Spouses to three of the most senior-ranking military leaders took the Installation Innovation Forum mainstage last week to talk about the role spouses can play in mission readiness and military family quality of life. Here is edited portions of their conversation with moderator Mona Dexter, Comcast NBCUniversal vice president of military and veteran affairs.

Dexter: How can we tap into military spouses as stakeholders?

Gina Allvin, spouse of the chief of staff of the Air Force: We say “adaptable, braced, connected.” Adaptable means the families are connected to the mission. They understand the mission. Braced is finding the connections. And that’s personal preparedness. You need to be personally responsible for your connection because you know the services.

For example, families who live in hurricane areas know how to prepare for hurricanes. I’ve never lived in a hurricane area. Community people, you need to make sure that we all know what we’re doing when we get there, because not everyone knows.

But that is a skill that is transferable to prepare for crisis. To prepare for natural disasters is a transferable skill that will transfer if we should ever have conflict.

Sharene Brown, spouse of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: What we do, how we train for our military members, means a lot across the globe. So how we help our families be able to be prepared going forward relies not only within our military but within our communities as well. Where do we find the information? We’re fairly resourceful as it is, but sometimes we just don’t know what we don’t know.

Dexter: The Pentagon recently released several quality of life enhancements, and one of those includes improving access to the Internet for service members and families. Why is connectivity in this sense so critical?

Brown: We’re building systems that are so much more sophisticated and complicated that Internet is necessary for all of us going forward. It affects our civilian life as well. We are tied to a lot of the local areas, and that’s one of the ways that we find information.

Allvin: Stations that are very remote don’t necessarily have great infrastructure and great connectivity. They have it. It’s slow. Spouses are possibly working from home remotely, our children are doing school from home. At that point, it is not equitable across the nation of how fast and how accessible your connectivity actually is.

Patty George, spouse of the Army chief of staff: I think what separates military life from civilian life is all of our perpetual moving. Being connected does become so important, not only to the new community that we’re in, because we want to be able to call it home as soon as we can, but also to the home that we left. And then also our immediate family that probably is not co-located with this, but we want to still share our life with them.

I think partly some of our recruiting challenges is that we lost connectivity with the rest of America. They don’t really know their military like they should, because we kind of isolated ourselves.

Dexter: What advice would you give today’s installation leaders to enhance the quality of life for service members and their families?

George: I think they’re doing it here with ADC. I often tell spouses that it’s really incredible that the military has pulled a seat out at the table of decision makers, and they have invited us to sit down. I think having conversations like this really has moved leaps and bounds.