I won’t argue that the Black Lives Matter push by the military leadership after George Floyd’s overdose death is the cause of the spike in military suicides. But it probably doesn’t help when white servicemen are being attacked and told they’re evil because of their skin color.

Meanwhile, the military brass has focused on fighting “extremism” and pushing critical race theory instead of doing their jobs.

I don’t expect there to be a functional military under a Democrat administration. The consistent element of the Carter, Clinton, and Obama administrations has been a gutting of the military while pushing assorted social justice and diversity causes to further weaken it.

The Biden administration is being consistent in that regard.

But the suicide rates show the human cost of the neglect of the rank and file by military leaders focused on boosting their careers through politically correct virtue signaling.

The number of deaths by suicide among military service members increased alarmingly in the fourth quarter of 2020, according to the Defense Department’s latest quarterly report.

The military recorded 156 deaths by suicide among all services, including active-duty, National Guard and Reserve troops, from Oct. 1 to Dec. 31 last year. That is a 25% increase from the 125 such deaths that occurred in the last quarter of calendar year 2019.

The total numbers are shockingly high.

Since 9/11, four times as many U.S. service members and veterans have died by suicide than have been killed in combat, according to a new report.

The research, compiled by the Costs of War Project at Brown University, found an estimated 30,177 active duty personnel and veterans who have served in the military since 9/11 have died by suicide, compared with 7,057 killed in post 9/11 military operations.

The numbers are ugly on Milley’s old stomping grounds

 Last year, at least 39 Fort Hood soldiers died or went missing. Thirteen killed themselves. Five were murdered. Eleven of the deaths remain unresolved—some legally; others for the victims’ families. The 2020 numbers add to ongoing mysteries, including a 2016 case where a corpse’s hyoid, the U-shaped neck bone typically examined to determine whether strangulation has occurred, was missing. These figures eclipse American casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq in the same year. 

Instead of showing any interest in this, military leaders are obsessing with renaming Fort Hood because of the Civil War.

It’s not just that men like Austin and Milley have adopted or made peace with a radically anti-American Marxist ideology, but that they’ve done it while neglecting an actual crisis. There isn’t a crisis of racism, systemic or otherwise, in the military. There is a far deadlier crisis.

It’s too bad that Secretary of Defense Austin, like the rest of the Biden administration, doesn’t give a damn.