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Policymakers and stakeholders should consider the following key findings when taking further steps

• Civilian post-deployment reintegration concepts and practices vary across non-DoD federal agencies.
• Civilian deployees must actively seek post-deployment reintegration assistance, but they often lack knowledge regarding the availability of reintegration activities.
• Civilian deployees seeking reintegration assistance are stigmatized in some cases.
• Personal services contractors typically do not receive post-deployment reintegration support and are more difficult to track following the end of their contracts.
• No reliable data exist to date on the size and scale of the issues facing individual civilian deployees, and more evidence-based research is needed.

Over the past two decades, the United States has deployed an unprecedented number of U.S. federal government civilians to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan to perform a wide variety of tasks. As more civilians have deployed, increasing numbers have been exposed to high-threat environments and high levels of stress. Studies of civilians (both government-employed and contractors) deployed to areas of conflict indicate that combat exposure and related stressors correlate with significant levels of deployment-related health conditions for this population. Anecdotal evidence further confirms that deployed civilians face similar deployment-related challenges to those experienced by military personnel, in terms of both health conditions and family challenges. This evidence demonstrates that there is a likely need for civilian post-deployment reintegration support. However, until now, a descriptive account of the specific policies, processes, tools, and outputs associated with reintegration for deployed civilians has been lacking.

This report reviews and analyzes assessments of the practices that U.S. federal agencies use to reintegrate civilians following domestic or overseas deployments to high-threat environments. The researchers aim to determine the extent to which such activities vary across the interagency community, and also identify promising practices for such agencies to pursue in the future. The authors leverage interview insights from federal agencies and a review of U.S. military post-deployment reintegration to accomplish these tasks. The authors also draw on U.S. military and Department of Defense civilian policy, programs, and experiences with redeployment to inform future reintegration efforts.

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Chapter Two

  DoD Post-Deployment Reintegration Policies and Practices

• Chapter Three

  Federal Civilian Post-Deployment Reintegration Practices and Experiences

• Chapter Four

  Key Findings and Recommendations

• Appendix A

  Glossary of Relevant Terms

• Appendix B

  Interview Protocol