to 2/4 RAR in early 1989. For several years Mark flew around in Blackhawks, patrolled in West New Britain New Guinea, patrolled through Northern Queensland and Northern Territory, and developed skills in bushcraft, jungle patrolling, urban warfare. He carried the Mag 58 for most of his time in the battalion.
Looking for skills he could transfer after discharge, Mark joined the Military Police and was posted to 31 MP Platoon in Puckapunyal. Here he developed skills in minor criminal investigations, traffic control, field signage, and population control. Mark ran range activities for the Platoon and the Victorian CIB who would come to Puckapunyal for experience in military weapons. Being promoted to Corporal raised his level of responsibility. Mark has intended to remain in the military for some time, but his relationship with his partner presented an obstacle. Mark couldn’t be posted with his partner to Canberra, where she had been admitted to RMC, unless he separated.
Mark separated from the ADF and looked for something to do. He felt that he didn’t have a significant number of skills in his virtual pack. He had excellent skills of self-organisation, attention to detail, punctuality, teamwork, and the ability to lead people. But he had very little confidence about what that, along with his military skills, meant in civvy street. There was no language to describe what he did to potential employers or even the university. Mark applied for his shooting licence and took a security course in Canberra. Before leaving, he broke his wrist in a PT session but was discharged administratively.
Mark had a few other injuries and looked for something beyond security and the paramilitary. He assessed he should go to TAFE, he hadn’t considered university and thought that was way out of his capabilities. Mark had no idea what university offered, what awards, and what career direction. He didn’t have Year 12 but was encouraged to undertake the ASAT – Australian Scholarship Aptitude Test and was successful in gaining a place at University in Canberra. He talks of the experience as liberating, transformational and beneficial in giving him a new sense of identity, purpose, and belonging.
While becoming part of the Australian military is a pinnacle in many young Australian’s lives, leaving is another critical event. It is a liminal time, moving from one place in life to another, and not always with the greatest support. If it takes 12 weeks to 12 months to train and educate a Defence member, it must take more than one week to separate them?
Who are Veterans in Australia?
There is currently significant political, social and academic interest in the transition from the military to civilian life. The recently approved Royal Commission into Defence and Veterans Suicide is partially about transition. The employment needs of the Defence industries involve issues of transition. Being adequately supported to ask what you want to do after service is a transition question. We, as ex-service personnel, require support to make the change, and the wider community deserves that we are transitioned effectively. Investing in ex-service transition is a return on investment, the investment in all our wellbeing, and the investment in the taxpayer funds that have been used to create highly productive and focused Australians moving back into the community. Finding appropriate ways to support service personnel in making successful transitions to civilian life is viewed widely as a priority for public policy and research.
There is approximately 59000 continuous full-time ADF personnel, of which around 9000 (15%) are women (Women in Defence). In 2012, the number of current personnel who had served overseas in a war or war-like zone since 1999 was approximately 50000; this number is now approaching the number of Australian veterans who served in Vietnam between 1962 and 1972. Within the current ADF workforce, around 43% have deployed multiple times, 19% on one occasion. 39% have never deployed (MHPW:2010). Whether an ADF member serves overseas or domestically around Australia, all will, at some point, discharge from the military and enter civilian life. Women and others will share transition challenges with male service personnel but will also experience difference due in part to societal gender norms, identification as a veteran, and physiological makeup.
About 5900 Australians join, and about 6000 leave the ADF each year. On average, they serve around eight and a half years. Of these separations, around 600 recruits do not complete basic training, and about 1400 leave involuntarily. These numbers are rough, but approximately 8/10 separations are other ranks with 3-7 years experience. The other twenty percent are Senior NCOs and Commissioned officers who service around 12 years on average. While most involuntary discharges are medical and receive support from DVA, there is no understanding of how many involuntary discharges result from maladministration or malpractice within the ADF or how many voluntarily discharge with significant health issues undiagnosed trauma.
Key issues in transition
Mark’s first concern was that he had no idea of what civilian life looked like. He joined the ADF at 17 and spent five years within the military cocoon – mixing with military mates, living on base, working out bush, focused on the job, not the future. Nothing encouraged him to look further than the immediate time frame. Mark assumed he would join the police, take up security, get a job in corrections or the mines. That is what everyone else seemed to do, and if it worked from them, it would work for Mark. He had heard it was hard on your back and knees.
Mark hadn’t completed high school, and his family members had never gone to university. It wasn’t even a consideration. There was no guidance or talk in the battalion or company about what jobs were out there. Most discussions of what was next were nested with an embellished ideal of military effectiveness and a jaded view of hapless civilians. He felt guilty talking about what was next. His mates and boss took the piss out of him. Mark had no idea of how or what he could take with him, he even felt out of place at the civilian firearms course where the naïve excitement of young men with sidearms seemed a distant memory on the range at Kapooka. How could he take his skills and experience to the civilian world and translate it into currency for employment and opportunity?
Mark left the ADF on September 15, he turned up to the duty room, signed the paperwork, received one last judgment on his dress code, and walked out the door. That was it apart from the emerging struggle to navigate DVAs processes. He had moved from the state’s property to a subject of welfare support based upon how ill he could present. Finding university was an unexpected boon lifting him from a sense of institutional dependency to personal agency. Mark was lucky, but not everyone is.
What now?
In the last several years, the ADF, DVA, and research community have begun to broaden their transition ideal. The Australian Government has allocated 17 million to Defence to establish the Joint Transition Authority (JTA). We know from international research that transition needs to be considered across the life course – from the influences of childhood preservice, through entry into the services, service itself, and transition out leading on through the working-age veteran to retirement and death. Once one has served, one is entitled to lifelong support. Good transition policies that include recognition of skills, personal coaching and family support, guidance to education or employment, and upskilling and reskilling are now talked about as a remedy to loss of identity, purpose, and belonging. For so long, transition has been serviced around illness and dislocation, and the focus has been on supports once people struggle, now we have the opportunity to change the paradigm and to focus on growth and opportunity. Putting the fence at the top of the cliff rather than the doctor at the bottom respects the veterans’ entitlement to a good life after service and continues to build upon the human capital and capital investment of the person and community into the future.
