Members of the military's combat specialties experienced higher suicide rates than other troops -- and the broader American public -- in the waning years of the War on Terror, according to numbers delivered by the Pentagon to Congress this month. The worst-hit jobs included career fields with high operational tempo and occupational exposure to explosions.
Between 2011 and 2021, the enlisted job groupings with the highest suicide rates were armored and amphibious vehicle crew members, infantry, combat engineers, explosive ordnance disposal and divers, combat operations control troops, and artillerymen assigned to both guns and rocket units, according to the data. All of those specialties saw suicide rates at least 50% higher than the general population during that period.
The numbers were contained in a report the Defense Department submitted to Congress comparing suicide rates across military career fields. The report, dated July 23 and delivered to lawmakers seven months after a congressional deadline, represents the military's first official by-job suicide data since a 2010 task force report. It was publicly released Wednesday.
To calculate suicide rates for 2011 to 2022, Pentagon researchers combined data for military specialties based on a master list of career fields. Active-duty and reserve deaths were included, and the rates adjusted by sex and age in order to allow meaningful comparisons with the general U.S. population. For their comparisons to the broader civilian population, the report excluded 2022 military numbers as the authors didn't have access to broader general population suicide data for that year.
What Congress received was mostly a data dump, according to Katherine Kuzminski, a defense expert at the Center for a New American Security, or CNAS, think tank.
"[The authors of the report] didn't really provide any analysis or storytelling," she said.
But Kuzminski, who heads CNAS' Military, Veterans and Society program, said there was an obvious theme: Jobs where troops are deployed more frequently and face greater exposure to low-level blasts experienced higher suicide rates between 2011 and 2022.
Chart depicting the six occupational groupings with the highest suicide rate.
The data alone cannot prove that those factors are causing the increased suicides, she cautioned, noting that those fields may also have experienced higher rates of casualties.
In recent months, lawmakers have intensified their scrutiny of the Pentagon's suicide prevention efforts, questioning whether the military has adequately accounted for some suicide risk factors, such as occupational blast wave exposure and operational tempo.
Concern over the role of brain injuries in military suicide rates -- fueled in part by reports from Military.com and The New York Times -- led to hearings on Capitol Hill and a series of legislative proposals meant to address the issue. In May, lawmakers asked a government watchdog agency to investigate what Pentagon officials knew about brain injury risk, when they knew about it, and what they did to reduce the risk.
Similarly, a March 2024 Army Times investigation that discovered high recent suicide rates in the Army's overworked armor community inspired Congress to double down on demands for Wednesday's suicide data. Although the Army quickly announced changes to its deployment model for tank units, the House Armed Services Committee directed the DoD to study its force structure in Europe, where the service's armor brigades regularly deploy due to a lack of permanently based armor units.
Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, said in a phone interview that the report "is not a panacea, but it gives [the Pentagon] a way to target resources and understand where the higher risks are." He added that the information will also help Congress provide critical oversight of military suicide prevention work.
"We can have all the studies in the world. We can have all the data. We can have recommendations," the senator said. "Implementation is as important as vision, and I want to see how this is going to be executed, and I'm going to keep on them to be sure it is executed properly."
The report falls short of the standard set by Congress in its 2023 defense policy bill. Lawmakers ordered the Pentagon to provide suicide data dating back to Sept. 11, 2001, broken out by year, specific job code, and duty status. The data provided in the report only covers 2011 through 2022, and it fails to analyze the numbers by year, specific occupational specialty, and active or reserve component membership.
The report's authors claimed they could not provide authoritative data predating 2011 because the Pentagon "did not have a standardized reporting methodology," and restrictions on analyzing suicide data with small sample sizes led them to decline to assess the by-year, by-component, or by-job code rates. The report argued these figures "are highly sensitive to small changes over time, and are unreliable for comparison."
Their approach contrasts with that adopted by the 2009-10 DoD Task Force on the Prevention of Suicide by Members of the Armed Forces, the last major effort to carve out job-specific data. The congressionally chartered task force's final report provided suicide data detailing annual deaths for every military occupational specialty across the different branches.
Kuzminski, the CNAS expert, argued the new report's consolidation of data could mask critical trends. She said that lumping together personnel generalists and recruiters, for example, "doesn't tell me what is the individual rate of the 'recruiting and counseling' [subgroup]. There's probably far fewer recruiters than broader personnel [specialists]."
The Senate's draft defense policy bill for fiscal 2025 includes a King-authored provision to make Wednesday's report a permanent annual requirement for the Pentagon.
King described the report's numbers as a starting point, saying that "what [DoD] produced is still significant," and the numbers will accumulate over time if his proposal to make the report a permanent annual requirement becomes law.
Now, the senator wants to see results.
"My concern on this suicide study is that I don't want it to just be interesting data," said King. "I want it to guide action."
The full report containing data on suicide by specialty can be found here.
Veterans and service members experiencing a mental health emergency can call the Veteran Crisis Line, 988 and press 1. Help also is available by text, 838255, and via chat at VeteransCrisisLine.net.
-- Davis Winkie is an investigative reporter who focuses primarily on the military and veterans. Davis, a Military Times and CNN alum, was a finalist for the 2023 Livingston Award for Local Reporting and shared the Society of Professional Journalists' 2023 Sunshine Award with colleagues from The Texas Tribune, ProPublica and The Marshall Project.
Related: Overall Military Suicide Rate Dropped, But Active-Duty Deaths Increased Slightly, Pentagon Reports
