By Richard Sisk
The War Report
The Army needs a rest.
That conclusion can be gleaned from a 200-page report on the “health” of the force after the longest period of conflict in the nation’s history and the blunt comments of the chief author, the outgoing Army vice chief of staff, Gen. Peter Chiarelli.
Chiarelli said there was “bad news” in the report on suicides in the ranks, drug and alcohol addiction, brain injuries, post traumatic stress, rapes, domestic violence and child abuse.
All of that was balanced by the “good news” of the Army’s commitment to face up to the problems and the efforts underway to combat them, Chiarelli said in his final Army news conference after 39 years of service. And all of it has to be viewed “in the context of a force stressed by 10 years of war,” Chiarelli said.
The stress levels should be eased by the withdrawal from Iraq, the winding down of the war in Afghanistan, and the reduction of the length of a soldier’s deployment in Afghanistan from one year to nine months.
The Army must take advantage of the breather by “re-integrating our soldiers, resetting our equipment and returning our primary focus to training and preparing for future contingency operations” rather than repeated deployments to combat zones, Chiarelli said in a foreword to the report: “Generating Health and Discipline in the Force – Ahead of the Strategic Reset.”
“I think the fact that I’m in front of you here today, laying this out for you, shows you that we see these problems, we see where we’ve had successes and we’re attacking those areas where we’ve got problems,” Chiarelli said.
For three years as vice chief, Chiarelli has taken the lead in the Army’s attempts to bring down the rates of suicide that have been rising since 2004 and he said there was evidence in the statistics to show that “we have leveled this thing off.”
There was an increase in suicides among active duty troops and mobilized Reserve and National Guard troops – to 164 in 2011, compared with 159 in 2010 and 162 in 2009.
But counting non-mobilized National Guard and Reserve troops, the total number of Army suicides was down to 278 in 2011, compared to 305 in 2010.
“The question you have to ask yourself, and this is the number that no one can prove — what would it have been if we had not focused the efforts that we focused on it? What I look at here is the fact that for all practical purposes, for the last two to three years, it has leveled off. I think we’ve at least arrested this problem and hopefully will start to push it down,” Chiarelli said.
The numbers offered up by the report on other areas of concern were staggering: 126,000 cases of traumatic brain injury over the last 10 years, 24,000 troops referred to substance abuse programs, 472,000 service members with post traumatic stress – about half of them in the Army, a 30% increase in violent sex crimes and domestic violence since 2006, and a 43% increase in child abuse.
Chiarelli, 61, who will retire at the end of the month, hit on the theme he has pressed in recent months: “I just want to get rid of the ‘D’” in post traumatic stress disorder.
Chiarelli said that substituting “injury” or some other word for “disorder” would go a long way towards removing the “stigma” from post traumatic stress that makes troops reluctant to seek help for fear that it would hurt their careers.
When the troops “don’t want to admit they have a ‘D,’ then they’re not going to come in” for help, Chiarelli said.
Chiarelli also brought up a major personal peeve – the law backed by the National Rifle Association and passed by Congress that bars officers from even speaking to at-risk troops about their personal weapons.
The majority of suicides in the ranks “have two things in common – alcohol and a gun,” Chiarelli said. “I don’t believe it’s unreasonable to tell that individual it’s not a good idea to have a weapon around the house.”
Read the full report here.
(Photo: Army troops in Afghanistan rest near border of Pakistan. U.S. Army photo.)
