Your readiness supports JBLM’s base-wide mission

  • Published
  • 446th Airlift Wing

You are significant. So who are you?

You are the Soldier who maintains security in the Pacific or is ready to support contingencies worldwide through your readiness. You are the Airman who provides global airlift in combat zones and during humanitarian crises. You are the medical professional who cares for service members, their families and military retirees.

You are a member of the Western Air Defense Sector helping guard the Western United States from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean by monitoring air traffic nationwide all-day, every day. You are a civilian employee working in a Joint Base garrison support directorate, at an Army and Air Force Exchange Service facility or Defense Commissary Agency.

In other words, you’re one of the 40,000 service members and 14,000 civilian employees who make Joint Base Lewis-McChord and its important operational missions the unqualified successes they are. 
 
Everyone is significant to JBLM’s overarching mission — without you it doesn’t happen. Of course, you could also be one of the 60,000 military spouses or family members who support their service members from the homefront — no matter where their husbands, wives, fathers and mothers may be serving.

That’s the conclusion I’ve drawn after crisscrossing JBLM over the last year and a half as the joint base commander. It’s a message I’m sharing with you now. Why? Because your readiness and resilience directly impacts mission readiness.

If you’re fit, healthy and operating at your best, your work reflects that and mission readiness benefits. If, however, you have serious problems affecting your personal life, your work suffers and so, too, does mission readiness.

What is personal readiness? For service members, civilians and family members, that’s when you’re physically, psychologically, socially and spiritually fit. It’s about having strong, well prepared families.

This fitness and readiness gives you the strength and resiliency needed to thrive in the complex and uncertain environments service members, civilian employees and family members can and do face.

So what can you do when life’s challenges hit, when you feel overwhelmed and unable to effectively cope with them?

When this happens, and it will, don’t feel you must handle it alone. Within your unit and here at JBLM we have the subject matter experts, resources and programs who can provide you with the resources and the help you need. They can help you conquer whatever seemingly overwhelming challenges you may be facing.

With their help you can restore your personal readiness and resiliency or assist a subordinate or family member who needs help. Here are five ways you can help:

• Improve financial fitness. Know your people. Look for the potential warning signs of financial struggle. Financial struggles can lead to bigger problems, which can affect work performance or deployment readiness.

• Increase healthy behaviors. Our goal is to cut drug and alcohol abuse rates, while making sure people get enough sleep, physical activity and good nutrition.

• Optimize physical fitness. Military service is physically demanding. Physical fitness leads to injury prevention and quicker recovery after injury. It also reduces our number of nondeployable troops. A physically fit civilian workforce is also important to support the all-encompassing JBLM mission.

• Foster healthy relationships. It’s imperative we have leader engagement at all levels of our military and civilian workforce to reduce our number of domestic abuse incidents.

• Strengthen individual life skills and personal resiliency. I’m asking everyone — military and civilian alike — to be their best. Demonstrate mutual trust for each other, provide honorable service and do what is right always. I believe this will cut crimes against persons and property on base and, more importantly, reduce suicides, attempted suicides and ideations.

For more information, call the Armed Forces Community Service central intake line at 253-967-7166.