Army Reserve chief prioritizes suicide prevention

New Army Reserve chief prioritizes suicide prevention, calm message on budget
9/7/2012
By Jared Serbu
Federal News Radio

The Army Reserve's new top officer, sworn in this June, has only two big concerns about his new job: making sure soldiers in the field don't sweat the details of threatened budget reductions, and finding ways to stop the troubling trend of suicides among members of the armed forces.

On the matter of budgets, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Talley says it's a topic for Pentagon folks like himself to worry about, and doesn't want it to be a topic of distraction for reservists across the 50 states and U.S. territories where reservists are based.

"We'll do less with less, and that's okay," Talley said during an hour-long appearance on Federal News Radio's On DoD. "Not everything has the same priority. We're leaders, and we'll set priorities and make tough decisions. I'm more worried about how we communicate that to the formations. I don't want captains and colonels in the field to worry about funding issues. I want them to focus on the basics: shoot, move and communicate."

Talley said the Army Reserve is relatively well positioned to handle the $487 billion worth of reductions the Pentagon has already planned to take from DoD's previously-planned ten-year budget. Sequestration would change the funding equation, reducing the overall military's budget by another $55 billion in 2013 as part of $492 billion in Congressionally-mandated, automatic budget cuts that will kick in on January 2 unless lawmakers agree on a Plan B.

"But we need to make sure we send a calm, cool and accurate message to the field so they're not panicking over potential funding issues that may or may not happen," Talley said.

Talley said doing "less with less" doesn't mean the Army Reserve will give up on any of the unique enabling capabilities that its doctors, railroad engineers, cybersecurity experts and soldiers from myriad other specialties bring to military commanders. "There's going to be a steady demand signal for the Army Reserve, and we're ready to meet that demand," he said.

Rather, a lot of training will have to be done in ways that are less costly. "One of the ways we have to do better is that we won't be able to do extended active-duty training. We have to do more home-station training," he said. "That means making more use of live virtual training, so more use of simulators for example. The good news is we have that capability in our Army, so we need to use it as it makes sense in order to minimize travel expenses and in order to minimize cost of training."

Talley said the rise in Army suicides is the only other topic that keeps him up at night. For the first seven months of 2012, the Army recorded 116 suicides among active-duty soldiers. July was a particularly bad month: 26 soldiers serving on active duty were believed to have taken their own lives, double the month before. Another 12 fatalities were being investigated as suicides among soldiers in reserve status.
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