This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Here's a strange thing to even begin to grasp. In all these years, at least in Washington, the heartland of American power, it hasn't been understood, not even faintly. In -- yes! -- all these years, including significant parts of the last century and this one, this country has continually poured ever more money into its military budget. The numbers have become utterly staggering as that yearly budget heads for a cool trillion dollars.
And yet, in those same years, the United States, which now spends more on its military than the next nine (or is it 10?) countries combined, hasn't been able to win a single war that mattered. In the last century, it essentially tied (if you can even use such a word in relation to a hell on earth) in the Korean War and distinctly lost in Vietnam. In this century, as part of its never-ending Global War on Terror, it spent 20 (yes, 20!) years losing its war in Afghanistan and functionally did the same thing in Iraq. Nor, as TomDispatch regular Nick Turse has reported brilliantly in these years, has it had real success in the rest of the Middle East or Africa, where, he's estimated, since that war on terror began, deaths from terrorism have increased by more than 50,000% and terror attacks by more than 75,000%.
Given such a record of "success," if it were any other government program, there would be severe cutbacks and major criticism (especially in an election year), but when it comes to the U.S. military, not a chance, not for a moment. And worse yet, as Turse points out today, even though the Global War on Terror has finally more or less ground to a halt, if not an end, almost 23 years after it was launched, the casualties from it continue to mount in a distinctly -- yes! -- suicidal fashion. What a horror" but let him explain as vividly as he always does. Tom
Suicide Squad
U.S. Troops Are Losing a War with Their Deadliest Enemy
By Nick Turse
At the end of the last century, hoping to drive the United States from Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam's holiest sites, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden sought to draw in the American military. He reportedly wanted to "bring the Americans into a fight on Muslim soil," provoking savage asymmetric conflicts that would send home a stream of "wooden boxes and coffins" and weaken American resolve. "This is when you will leave," he predicted.
After the 9/11 attacks, Washington took the bait, launching interventions across the Greater Middle East and Africa. What followed was a slew of sputtering counterterrorism failures and stalemates in places ranging from Niger and Burkina Faso to Somalia and Yemen, a dismal loss, after 20 years, in Afghanistan, and a costly fiasco in Iraq. And just as bin Laden predicted, those conflicts led to discontent in the United States. Americans finally turned against the war in Afghanistan after 10 years of fighting there, while it took only a little more than a year for the public to conclude that the Iraq war wasn't worth the cost. Still, those conflicts dragged on. To date, more than 7,000 U.S. troops have died fighting the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other militant groups.
As lethal as those Islamist fighters have been, however, another "enemy" has proven far more deadly for American forces: themselves. A recent Pentagon study found suicide to be the leading cause of death among active-duty U.S. Army personnel. Out of 2,530 soldiers who died between 2014 and 2019 from causes ranging from car crashes to drug overdoses to cancer, 35% -- 883 troops -- took their own lives. Just 96 soldiers died in combat during those same six years.
Those military findings bolster other recent investigations. The journalism nonprofit Voice of San Diego found, for example, that young men in the military are more likely to take their own lives than their civilian peers. The suicide rate for American soldiers has, in fact, risen steadily since the Army began tracking it 20 years ago.
Last year, the medical journal JAMA Neurology reported that the suicide rate among U.S. veterans was 31.7 per 100,000 -- 57% greater than that of non-veterans. And that followed a 2021 study by Brown University's Costs of War Project which found that, compared to those who died in combat, at least four times as many active-duty military personnel and post-9/11 war veterans -- an estimated 30,177 of them -- had killed themselves.
"High suicide rates mark the failure of the U.S. government and U.S. society to manage the mental health costs of our current conflicts," wrote Thomas Howard Suitt, author of the Costs of War report. "The U.S. government's inability to address the suicide crisis is a significant cost of the U.S. post-9/11 wars, and the result is a mental health crisis among our veterans and service members with significant long-term consequences."
Military Shocked (Shocked!) by a Rise in Suicides
In June, a New York Times front-page investigation found that at least a dozen Navy SEALs had died by suicide in the last 10 years, either while on active duty or shortly after leaving military service. Thanks to an effort by the families of those deceased special operators, eight of their brains were delivered to a specialized Defense Department brain trauma laboratory in Maryland. Researchers there discovered blast damage in every one of them -- a particular pattern only seen in people exposed repeatedly to blast waves like SEALs endure from weapons fired in years of training and war-zone deployments as well as explosions encountered in combat.
The Navy claimed that it hadn't been informed of the lab's findings until the Times contacted them. A Navy officer with ties to SEAL leadership expressed shock to reporter Dave Philipps. "That's the problem," said that anonymous officer. "We are trying to understand this issue, but so often the information never reaches us."
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