US Military's cyber command unit grapples with cluster of deaths by suicide

The sad part is no matter how good they do their job whatever they do is only as good as the head at the top of the pyramid in the executive office…

I suspect the Cold War of cyber warfare that is happening is orders of magnitude bigger than the public knows.

Imagine knowing this and not being able to get emotional support from your friends and family.

"Between early June and early July, as many as five individuals who worked in or closely with US Cyber Command died by suicide, based on internal communications, public records and sources. The deaths have raised concern among lawmakers and military leaders within the highly secretive command, which is responsible for defending US networks and conducting offensive cyber operations."

According to https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-25-107121.pdf there are ~17,000 authorized positions

Glad to see this brought up! My entire Air Force experience is blocked to comment on besides basic training...Tech school and forward is NDA'd, read in, etc

You don't really get to sneak a glimpse of operations and write a book like the SEALs seem get to (jk!)

There is a tv show about in-the-know government employees dying by suicide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormwood_%28miniseries%29

I'm curious if LLMs have a role here. They're phenomenally capable at cyber stuff, and the military is without doubt taking full advantage of this. For people who's sole identity is tied into something that LLMs become better than them at, it seems easy to imagine that zooming straight on over to existential crisis territory.

It's sad how many people are commenting on this with insane conspiracy theories and that people are actually responding in support of them. Really shows how falling into echo chambers online and buying into conspiracy theories can cause significant harm to ones ability to think rationally.

Wasn't there something similar with scientists recently? I wonder how much of that is just statistical noise.

Were any of these suicides by falling out of a window? That might imply involvement of certain foreign actors.

Suicide or closing the loop?

Whenever I hear some big AI CEO say that AGI/ASI might end humanity, I imagine it doing so by conditioning people to commit suicide or some kind of massive-scale manipulation. Probably setting people up into complicated bad situations and then blackmailing them.

I don't know if this is it here. These sorts of jobs can have tough moral implications. But it seems like a hierarchy of blackmail has been set up in our society and it seems like a dangerous vulnerability.

For what it’s worth suicide prevention was probably the number one initiative during my 17 years in the USAF from 2002 to 2020

I think the flu vaccine and sexual assault prevention were about equally as focused on

To the point where it was at least a weekly conversation between commanders and staff officers

All those issues usually were prioritized over readiness (Ready to go to war) or PT which were also huge pushes.

I think a lot of people are misunderstanding the significance of "cluster" here. It's not just a statistical anomaly where a disproportionate number of deaths happen in a short space of time. Clusters also happen because suicide by one member of a group can influence other people in the group to do the same thing. This is also why details of how people went about it are scarce in reporting. It's also a big reason why the infamous scene from 13 Reasons Why got removed later on.

It's hard to determine what the expected rate should be. The military as a whole skews younger and more male. But people with mental health issues tend to leave or wash out eventually. So you see a disproprotionate rate of suicide among veterans. It's where the "22 veterans a day" [1] number comes from (although later research seems to indicate the real figure is now lower).

The US military is a difficult psychological environment. Arguably, this is completely unnecessary. There are many jokes about this like having to come in on the weekend because somebody wore the wrong color socks or having to show up at 3am for a 10am formation ("hurry up and wait"). Also, the US military constantly moves servicemembers around (ie PCS). Other militaries don't necessarily work that way. It's conformity taken to an extreme level.

One author (Daniella Mestyanek Young, a former Army intelligence officer herself) has written two books claiming the US military is essentially a cult.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2015/10/01/444999996/the-number-22-is-th...

If one wants a conspiracy theory in USSR a First Deputy Chairman of the KGB offed himself when an investigation he was coordinating led to the daughter of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Leonid Brezhnev.

Anyone have a non-paywalled source?

This isn't Russian assassins. They kill specific notable people, not functionaries. Nor is this about not being able to talk about work. Working in these fields becomes your life. You talk about it all day. They don't want to talk about it more, certainly not at home.

This is about over-qualification in a narrow field. These are people for whom there is only the one job. Then ... something happens that threatens that existence. Think of a young airline pilot being diagnosed with an eye problem. His flying days are over. His entire experience is meaningless to any other jobs and he must start from scratch: a 40yo with no qualification beyond highschool.

