This paper has considered what is known in international management regarding short-term international assignments and has adopted a dialectical approach in considering that literature and literature on international assignments in general in parallel with the lived experiences of some deployed military personnel from the Irish Defence Forces. A major limitation of the paper is the restricted size of the sample that shared their experiences with us. Due to the specificity of the organization in question, the Irish Defence Forces, and the potential of being recognized in the study, further interviews were not possible. However, our focus was to consider a more holistic picture of short-term assignments from
the point of view of the assignee and his/her remaining partner in the context of what is known about short-term international assignments in the management literature. Drawing on international human resource management literature, our focus was on advancing what is known in this space.