CSF: How to Increase Military Suicides Without Really Trying

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
September 23, 2014

What is the job of military leaders? Kill the enemy and get them to surrender with psychological pressure. Who had the bright idea they would be remotely capable of doing anything to save the lives of the troops serving under them?

There is a great line in the movie Steel Magnolias by Shirley MacLaine "I'm not crazy, M'Lynn, I've just been in a very bad mood for 40 years!" I've been in an every increasing bad mood for the last 30 years and today I may very well blow my top.

Fuck is an English-language word, a profanity which refers to the act of sexual intercourse and is also commonly used to denote disdain or as an intensifier. Its origin is obscure; it is usually considered to be first attested to around 1475, but may be considerably older. In modern usage, the term fuck and its derivatives (such as fucker and fucking) can be used in the position of a noun, a verb, an adjective or an adverb. There are many common phrases that employ the word, as well as compounds incorporating it, such as motherfucker.

So I'm using it right now in place of the inability to provide another word suitable for the ever growing emotional pain being inflicted on the troops and families, including veterans, trained and sent by the Department of Defense to defeat the enemy time and time again. When are they going to get a fucking clue?

CSF, Comprehensive Soldier Fitness IS THE PROBLEM NOT THE SOLUTION! Gee what other words could those letters stand for? Here's a hint. They are not good words but I just gave you the last one. The terms are used everyday when soldiers try to explain the "efforts" the military has been doing for the last decade while they kill themselves more often than the enemy does.

PowerPoint Commando / PowerPoint Ranger
A briefer notorious for producing overly complex briefs in PowerPoint that are too long and use too many effects, such as animations and sounds.

Suicides tied to military service among veterans are twice the civilian population. If that doesn't seem bad enough then consider they are only 7% of the population. Maybe that means something to you but when you consider there are more veterans no longer counted by the DOD as they hide behind the reduction in suicides, that should really be a huge slap in the face.

They say;

"Number of soldier-suicides down Bobeck said the Army National Guard had 120 suicides in 2013. There have been 44 this year, he said.

“That’s tragic that we’ve even had 44, but that’s a significant difference in number,” Bobeck said. “We’ve made a tremendous investment in our resiliency campaigns and our resiliency training. Can we tie that directly to that? We’re still looking at that, but we know we’ve had a significant reduction.” Yet, each soldier’s suicide “is still tragic,” said Bobeck, who noted the necessity of reducing the incidence of such tragedies “to zero.”

There are less serving to count in the first place because of sequestration and the cutbacks thanks to Congress. They came out with Battlemind and then CSF. Congress has funded billions a year yet what happened? What happened to all that money? Who got it? Was anyone held accountable for the money wasted as more and more lives were lost to suicides? No, the bullshit result is the DOD and the VA say they don't have a clue if any of it is working or not. Well here's the biggest clue of all. They filled more coffins than the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Iraq Republican Guard. When you add up the number of suicides in the military plus those of the discharged the number is higher but one more catch is the DOD doesn't have to count them after they are discharged including those discharged under bad papers leaving them with nothing but heartache.

If all that isn't bad enough, here comes yet on more crap load of results of what they have done.

Report: Some causes of suicide in military need more study
USA TODAY
Gregg Zoroya
September 22, 2014

While the military has poured more money into suicide research than any other sector of American society in recent years, certain targets in dire need of study remain under-funded, according to a RAND Corp. report released Monday.

Researchers sampled opinions of leading suicide experts within the military and on the RAND Corp. staff about the most important areas needing research. They found the those areas — improving ways of identifying those who are suicidal; and developing better methods for the ongoing care of those with self-destructive tendencies — receive little or moderate focus in either funding or number of studies.

"There is no apparent relationship between what is being funded and what (Defense) representatives perceive as important," RAND researchers concluded.

RAND researchers found that the largest sums of money and the greatest numbers of studies were devoted to finding better treatment methods and improving care, each ranked ninth and fifth, respectively, on a list of most important research areas.
read more here

UPDATE

Now add this to the above out of a report on the situation at Fort Hood

Inferior testing and evaluation procedures,
Lack of adequate funding for clinic services,
Senior mental health professionals forced into retirement by the Army,
Months-long wait times for soldiers seeking evaluation and treatment for psychological conditions,
Only one trained clinical neuropsychologist for more than 50,000 soldiers