Military practices CYA instead of saving lives

Today on the Huffington Post there is a great article on what an Army Captain thinks about what the Army is doing.

Army Captain Haunted By Recurring Nightmare From Afghanistan

Like many others, Adam shrugged it off as the "bureaucratic, cover-your-ass, in-processing" the Army requires for returning soldiers.

"I was given about 10 or 11 different surveys," he said. "'Do you feel like hurting yourself?' 'Did you see people die in combat?' Very raw questions I didn't even want to think about, and it's not a person asking me, it's a computer. It's 'here, lemme turn everyone into this data point.' Naturally, all of us, we just want to go home, right? I got very good at the tab, click, click, and filled everything in with the letter 'C' -- for average -- wherever they said, 'Rate this.'"

Cover your ass is right and that is what they have been doing all along. Amazing that the press has yet to catch onto this. You'd think they would have had plenty of time to actually do some investigating considering it has been going on since 2008.

Here are some basic headlines they could have used and then maybe, just maybe we could have saved thousands of lives every month. Thousands? Yes and you'll discover that in the list of missed headlines.
Less Deployed but More Suicides
Troops left Iraq in 2011. 2012 highest suicide rate on record.

U.S. troops have finally left Iraq - after nearly nine years, more than a trillion dollars and the loss of almost 4,500 American lives. The last soldiers moved across the border to neighbouring Kuwait in the early hours of Sunday morning, hugging each other in relief.

Associated Press had learned that suicides in the U.S. military surged to a record 349 for 2012 and almost every news site jumped on that number. While the press reported the totals, what they did not mention were the Army National Guards and Reservists suicides topped that high record off at over 492 suicides because there were 143 of them reported by the DOD in February of 2013.

Veterans committed suicide at a higher rate as well.

There were also over 30,000 calls to the suicide prevention hotline they managed to save among the hundreds of thousands of crisis calls.

The number of calls to the national Veterans Crisis Line in Canandaigua in the past six fiscal years:
2007: 9,379
2008: 67,350
2009: 118,984
2010: 134,528
2011: 164,101
2012: 193,507

So with everything being done, no one noticed that there were more veterans, less troops deployed into combat and even less troops in the military.

Army
Active duty force will decrease by about 75,000 soldiers to 490,000. (For perspective, there are about 565,000 soldiers on active duty today and there were about 480,000 soldiers on active duty on 9/11/01.)

Marine Corps
Active duty force will decrease by about 20,000 Marines to 182,000 total. (For perspective, there are about 202,000 Marines on active duty today, and there were about 173,000 on 9/11/01.)
Air Force

Eliminate six of the 60 Air Force tactical air squadrons, as well as one training squadron. The Pentagon will eliminate: 27 aging C-5As (leaving behind 52 C-5Ms and 222 C-17s); 65 oldest C-130s (leaving behind 318 C-130s) and they will divest 38 C-27s.
Navy

Retire seven cruisers that have not been updated with ballistic missile defense capabilities or that are in need of significant maintenance. Some fleet support ships will also be retired, and the building of several ships (1 large deck, 1 sub, 2 littoral combat ships, and 8 joint high speed vessels) will all delayed by one year or more.

So what do you think their next excuse will be considering the 2012 Suicide Event Report has still not been released? What is their excuse for the rise in attempted suicides this year? Any clue? I won't bring up all the other things that have come out in the last month because these questions have not been answered in all of these years, so it wouldn't do much good annoying active readers of Wounded Times. go here for Lesson one on CYA and letting them die