The Military Services Don't Care About Suicide
The Military Services Don't Care About Suicide
Services ignore Congress and obscure the nature of the suicide epidemic
If you care about something, you do everything in your power to deal with it.
You get beyond slogans and posturing. You take action to make a material difference. You take every action you can, not as few actions as you can get away with.
For those paying attention, it’s been doubtless and crystalline for a long time that there is a causal link between the demands placed on military members and the incidence of suicide.
Units, career fields, and specialties ground into dust with constant deployments, curtailed rest intervals, and relentless operational demands have higher levels of suicide.
Which makes logical sense, and when acknowledged, makes the issue of suicide assailable. If we understand something, we can fix it.
And yet the epidemic of military and veteran suicide persists.
Not because it must do so.
But because those with the power to ameliorate it, the US military services, don’t care to fix it. We know this not from DoD’s words or statements or policies. But from its evident actions.
Two stories published over the last few days will likely have caught little notice among major media outlets or their consumers.
But these two reports are damned important.
They illustrate DoD’s frigid disregard for its own workforce, regardless of constant lip-syncing, virtue signaling, and advertising to the contrary.
Some participants in this chicanery are unwitting. But its masterminds are nihilistic shitlords unworthy of setting pins in a bowling alley, much less setting policy for the volunteers who provide our defense.
Such lowly creatures perceive no duty of care. They perceive only a duty of obedience.
Let’s review the two stories I am talking about.
First, the military services refuse to report whether units are complying with a policy requiring minimum dwell times between deployments.
This matters because people serving in units which don’t meet the tempo policy are twice as likely to kill themselves as others.
We only know because of investigative reporting conducted absent the cooperation of the disgusting, bloody-handed flesh merchants responsible to actually monitor and act on this policy.
Second, the services are refusing to provide data on suicide rates by job code.
This matters because we know certain career fields have been under more chronic strain than others, and that this has crushed morale in such units.
By forcing the military services to acknowledge suicide does not settle evenly on career fields, we can take a first step toward getting the services to address manpower shortfalls to restore a sustainable tempo to these specialties.
But of course, the services have employed bureaucratic stalling and smokescreens to evade this acknowledgement. Because to do so would be to admit they need more people.
Which would risk them being forced to pay for people when they’d rather lubricate the pockets of defense contractors using your money and mine.
And would risk them being held accountable for cutting manpower too short, like when the US Air Force slashed 19,000 Airmen in a single year despite Congress giving them five years to do so … only to report being 80,000 short a few years later.
Bureaucracies bury what’s dear to them under mountains of petrified shit to protect against accountability, truth, or any erosion of control. Their actions give lies a head start on truth.
From the time an issue is identified, it takes years or decades of drilling to get through all that shit and into the deeply buried chamber of truth, which is the only place an issue can be genuinely approached.
Lots of great people have drilled for years to pierce the chamber of truth of military suicide. They’ve beaten the bureaucrats at their own game, getting requirements for operational tempo reporting and suicide by job code written into law.
Now is the time for the services to comply with that law, stop evading, and allow the truth of this issue to be exposed. This is the only way it can be addressed, which is how we can stop pushing people who volunteered to serve on our behalf so far beyond their limits that they can’t cope.
In a recent interaction with retired USAF MSgt. Chris McGhee, I learned two things.
Chris in an unheralded badass who has done as much as anyone to force the DoD to stop fucking around and deal in truth when it comes to suicide. The requirement for suicide numbers by job code is a result of his persistence and activism.
He reminded me of a scandalous example of suicide response by an Apple subcontractor which cultivated such miserable working conditions in its China factory that people starting throwing themselves off the building. The company’s response was not to improve conditions … but to install angled nets from its building to catch people and roll them back inside.
This is the metaphorical equivalent of what the military services have thus far done to address suicide. Reactive, disingenuous, and pathetic.
We can and must expect better.
And if bureaucrats refuse to follow the law, Congress should call hearings every month until they do. Drag the service chiefs and their lackeys to public account.
And in those hearings, tie knots in the purse strings until every weapon, every cash cow, every cherished teet of taxpayer largesse is conditioned upon the basic, human, fundamental responsibility of actually caring about people killing themselves because of how serving their country made them feel.
No more F-35s until you show you’re serious, or at least law-abiding, on this issue.
I am ashamed of my country when I see this level of cynical skullduggery on an issue as basic as taking care of the people who do our fighting for us.
Ever thus since we stopped holding our government accountable and accepted that such betrayals are just part of the price of all that wonderful freedom afforded by our inept, cash-addled, louse-infested administrative state.
Written with unapologetic and seething anger … alongside a malignant lump of regret for the preventable loss of fighting Americans who are overwhelmed by the unreasonable demands of service and unable to see through the darkness to the other side.
We owe them and their families so much more.
TC is an American veteran residing in the UK.