Dig into these people and I think you will find something related to their security clearances. Something bad, or something totally innocent, that threatened their clearance. They are faced with a professional reset, something that will impact them and their family in a negative and permanent way.

From the article: Sergeant Kevin Stallings ... He took his own life the month before he’d have turned 37. ... grew up in a military family ... enlisted in the Air Force right out of a Virginia high school ... earned a degree in intelligence analysis

So he had no qualifications outside of intelligence. He had little to no perception of any life outside his field. So anything threatening that job, real or imagined, would be instantly existential.

I have always wondered how the Ukrainian FPV drone operators cope - some of footage is pretty gruesome - esp when the drone chases some hapless Russian running away before zeroing in and then blowing him up.

Some even shows double tap mortar rounds being dropped on Russians and then gravely wounded they drop another one to finish them off.

It wouldn't surprise me if they found out something they shouldn't about Israel's infiltration in US military and politics, and were dealt with.

But most probably they couldn't bear the atrocities they had a first row view at.

go read about what they are doing to people in the Navy over in Iran

* https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/04/16/iran...

their families had to throw a huge protest

now imagine they aren't even allowed to talk about it and/or being given illegal orders

but the thing about military bases around Iran, all their defense missiles are being taken away and given to Saudis etc. which is why deaths are happening and massive number of wounded not reported

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Please, a reminder that OPM shredded/chainsawed longstanding Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, which monitors federal workers satisfaction & requires public reporting. https://ourpublicservice.org/know-the-facts/resource-library... This doesn't impact military personnel directly, but it does impact a ton of civilian DoD and DoD adjacent people who work alongside military personnel every day, making them good reliable signals. And these people have been sending up distress flare after distress flare after distress flare, at meltdown levels of dissatisfaction. Workers and enlisted care, and our government now is anti caring, is vice signalling, through and through. The tension is real. There are consequences. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2026/03...

IMO the state has become a reckless lawless force. One that knows nothing it's doing is any good, and which is concealing itself to keep doing bad anyways.

Cyber in particular has been absolutely gutted, by what naively to an outsider here looks like treasonous acts designed to destroy our ability to monitor and handle cyber issues. Gabbard disbanded Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center (CTIIC), all but destroyed Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC)'s role, and cut 40% of Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI, the directorate for intelligence!). Our nation has been flying part way blidnfolded, and it can't be anything but deliberate. And I expect people in the vicinity, people who've taken this job seriously, to have incredible woe at seeing the chainsaw fall so, for what they know to be fairly vital functions.

> We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down. -Russel Vought

IMO again, it's even worse than that. I think we are giving quarter to enormously bad forces, because they are friends to the ultra wealthy right wing wackos who have seized power in the United States. That these moves propel the grift and propaganda and malign forces that some in this administration feel great affinity for and have mutual benefits with.

I fully expect many of these Cyber people have been told to target patriotic Americans at home (and other leftist forces) too, who want nothing more than life liberty pursuit of happiness and brotherhood. I'm speculating deeply here, but of all "abuse of power comes as no surprise" times, a treasonous-to-democracy mis-use of otherwise crucial Cyber systems to go after ICE protestors, having them using Palantir or whatever to track them would be all too likely an outcome for this administration by insurgents. I truly feel it extremely likely that many of the cyber and mil people have been made to face impossible situations, which will likely never be reconcileable. (Worse even than the pointless other wars we have started, the lawless murder of boats.) Ordered by this nation to violate their oaths to the constitution, and to betray their loyalty to actual America, by wicked sinister evil forces. There is no escape from the torment placed upon them by having to follow a malign domestic command.

There's a lot of conspiracy brained posts here already, and I apologize for the glonzo. But we have conspiracy level bad people doing multiple conspiracies a week right now, and they are our leaders. It must be hell to be so torn, to have to work under such nepharious lawless psychopaths who have such a warped injurous to America views and machinations. Cyber probably sees a lot, is probably asked a lot, and to be torn, between such a clear mission and these domestic hounds of hell is a forever nightmare that will torment good men and women, who deserve to serve a military that has not been warped to being a force for din and bedlam on earth.