Breakdown in the U.S. Military
Army suicide rates have spiked since 2002, reaching a record level. Equipment continues to degrade under the constant deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. And with over $500 billion per year being spent on the DoD, the military seems incapable of spending it on the right things.
When soldiers needing mental health care are shunned by a military culture that values stoicism or herded into condescending group therapy sessions where they are told like little children “don’t hit” and instructed to play bingo, it is clear that the military health care system remains untrained and unprepared for the problems it must actually face.
And when equipment acquisition continues to focus on huge big-ticket items like 4 different advanced air superiority system while armored vehicles grind their gears in the sands of Iraq, it is clear that our military budgeting process serves the interests of defense contractors more than it does the troops on the ground.
We need to get priorities straight at the DoD and in Congress.
When I was a young first Lt. in the United States Army just after the Vietnam war had ended I was put in charge of a platoon of combat soldiers.
The thing that I had to fight during this time in my career was the horrible amounts of drug addiction, alcoholism, racial tensions, domestic violence and suicides. Why is this happening we kept asking ourselves. My captain would beat me with the question. Get this under control damn it.
Finally around 1978 to 1982 it stared to be given a name that we all used to associate with the old "Shell Shock". We all knew what it was but you didn’t dare reference this because of the repercussions of doing so. Finally it was officially dubbed PTSD and given a name and recognized by the US Military as an official "Illness".
Wars do terrible things to people. They turn a once promising life into a living hell. The amazing thing I found in talking to my men over the years was that many who saw heavy action in Vietnam were not affected by it at all. Others who saw only limited action were greatly affected by it. We approached the problem by making our men work harder on maintaining their equipment but it seemed the harder they worked the more dysfunctional our equipment became.
So while I understand these reports what the people fail to understand is that an Army is expected to stand to and report for duty. The problem with this is that the Military has understood since WW2 that a combat unit on the front line begins to seriously degrade after a little less then 30 days.
Asking our boys and girls to be on the front line for a year as we did in Vietnam where there was no front line offers a recipe for personal disaster. It is why even though I was an officer in the United States Army that I was also opposed to Afghanistan and Iraq. Not because of political reasons but because of something nearly every officer in the Military comes to realize that a war without a front makes the entire tour a front line duty and as such the unit will degrade quickly.
Looks like I might finally get to have a normal conversation with you abrisaham. I’m curious about how you think the US should treat conflicts like Afghanistan and Iraq. I supported Afghanistan and opposed Iraq, and my position hasn’t changed. Regardless of that, it stands to reason that sometimes the country will be challenged by forces that do not allow for traditional warfare where, as you say, the front line is clear. But it’s clear that you can’t shy away from such conflicts always, sometimes they have to be fought. Given the terrible toll they take on military personnel, how would one effectively fight those battles while keeping the military sane?
Well Claudia I am leaving this site and in fact had left it when a post at another site brought me back to this one.
But I will answer so in leaving you do not think me a total Bhole.
When soldiers needing mental health care are shunned by a military culture that values stoicism or herded into condescending group therapy sessions where they are told like little children “don’t hit” and instructed to play bingo, it is clear that the military health care system remains untrained and unprepared for the problems it must actually face.
I can only shake my head because it is precisely these things that help keep a units cohesiveness and keeps a unit functioning and in working order. I find the above statement troubling.
It is imperative that as a military unit you keep functioning. It is your job to perform the tasks being assigned to you and to do so you must have the cooperation of your men. You must have their attention and you must have their respect. You get that by having them respect each other and look out for each other and to make the war personal. A personal battle to ensure that they and their buddies survive to go home.
If you fight a war in the abstract. Using great far left, left, Center, Right or far right political dogmas then the results will most likely be half your men are unwilling to fight and the other half cant be contained. As a leader it is your responsiblity to keep the focus on the mission and the men fighting not for some grand or noble cause but for the mission at hand.
So in all wars their are two wars being waged. The great war of the politicians and the people on the home front who are fighting for idealogical reasons. Then their is the war of the soldier who is fighting to survive until tomorrow. Idealogy is not of great concern to them. I am speaking of Western Armies and more specifically the American Military now.
Group therapy was completely absent In Vietnam. Many of the men would relate to me that they did not even know the mission or what they were even doing? They did not have a plan B or C or D. It was simply walk around, find the enemy and kill them.
