alt Hacker NewsUS Military's cyber command unit grapples with cluster of deaths by suicide
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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 to (jk!)
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
There is a tv show about in-the-know government employees dying by suicide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormwood_%28miniseries%29
Also, with so many stationed in SK how many got margin-called in the memory crash?
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.
Were any of these suicides by falling out of a window? That might imply involvement of certain foreign actors.
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.
Wasn't there something similar with scientists recently? I wonder how much of that is just statistical noise.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.