mobanmarketUS soldiers “are at their breaking point,” declared Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Monday, citing the impact of multiple deployments over more than a decade of continuous US war beginning in 2001.
Though some veterans welcome the acknowledgement, they disagree with Hagel’s “solution”—focused on beefing up the military—insisting that this problem can only be addressed by ending the wars responsible for this trauma.
Speaking at the Veterans of Foreign Wars annual conference in Louisville on Monday, Hagel shared the stories of service members who have faced five or more consecutive deployments that compound their mental traumas and make them freeze up in battle. “When you push human beings this hard, they break,” he stated.
Yet, Hagel—who has been a key force behind the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan responsible for these mental health problems—insisted that the solution lies in ‘strengthening readiness’ for further deployments while “address[ing] unsustainable growth in personnel costs, which represent half of the department’s budget and crowds out vital spending on training and modernization.”
Veterans and service members have been arguing for years that the real solution to the mental health epidemic plaguing the military is to end US-led wars.
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