Group events are meant to keep the men informed, involved and to treat them with dignity, not treat them as children as Jason asserts. He may not agree with it but it is not meant to degrade but to include. It is also meant to weed out those having troubles and to get them help. It is also designed to help them deal with losses, potential losses and to help them understand that if and when that happens that there is a reason etc. etc. Coping skills are taught.
And yes if you have men in your outfit having trouble then they need help and they will most likely be weeded out of the military. The military is designed to protect Democracy, not practice it. A unit is only as strong as the weakest link. Allowing weak links to persist in a military unit on the front lines is injurious to morale and is not normally tolerated.
It is precisely this that then is equated to the idea that the military treats its men terrible by throwing them out for having problems. But by keeping them in the military with their problems that creates even more problems. While I am a compassionate liberal I also am a firm believer that to accomplish war time tasks in a VOLUNTEER ARMY that you must weed out and remove the weak links whenever and where ever possible for the good of the unit cohesiveness.
This is cold and its calculating. But that is why the VA exists. To help these men. It is not my duty to try and nurture men in combat. War is an ugly, horrid business but when asked to fight it then it is my business to inflict massive and unsustainable casulties upon the enemy with the desire to completely destroy his will to continue with the battle.
So when the battle is over and the men come home then I have to deal with myself. I have to deal with the ugly decisions I had to make. To send men to mental health and ultimately to the end of their career in the military. While not always, but nearly always. I had to sit alone at night with a book in my hand staring at it trying to read and wondering what I could have done differently. Wondering why we cant all just get along.
Now to answer your question. how would one effectively fight those battles while keeping the military sane?
The reason most wars do not last a long time is because you do not. The reason the Surge seems to be working is a combination of things but most notably all long civil wars have lulls in which the people just grow weary of fighting. The human psyche cannot absorb horror after horror without cracking. It just cant.
What we are doing in Both Afghanistan and Iraq is wrong. Not because of political reasons. I have tried to refrain from making those calculations but because of human reasons. We cannot keep throwing the same units back into battle over and over for extended periods of time with a nation that is heavily divided over the war.
The reason I am so angry at the antiwar is not because they are against the war. Hell Im against the war. But because as I stated earlier every war has two sides. The home front and the war front. Without cohesive homefront support the men and women in the field start questioning why they are there and looking for reasons not to be. It is as simple as that. When the men and women under your command start questioning why they are even there then you have a compounded problem that so effects morale that you have a whole new set of problems facing you as a commander.
Once the antiwar sentiment began. The war was lost. So any battles in the future should be hit hard, get out. Hit hard, get out. Or else you will have a bazillion people asking for benefits from the VA. We learned that lesson in Vietnam and I thought it had sunk in until 911. I guess I was wrong.
It’s not like I don’t know what I’m talking about. I did 15 years in the military, including supervisory positions. I’ve done a massive amount of research into the military during the Vietnam and post-Vietnam periods. I know about unit cohesiveness and military culture.
I also know how badly the military handles mental health issues. People with psychological problems are treated as lepers, stripped of their security clearances, and often punished by termination of their careers. As a result, most fear the consequences of seeking mental health treatment in the first place.
And when they do seek it, they are infantilized. Group activities may be useful in some treatment contexts, but if the CONTENT of those activities is playing bingo like a bunch of senile retirees, it is in no way a positive experience for the patients. The real point should be in reintegrating people into their units (from which the mere fact that they reported to the Mental Health Office at all makes them isolated), not giving them a new identity as de facto children.
As for the VA, the point is that we need to do a better job of mental health treatment BEFORE we go around kicking people out of their military careers and over to the VA.
P.S. I am sorry to see that you choose to leave rather than comply with very moderate rules about comments and that you have never chosen to discuss your concerns privately as an alternative.
Why in God’s name? You’re very welcome here.
Jason I do not disagree with anything you said nor do I question your 15 years in the military or your work where you did your graduate work on the military.
What I question is academia’s continual assault on the military in such a cavalier manner. Thus I had to shake my head and find the way in which you express yourself troublesome.
What I question is would you want mentally challenged officers in the bunkers with fingers on the trigger? Would you want mentally unbalanced pilots flying combat missions over your head?
If you were the manager of your local Walmart or Target would you want employees who were angry, hurtful, threatened the health and welfare of your customers or fellow employees? Of course not.
