Abstract

Purpose: This study examines how indoor air quality and infection-reduction issues have been discussed in military living and operational environments. Research Design and Data: The study employed a longitudinal text-mining approach based on a final corpus of 101 coded records collected between 2016 and 2026. The dataset integrated news articles, policy and legal documents, scholarly literature, technical standards, and institutional case materials from Korea and selected overseas military contexts. The corpus was analyzed using frequency analysis, time-series analysis, topic modeling, co-occurrence analysis, keyword prominence mapping, and comparative visual analytics. Results: The findings show that military indoor-air discourse is concentrated in barracks, living quarters, training environments, and shipboard spaces. The issue became most visible during the COVID-19 period, particularly through collective infection incidents in recruit training centers, naval vessels, and Air Force training units. Since 2023, however, the discourse has increasingly shifted toward barracks modernization, mold mitigation, HVAC improvement, accommodation renewal, and environmental standards. The Korean corpus was more strongly associated with outbreak-driven and incident-centered themes, whereas the overseas corpus emphasized modernization and systems-oriented environmental management. Conclusions: Military indoor-air issues should be understood not as a narrow device problem, but as a multidimensional systems issue involving infection control, troop living conditions, environmental quality, and facility modernization.