By Since the media cannot dispute the point now that the surge strategy has worked in Iraq they have been working overtime instead in trying to create the conventional wisdom that the surge isn’t worth it because the US soldiers are all coming home and killing themselves:
The parents of an Iraq war veteran who committed suicide and members of Congress on Wednesday questioned why there’s not a comprehensive tracking system of suicide among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.
Mike Bowman, of Forreston, Ill., said his son, Spc. Timothy Bowman, 23, is a member of the “unknown fallen” not counted in statistics. His son, a member of the Illinois National Guard, took his own life in 2005 eight months after returning from war. Bowman said he considers his son a “KBA” — killed because of action.
“If the veteran suicide rate is not classified as an epidemic that needs immediate and drastic attention, then the American fighting soldier needs someone in Washington who thinks it is,” Bowman said. [AP]
The military keeps elaborate statistics on suicide rates however they don’t track the suicides of former soldiers simply because they are no longer in the military any more. The Pentagon has no control over people who are not in the military thus cannot keep track of if they commit suicide or not.
I have long posted on the politicization of the military suicide rate which is exactly what this article is. The usual mouth pieces such as the Washington Post and left wing blogs have sensationalized the military suicide rate without providing any context which this AP article as well provides none of. These mouth pieces are claiming soldiers are killing themselves because of the sustained combat and long tours. If that is so then how do they explain why the suicide rate dropped from 18.8 in 2003 to 10.5 in 2004 when sustained combat with two battles of Fallujah and the multiple battles with the Mahdi Army were raging with deployments being extended then as well? They can’t explain so they just don’t mention it.
More than likely the drop had little to do with conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan just like the increase now has little to do with it as well. Though every suicide is a tragedy and I wish there was a way to stop them all, but the US Army has an end strength as 1,039,053 soldiers and it is statistically impossible to stop every suicide. What can be done is to take measures to keep it at a low rate and 99 soldiers committing suicide in one year in such a large sample number is statistically extremely small. Additionally when you compare it to civilian rates the military’s rate of 17.3 suicides per every 100,000 soldiers is lower than the civilian number when compared by age and gender which comes out to 19.06 per 100,000.
Statistically speaking someone who joins the military has a lesser chance of committing suicide than someone who doesn’t. The most likely reason for the increase probably has more to do with random variation in a very small statistical number which is evident by the large unexplainable difference between the 2003 and 2004 number. Interestingly enough the AP article mentions none of this. Is anyone surprised, because I am not.
10:48 pm on January 13th, 2008 1
[...] Since the success of the new strategy in Iraq began to show signs of success, the New York Times has worked hard on creating a narrative that, yes the new strategy is working but it is not worth the cost on our soldiers. They started to create this narrative by first making claims that service members were raping women which proved to be untrue. Then they moved on to claiming that service members were committing suicide at disproportional rates after returning from war which turned out not to be true. [...]