But somehow in the great scholarly world of Academia it is okay to rip the military for not having compassion on those same soldiers that would be fired by Walmart and Target in a heartbeat.
The difference of course is that we as the military and the government probably caused their problems and therefor as a commander it is my job to weed them out and hand them over to the Military arm that deals with that.
Usually they are then sent on to the VA where it is out of my hands. I do not have the luxury to worry about what happens to them because I am being asked to fight a battle, win a war and I can only do that when I have the very best soldiers at my command.
Jason you are making a typical mistake. You are accusing the front line War time combat officer of being cold and calculating when in fact that is EXACTLY how we have to be in order to get the job done and accomplish the mission. We do not have the luxury of second guesses. Of changing our mind and make a different decision. When you order the first battalion to move up instead of the second or the third and when the iraqis drop a couple m1 tanks or an apache accidently mistakes it for an iraqi tank and kills 4 of your men with a hellfire missile you cannot take it back.
You want good, healthy, mentally stable men in that tank, leading that battalion and flying those apaches. I shake my head because you do not make this distinction. Combat soldiers seem to in your world deserve the benefit of the doubt.
I AGREE. Just not in my outfit. They deserve the benefit of the doubt with another part of the military tasked with their care. NOT MINE.
If that is your contention I wholeheartedly agree. But if that was your contention then you certainly did not make that clear at all.
Yes, abrisiham, there’s no need to leave. If my calling you a loon had a part in your decision, I apologize. I think your opinions are very wrong and our country would be in profound danger if they become public policy, but you’ve clearly thought them through and are deeply committed to them.
The claim that "academia" undertakes a "continual assault on the military" is laughable in my own case even if it were descriptive of some vast academic conspiracy. Any of my students will tell you that I am very positive on the U.S. military overall. And the op-ed I wrote about the all-volunteer force was strongly supportive. Your sweeping (and completely irrelevant) stereotypes about “academia” aren’t reflective of my experience among security studies scholars, civil-military relations scholars, or the surprisingly large number of international relations scholars with military experience and/or close military connections.
My criticism is focused on a single narrow area — the way that the military treats mental health problems that are, in many cases, created or exacerbated as a result of military service. Military culture deters people from even seeking help in the first place and, once they do, they are treated as outcasts and/or infants.
No one is suggesting that they should be left in place in command of a bunker or a machine gun. That’s just a flatly wrong interpretation of what I am saying. In fact, part of my criticism of the current approach is that it winds up causing them to stay in place rather than seeking help. Those who might want help will hide their problems (and their supervisors will help them) for fear of the social and career consequences of seeking even minor mental health treatment.
The military needs to change its approach in this area as part of our national duty to the volunteers who have sacrificed their physical AND mental health in service of this country. Mine is NOT an anti-military nor an anti-soldier argument. I think a better and less ideologically antiquated approach to mental health would actually increase military effectiveness by making it so that people who can be treated can receive that at an early stage when it might make them able to eventually return to service AND by removing people who would otherwise stay in their units trying desperately to conceal their problems until they commit suicide and take out half their squad along with them. Even if their suicide is all alone, that is hundreds of thousands in wasted training costs and a serious impact on unit morale.
Bottom line: Military mental health care should take a rehabilitative instead of punitive approach whenever possible. And the nature of that rehabilitation should be empowering, not infantilizing.
Bottom line: Military mental health care should take a rehabilitative instead of punitive approach whenever possible. And the nature of that rehabilitation should be empowering, not infantilizing.
There is no doubt that many in the military hide their mental health status from superiors because they are afraid of a punative approach. I can go you one better. I kicked several soldiers out of my units because they were physically unable to perform their duties and as they were leaving they felt degraded and humiliated.
I am sorry. But they could not perform their duties and somehow I just didnt think it appropriate that their buddies should carry their rifle because they were missing an arm but still wanted to stay.
The problem with mental illness is that we can look at you and see that you are missing an arm or a leg and say "Okay". But when we look at you and see nothing wrong except an occassional bizarre or inappropriate behavior then there is no light switch that comes on and says "Okay"
People like you Jason want the light to pop on and so would I. But there is no magical light switch to shine is rays upon the mental cases in the military. Therefore it becomes a shell game. That is why it becomes degrading and appears punitive. Any time someone is forced from their outfit that does not want to leave it is perceived as punitive.
