larry johnson reports on the condition of the empire's military and it ain't good; 

 

When the Secretary of the Army orders every officer and sergeant in the force to personally check on every soldier, every single day, that is not a routine holiday gesture. It is an alarm. And in the ten months since Dan Driscoll issued that order, the alarm has kept ringing — from a carrier in the Arabian Sea, from a secretive command at Fort Meade, from the families of sailors who can no longer get a straight answer about why their children are hungry. The stories arrive from different branches and different missions, but they add up to a single indictment: the American military is being run past the limits of the people inside it, and too many of its leaders have responded not by fixing the problem but by denying it exists.

The order that was an admission

Start with what Driscoll’s November 2025 memo actually conceded. “Last year, we lost 260 soldiers to suicide,” he wrote. “Soldiers aren’t getting the help they need.” Read that again. The civilian head of the Army, in writing, told the entire force that its existing suicide-prevention apparatus — years of briefings, mandatory training, awareness campaigns, and dedicated prevention offices — was failing to reach the people who needed it. His solution was to fall back on the most basic human intervention available: order a person to call another person, once a day, and ask if they are okay.

There is nothing wrong with that instinct. A daily check-in is humane, and Driscoll deserves credit for making it personal and mandatory rather than performative. But strip away the sentiment and the memo is a confession. The Pentagon’s own data shows active-duty suicide rates rising more or less steadily from 2011 through 2023, through multiple administrations and countless “prevention initiatives.” When the fix for a decade-long institutional failure is to command individuals to manually watch each other, the institution is admitting its systems don’t work. The daily check-in treats the symptom. It does nothing about the conditions generating the wound — and those conditions were about to get worse.............more..........