Is the US military stretched too thin?

(Note: Originally published on Quora on November 25, 2017)

Twenty-two veterans commit suicide every day. It's the equivalent of an entire high school classroom dropping dead, every single day. Our military is stretched too thin, and it's evident from our inability to take care of the mental health of our returning soldiers. When I returned from my second deployment (16 months), I rushed through a mental health questionnaire, on which I absolutely lied on every question, and ran to see my family. Why?
1. As a non-commissioned officer, you are conditioned to appear strong regardless of the circumstances. ("You got shot? Take a knee, drink water!")
2. Soldiers don't like to complain about problems they came home with, when some of their buddies didn't come home at all.
3. In military intelligence, you would never dream of seeing a psychiatrist, because the stigma is that you would lose your security clearance.
So, our soldiers return home from long deployments to inadequate methods of detecting mental health issues, are given sometimes just a year at most of dwell time (time between deployments), and redeployed to learn new problems to add onto the old problems. Then, they come home and they've completed their term of service, and the next thing you know they're sitting in a college classroom or working at some office building, absolutely batshit crazy, unable to go to sleep at night without checking the dryer for insurgents, with no one to talk to because the US Army told them they were tough and resilient and unshakable. And so they hold it together until they can't anymore, and then... 22 veterans commit suicide. Every day.
We need to spend half as much on wars and twice as much on reconditioning these machines we created after they are no longer needed for the business of killing.

John Days | Senior Analyst | CNIC