Army News, news from Iraq, - Army Times

DoD leaders seek clues to Army suicide spike

Defense officials acknowledged Tuesday that it is the “cumulative effect” of repeated deployments that have stressed the U.S. military.

What the Pentagon now wants to determine is whether those stressors are responsible for the reported increase in Army suicides last month.

The Army, which has borne the brunt of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, announced seven confirmed suicides in January, and as many as 24 soldiers may have killed themselves. The Army also reported a 25 percent increase in suicides in 2008 over the previous year. Last year was the fourth consecutive year that the number of Army suicides rose.

“The uptick, most recently, in suicide — very troubling,” said Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, during a Pentagon news conference. “We’re trying to understand that, for the Army. This is the first time that the Army has come up to the level of its counterpart, the civilian sector, so to speak.

“And so we’re trying to understand, is this cumulative?” Cartwright said. “Is there something that is a trigger event here? We’re working with several agencies, on the national health side, to try to understand this.”

Cumulative combat tours are certainly at least partly to blame, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said. “I think that part of problem ... whether it’s divorce rates or suicides, or I would say PTSD — [is] that these are a manifestation also of repeated tours,” he said.

Tour lengths alone, he said, clearly have strained the force. “There’s no question in my mind that the 15-month tours were very, very hard on our troops and on their families,” Gates said. “And I think we moved to get back to 12 months deployed just as quickly as we could.”

Army combat tours were shortened to 12 months as of August 2008.

But, Gates added, “it’s not just the length of the tour but the fact that so many have gone back for two and three and even four rotations in Iraq and Afghanistan. So I think it’s a combination of all of those things.”

Gates repeated a previous commitment to increasing dwell time at home later this year.

“My hope is that we will begin to see a lengthening of the dwell times beyond a year, perhaps toward the latter part of this year,” Gates said. “And I think it will incrementally lengthen over time. We won’t go straight from one year deployed to two years at home. We’ll more likely go from one year deployed to 15 months at home to 18 months at home and so on.”

The ongoing effort to increase end strength in the Army and Marines and the coming drawdown in Iraq will help the department manage that change, he said.

Despite the strains on the force, both leaders said they feel the health of the overall force is good.

Cartwright called the military “a great force, resilient, motivated.”

Added Gates: “The force as a whole is incredibly resilient and their families incredibly strong. But there’s no doubt that there is additional stress.”

Cartwright cautioned that with some Army units are still serving out most or all of the last 15-month tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, the negative trends in areas such as suicide and divorce might not abate soon. “That’s another benchmark that we’ve got to cross before we can expect to see some of this work, some of these rates start to move in a positive vector,” he said.