Military life is a family mission anchored in shared purpose, sacrifice, and service. Every deployment, relocation, and empty chair at the dinner table reflects not only the service member’s duty to the country, but also the family’s quiet endurance. Together, they live a calling few outside the military will ever fully understand.

That calling often disappears the moment service ends. Nearly 250,000 service members leave active duty each year. Some walk away with decades behind them; others with only a few stripes. But regardless of rank, many face an identity crisis the moment they take off the uniform for the last time.

Behind every folded uniform lies quiet uncertainty—and for too many, that uncertainty turns tragic. Veterans are at the most significant risk in the first year after leaving service, when mission, identity, and community disappear overnight.

According to the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) most recent report, veterans who separated in 2021 died by suicide at a rate of 46.2 per 100,000 within their first 12 months of separation. Those who separated between 2010 and 2019 experienced first-year suicide rates ranging from 34.8 to 51 per 100,000.

The message is unmistakable: a transition without purpose is not just a vocational challenge—it’s a life-and-death issue.

This is not only the veteran’s burden. When a service member loses purpose, the family loses its anchor. Spouses absorb emotional and financial stress; children feel instability. A fractured transition destabilizes the very institution that undergirds military readiness: the family.

The Department of War (DoW) and the VA share responsibility for this runway. DoW owns the final years before separation, and the VA inherits what comes after. Between them sits the Transition Assistance Program (TAP), the military’s designated on-ramp to civilian life.

But TAP is not an actual transition program. It is a checklist: PowerPoints, résumé templates, and briefings. In a national survey by the Veterans of Foreign Wars, more than half of veterans said TAP didn’t adequately prepare them, describing it as a ‘fire-hose of information’ delivered with ‘no time to absorb or apply it.

TAP prepares veterans for a paycheck, not rediscovering their purpose. It explains benefits, but rarely helps service members answer the fundamental questions every warrior faces at separation: Who am I now? And it leaves families almost entirely outside the process.

The military trains its people for every mission except the last one—rediscovering who they are when they hang up the uniform once and for all.

It’s time for a different approach.

Some programs already provide a path that works. At Texas A&M University, the VET+MAP program helps service members—and their families—rediscover their purpose, mindset, and identity before separation. It treats purpose as the center of transition, not an afterthought. It asks the questions résumé workshops cannot answer: Who am I? Why am I here? What am I called to build next?

Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) applies similar principles, treating transition like any other mission. Each departing operator receives mentors, purpose-driven planning, and a trusted network. The result is not just employment—it’s direction and renewed purpose.

Together, these programs offer a clear roadmap for the DoW to strengthen transition outcomes by integrating the purpose-based lessons pioneered at Texas A&M and JSOC into a formal pilot program.

A three- to five-year pilot could be launched across select installations and include four essential components:

1. Early purpose-based preparation (12–18 months before separation)

Not résumé writing—identity rediscovery, mentorship, mindset development, and community building. What gifts, talents, and passions remained dormant throughout the military journey?

2. Family integration

Transition is a household event, and TAP’s current structure fails to recognize that reality.

3. Measurable outcomes

TAP has never measured what actually works. A partner such as Texas A&M or Syracuse University’s Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF) could evaluate:

— Post-service employment and education

— Mental-health and suicide-risk indicators

— Family stability at one, three, and five years after separation

4. Leader accountability

The DoW does not evaluate leaders on how well their people transition, leaving a critical part of readiness unmeasured. The DoW could change that by adding transition-readiness metrics to unit and leader evaluations, tying accountability to how well service members—and their families—are prepared to succeed after service.

Such a pilot would give the DoW the evidence needed to redesign transition for the modern era. It would also acknowledge a truth that military families have learned for generations: purpose gives direction, and a unified family provides a catalyst to success. When either breaks down, the nation pays the price. When both are supported, the country gains leaders grounded in resilience, discipline, and service.

Transition is not workforce development. It is identity development, and identity begins at home. Readiness does not end when a service member leaves the formation; it continues in the strength of the family that runs—rather than limps—into the next chapter.

If we get this right, we can finally begin turning the tide on veteran suicide. Purpose, identity, and belonging are not soft concepts—they are protective factors. When service members leave the force with a renewed sense of mission and families equipped to run with them into civilian life, the risks of despair decline dramatically.

The next mission begins before service members hang up the uniform for the last time. We can either leave them to rediscover their purpose on their own, or we can build a transition system worthy of their service—and the families who stood by them through it all.

America’s strength has never rested solely in its weapons, but in the men and women in uniform, and the families behind them, who know their calling does not end when their service does.

____

Chris Wingate is the Government Relations Director at The Heritage Foundation and a former Senate staffer for Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Joni Ernst (R-IA). He is a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel and Aeromedical Evacuation Officer.

_____

©2025 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.