In this article, we describe the military's approach to providing high-quality, reliable, and affordable child care to military families as a means to promote combat readiness and retain personnel. We also discuss how the DoD is coping with the challenge of providing child care to families who face multiple deployments, and to the growing share of military families who live in civilian communities. Finally, we argue that the military's experience with revamping its child-care system could be used as a template to improve child care for the nation as a whole. (author abstract)