Discussing the battle against veteran suicides: Harrell and Berglass respond

By Margaret C.
Harrell and Nancy Berglass


Best Defense guest respondents

The blogosphere discussion
regarding our policy brief, Losing the Battle, has been
rich and provocative. Of the criticisms sent our way, there are some with which
we disagree, some with which we concur, and some about which we have little
evidence but take interest. One among the latter is the assertion that were the
VA to incentivize healing and not reduce or eliminate veteran
benefits when patients improve, more veterans would heal from wounds both
physical and invisible, and fewer would reach levels of desperation deep enough
to lead to suicide. We know of no empirical data to support that idea, but it's
a compelling hypothesis that is gaining traction in policy circles and merits
serious investigation.

There are also a few
criticisms that, we assert, are misguided in elemental ways. Two concerns have
been voiced to which we take particular exception, but that we also think raise
the opportunity for some clarity in this discussion.

First is
the assertion that our work puts the burden of solving military and veteran
suicide solely on the shoulders of government agencies. We see how the writer
may have perceived this to be the case. However, the truth is that Center for a New American Security's (CNAS) role
as a research partner to the White House's Joining Forces initiative -- under
which Losing the Battle was written
-- was largely seeded by co-author Nancy Berglass's influential policy brief America's
Duty. The premise of America's
Duty is that civilian stakeholders, and specifically community-based
organizations, are critical to "winning the battle." With all due respect to
the blogger, CNAS has played and continues to play a leadership role not only
in framing the discussion about the role of community players in the veterans space,
but in defining best practices for such involvement. Not only do we understand
and appreciate the role of communities in reintegrating veterans, but the
Joining Forces initiative under which the suicide brief was authored is based
on the very fundamental assumption that federal agencies and communities alike
must "join forces" in order that our communities, including service members,
veterans, families, remain well.

That said, we believe that while communities have a central
role to play in the reintegration of veterans, DOD and VA do bear primary
responsibility for the wellness of their charges; underresourced community
organizations cannot be effective in addressing the entirety of the problem. We
agree that it is a moral imperative that the 99 percent who have not been to war
should care for the 1 percent who protect our nation. However, moral imperatives do
not play well in the face of reality and constrained resources; and neither DOD
nor VA has invested meaningfully in helping resource community organizations so
that they can do their share to meet this "moral obligation."

Second, we'd like to
address the assertion that our only motivation for writing the piece was "to
ensure that men and women would keep enlisting." The notion is an unfortunate
misinterpretation; both authors have dedicated significant aspects of their
careers (and personal lives) toward understanding and -- where possible and
appropriate -- developing actionable solutions that emphasize and proactively
address the human concerns of war. The writer of that comment, however, hit upon
something we do think worthy of further exploration. How does a think tank
dedicated specifically to examining issues from a national security perspective
contribute to discussions about the human experience of war? A decade of unprecedented warfare has taken
an intense toll on our families, friends, and communities, but CNAS, the platform from which we produce
our work, is a national security think tank. Our job is to view the issues
through that particular lens. Our primary audience includes leaders who change
our nation's course, and they are largely concerned with costs and benefits. Unlike
advocacy organizations -- whose missions allow for more impassioned and morally based
arguments -- CNAS elicits positive results through research and analyses that are in
greatest part informed by data and interpreted via the political reality of
the cost-benefit equation. Thus, the best approach to policy change is rarely a
focus on the personal, even if those stories are tragic and personally
meaningful. That it is our job to discuss these issues in the context of how
they affect our nation's security does not mean we do not care about the human
aspect. But our primary goal is to elicit change. To be effective, we must know
our audience. In that sense, Losing the
Battle was meant to raise discussion of how we address a serious human
condition of war, in light of the far more material emphasis on the allocation
of resources in tough times. This paper was developed to give DOD and VA
actionable recommendations to reduce suicide among their constituents -- and it
did just that.

Our policy brief had four stated objectives: to examine the
phenomenon of suicide within the U.S. military community, including both
frequency and relatedness to service; to outline steps taken by the DOD, the
armed services, and the VA to reduce suicide; to identify obstacles to reducing suicides further (we never
asserted, as several bloggers seemed to think we should have, that we had all
the answers); and to make recommendations to address those obstacles. We think
we did those four things well. To those who criticize this framework as faulty
for not offering "solutions," we counter that were the issue that simple, we
would have. But look at the blog posts so far; how actionable and constructive
are recommendations like "treat veterans like people" or "Do not equate playing high school football or
other sports with the camaraderie of military service"? The recommendations
we've made are not framed as complete solutions to the suicide problem, but
they are actionable measures that can mitigate it.

To all of those who
have commented, we are grateful for the discussion; fostering dialogue about
the issues that affect service members, veterans, and military families is a
core objective of the Joining
Forces initiative under which the paper was developed. As a nation, we are
unlikely to reach consensus about many of the tough issues pertaining to war,
but such open discussion about them is critical to strengthening the role of
civilian actors as stakeholders in veterans' wellness.

Margaret C. Harrell is a senior fellow
and the director of the Joining Forces initiative at the Center for a New
American Security (CNAS). Nancy Berglass is a nonresident senior fellow at
CNAS, the director of the Iraq Afghanistan Deployment Impact Fund (IADIF) of
the California Community Foundation, and the principal of Berglass Community
Investment Consulting.