Your spouse just deployed. The 12 things to do in the first 48 hours.

Hour 0 to 12: lock down what was shared

1. Confirm Power of Attorney is in place and accessible

General POA, special POA, and medical POA: if they were drafted before deployment, locate them now rather than under pressure. Make sure you know where the original is and where digital copies are. The POA is what lets you handle vehicle registrations, lease decisions, and other paperwork that requires the service member’s signature. Realizing the POA expired or is misfiled while you are at the DMV is the kind of friction that creates emotional collapse on top of operational delay.

2. Audit shared accounts that were on auto-fill

If your spouse used the household computer with browser saved passwords, the deployment is the time to check that the saved credentials still work for accounts you need access to. Banking, utilities, kids’ school portal, insurance, healthcare. Try logging in to each one this week, before there is an emergency. If a password has changed and only your spouse has the new one, you discover this on a calm Tuesday rather than at the pediatric ER on a Sunday.

3. Update emergency contacts

Your kids’ school. Your doctor. The HOA. The veterinarian. Anywhere the deployed spouse was the primary contact. Update to your phone number and to a backup contact (a parent, sibling, or close friend who lives nearby). The school’s emergency contact list is one of the most consequential lists in your daily life and the one most people forget to update during deployment.

4. Decide on the location-sharing policy

If you and your spouse share location through Apple Find My or Google Family Link, decide whether to keep that on during deployment. Keeping it on offers the comfort of knowing where the other is, while turning it off prevents the location records from existing in the first place, which matters if either party’s device is later compromised and used to expose patterns. We covered the broader frame in family tracking apps your kid’s school is recommending. Either choice is defensible, but the decision should be made deliberately rather than left at the default setting.

Hour 12 to 24: harden what is now exposed

5. Audit social media for deployment indicators

Pictures of your spouse in uniform with identifying patches. The “we will miss you while you’re away” post that publicly announces the deployment. The countdown calendar in the kitchen that shows up in family photos. Each of these is a deployment indicator that, combined with publicly available data, identifies your household as one with the active-duty member absent. Audit your own posts and your kids’ posts. The pattern is to make the deployment less obvious to anyone with general access, not to hide it from family. The framework is the OPSEC pattern we covered in our pieces on military social-media exposure: see data brokers that publish your address for the broader picture of how deployment indicators combine with broker data.

6. Lock down the home address publicly

If your home address is on a public listing (real estate site listing, business registration, donation receipt), now is the time to remove or obscure it. The deployment-period exposure makes this more important than during normal operation. The opt-out flow for the major brokers is the same one we covered in VeteranOwnedBusinesses and the veteran-targeted brokers. Submit the requests this week. The processing takes weeks. Submitting now means the records start clearing during the deployment, not after.

7. Check home physical security

Door locks, window locks, garage door, motion-sensor lights at entry points. None of this is technical. All of it is what reduces the operational opportunity for the burglary patterns that target deployed-spouse households (a known pattern, not paranoia). The cheapest fix is replacing standard exterior bulbs with motion-sensor flood lights. The next cheapest is a deadbolt rekey if you have not done it since the last realtor walked through the house.

8. Decide on the doorbell camera posture

If you have a Ring or similar smart doorbell, the deployment-period considerations are the ones we covered in Ring just partnered with Flock Safety. Either harden the settings (E2EE, reduced retention, Neighbors disabled) or move to a local-only camera platform. This decision belongs to the first week of deployment, before it gets buried under months of routine and revisited only when something has already happened.

Hour 24 to 48: build the systems for the long deployment

9. Establish a communications schedule and rules

If your spouse is deploying to a location with limited and intermittent connectivity, the communications pattern needs structure. Decide which channels are for which purposes. Signal for personal substantive conversation. Email for the long-form letters. WhatsApp or video calls for the family check-ins. The OPSEC overlay matters here too: what your spouse can say and cannot say varies by mission, and the spouses who do not understand the rules accidentally produce material that ends up in unit OPSEC briefings as bad examples.

10. Set up a financial monitoring routine

Deployment is when financial fraud against military families spikes. The fraudster knows your spouse is gone, often through publicly available indicators. The countermeasures: enable transaction alerts on every account (text alerts for any transaction over a low threshold), check the credit-bureau alerts weekly, freeze the credit at all three bureaus if you do not anticipate needing new credit during the deployment. The fraud pattern targeting military families is well-documented. The countermeasures are simple. Both are real.

11. Document the household state

Photos of every room. The contents of the medicine cabinet. The state of the vehicles. The condition of the appliances. This is the boring administrative work that pays off if anything happens during the deployment that requires insurance documentation, that requires showing the household state to a lawyer, or that requires explaining to your spouse what changed. The documentation takes thirty minutes. Doing it during a calm window of the deployment is far easier than reconstructing the same information under stress later.

12. Build your support network on a verified channel

The Family Readiness Group is one source. Friends who have been through deployments are another. The unit’s family support liaison is a third. Pick the channels you actually want to use, exchange contact info on those channels, and make sure you have current numbers for the people who matter. Deployment-period emergencies rarely match the ones you anticipated, which is why a list of three people who will pick up at 11 PM is the cheapest insurance the family carries. The framework around what to share and what to keep private with that network is the same one we cover in operational identity separation.

Frequently asked questions

What if my spouse left without doing the POA paperwork?

This happens more often than units like to admit. The fix during the deployment is harder but possible: a remote-notarization service can sometimes accommodate a deployed service member, and JAG offices on most installations can produce a POA package for the deployed member to sign and return. Talk to the unit’s family readiness liaison or to the legal assistance office. The process is slower than doing it pre-deployment but is not impossible.

Should I tell the kids’ school the spouse is deployed?

Yes, in most cases. The school’s response to a deployed-parent household is generally supportive and the staff who interact with your child benefit from the context. Tell them in writing. Ask the school to flag your records so that any unusual situation triggers contact with you rather than with the deployed spouse’s number, which may be unreachable.

The same disclosure to social media is a different question. The school is a known set of staff with a relationship to your family. Public social media is an unknown audience. Disclose to the school. Be more cautious with public posts.

My spouse insisted on deleting all our shared photos before deployment. Should I be concerned?

Probably not. The deletion of shared photos before deployment is sometimes part of OPSEC training where the unit is concerned about device compromise during deployment. The concern is that family photos on a personal phone seized in-country can identify the family. The deletion is operationally rational. Having that conversation before the deployment, rather than improvising it during, is what determines whether the spouse at home feels supported or cut off.

What about during the deployment if I suspect I am being watched?

Document and report. The unit’s family support has channels for this kind of concern, and most installations have force-protection points of contact for spouses. The threshold for raising it is low. If you genuinely feel something is off, the unit prefers a check that turns up nothing over a missed signal that turns up later as a real incident. The framework for what to look for is in our piece on eight signs your phone is being monitored; the same logic applies to physical surveillance.

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There’s no perfect setup. Anyone selling you perfect is selling fear. The goal is simple: make yourself a harder target than the person next to you.