A few thoughts on that CNAS study about how to reduce military and vet suicides

By Stacy Bare
Best Defense guest commenter

The Center for a New American Security hosted a policy briefing recently titled, “Losing the Battle: The Challenge of Military Suicide.” I was excited to see a room full of 200+ people discussing the challenges around preventing military and veteran suicides. CNAS is a well-respected think tank and also published a policy brief of the same title on the subject. What would we learn? How would the national dialogue around military and veteran suicide be impacted? Would we find innovative new ideas for possible solutions?

Here’s the catch though, the discussion was not, in my mind, so much about the concern for the unnecessary death of hundreds and thousands of men and women, but to ensure that men and women would keep enlisted. To quote from page one of the report, which can be found here, “If military service becomes associated with suicide, will it be possible to recruit bright and promising young men and women at current rates?…Can the all-volunteer force be viable if veterans come to be seen as broken individuals?”

So what: If too many of us commit suicide we’ll be forced to have a conscription military?

And now to the answers:

What would we learn?

Not a lot of new information if you’ve been following the national dialogue, but I’ll recap it here:

• Last year 295 members of all services committed suicide

• The VA’s best guess is that 18 veterans a day are committing suicide

• The VA’s best guess comes from a 2009 report, meaning it was using 2008 data or pre-economic crash; it would be a safe assumption to make that we are losing more than 18 veterans a day to suicide

• The DoD is investigating and working on a number of medical studies relating to brain trauma and suicide

• The Army has instituted a 15 minute on-line survey returning combat soldiers are supposed to take that will help identify

• 50 percent of all military suicide victims were seeking mental health at the time of death

How would the national dialogue be impacted?

I left the briefing frustrated and angry, because I do not think the national dialogue will be impacted at all by the policy briefing and conversation that was had yesterday. The framework around the discussion is entirely wrong and the CNAS briefing only helped to reinforce the false assumptions of the debate, and that is, that the onus of reintegration and mental health falls squarely on the shoulders of the Department of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Administration (VA).

Until we shift the paradigm to ensure the burden of reintegration and mental health is shared at least equally by, if not more so, by the community at large, I do not see a likely decrease in the numbers of veteran or active duty suicides.

Community participation and coordination of community and veteran service organizations to allow for more community involvement and a concentrated effort on understanding and better meeting veteran and military service members needs will help ‘win the battle’.

I appreciate the work the panelists are doing and what they’re trying to do. I certainly do not think funding should be cut from the DoD or VA. In some places, it needs to be expanded and communities need to be let in to take care of their troops, their veterans, and their military families.

As a society, we’ve asked for men and women to volunteer to become trained killers. Men and women who are ready to execute the violent, deadly, and often messy tasks required of our existing national defense and foreign policy goals. We’ve gone, we’ve done our duty, we’re doing the best we can to take care of our own, but its time for communities to step up and do their duty in return and to have this be recognized as the solution at the highest levels. Many communities and community organizations are stepping up, but our policy makers and national thinkers are still missing the boat.

What innovative ideas and recommendations did we hear?

You can read the policy brief here and make your own mind up, but I did not hear anything that I thought would work. No game changers in here folks, just some common sense ideas that you may be shocked were not already implemented.

Here are a few ideas that I think might be effective at curbing veteran suicide and that could really impact the national dialogue:

• Stop going to war

• Incentivize healing and do not take veteran benefits away because they get better

• Streamline the paperwork process for getting help in the VA

• Encourage community organizations to coordinate veteran and military services

• Honor military service through participating in the freedoms and privileges we helped to defend, such as voting, using public lands

• Treat veterans like people, not monsters and give us a fair playing field

• Recognize your involvement in this war as a citizen or resident of our country

• Learn about the military, its history, its rank structure, its branches, so you can speak intelligently and with the same vocabulary as service members

• Do not equate playing high school football or other sports with the camaraderie of military service

• Do not ask a veteran if they have killed someone

We can stop 18 veteran suicides a day, we can beat this problem, but we all need to participate, not just the military. On Nov. 8, honor a veteran, vote.

Stacy Bare served as a captain in the U.S. Army from 2000-2004 and again from 2006-2007. He served as the Counter Terrorism Team Chief in Sarajevo, Bosnia, in 2003-04 and as a Civil Affairs Team Chief in Baghdad, Iraq, from 2006-07. He is now the Military Families and Veterans Representative for the Sierra Club. Stacy is 6’8″/260+ and might have played for the All Blacks but for his love of veterans and rock climbing.