The rehab takes places at the VA not while your under fire or dodging road side bombs. Same goes with the soldier missing an arm. It might be punitive but as long as he is assigned a slot in your outfit then there is no one to take his place. Once he is a casulty then you want him gone so he can be replaced. That is even more important in a combat zone then in peacetime at Offut AFB.
Perhaps the disagreement comes in that you want mental cases to keep their jobs. You want that insane Captain flying his apache with hellfire missiles to keep his job while they try to work out his issues between missions. As for me. Coldly. I want him at the VA getting help. I dont want him anywhere near my men.
Now if your talking about the VA in the above post then my heartfelt compassion arises from the ashes. In active duty and especially in a war time environment then I am one cold SOB.
PatHmv the sad truth is that Barak Obama shares those opinions. Which you would think I would favor him which I did for awhile till he decided to run for President.
Im assuming your talking about my opinion that Abraham Lincoln and the Republican party didnt do enough to prevent the war?
I wonder what they will say about the democratic party in the year 2165. Maybe someone will be saying they didn’t do enough to prevent the war and it will be considered dangerous for the society to adopt such a view.
I still think you think I favored no war over the succession. I think Abraham Lincoln was correct in going to war over the succession. My point always was that enough was not done to solve the crisis prior to the succession. I have never nor would I ever favor succession to war.
arisaham, thank you for clarifying that last. I was indeed under the distinct impression that you opposed the war even in the face of destruction of the Union by secession. We can certainly agree to lament that both sides were unable to find a way to resolve the crisis (and the continuing inhumanity of slavery) without a war.
The claim that "academia" undertakes a "continual assault on the military" is laughable in my own case even if it were descriptive of some vast academic conspiracy.
Took me awhile to dig this out of my computer of which I must have 100 books worth of notes.
As it turns out, the military and the Department of Defense (DoD) have an entire system of education and training institutions and organizations of their own, including the many schools of the National Defense University system (NDU): the National War College, the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, the School for National Security Executive Education, the Joint Forces Staff College, and the Information Resources Management College as well as the Defense Acquisition University, the Joint Military Intelligence College — open only to "U.S. citizens in the armed forces and in federal civilian service who hold top secret/SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information) clearances" — the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, the Naval Postgraduate School, the Naval War College, Air University, the Air Force Institute of Technology, the Marine Corps University and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, among others. In fact, scholar Chalmers Johnson has noted in his new book on American militarism, The Sorrows of Empire, that there are approximately 150 military-educational institutions in the U.S.
This assault from the military academia is continual and incessant. They are constantly striving to make the military better but in so doing one of the things continually being redefined is are we a military or are we a social services program. The policy coming from the DoD seems to want to change every 6 months. This is what I was referring to.
At the point that I specifically said the opposite not once but twice, I conclude that you’re being intentionally dishonest and I decline to discuss anything further with you.
Jason if you look hard enough you can end any conversation. Fine. As for me I still want him at the VA getting help and you want him reassigned. Surely you know this is a failed policy and I find that your entire thesis now falls apart because in order to reassign a man or woman period from his original job will put a very large mark on their record.
So in the end you must be advocating for the entire retooling of the military structure to one that is accommodating to the 1/10th of 1 percent of those men and women who have problems thereby further undermining the very thing that makes the military a completely different corporation than can be found anywhere in America.
Discipline.
No wonder you ended the conversation. I know must go away from this conversation not understanding what you want to accomplish and you leave the conversation diminishing your chance to have perhaps 100,000’s of people who might read this blog understand your position and why it is superior to the old stodgy position of entrenched military leaders.
Your loss. Mine too.
You know Jason I have to give you the benefit of the doubt but if you look at the above time stamps on the posts you will see roughly a 30 minute separation between your post and mine in post 9 and 10. I sometimes take 30 minutes to an hour to write my post, editing and reediting and rewriting till I am concise on what I have to say.
I never read your clearly stated position of the troopers not being in their current jobs until after I posted post 10. Secondly I have gone back and reread the entire banter and do not see where you indicated this position prior to my post 10. So I can only conclude that you continually seek ways to squelch debate not encourage it.
But I will concede your point that it appears I am being dishonest. Unfortunately such is not the case but I guess that is how you are going to compartmentalize me at this forum.