This was a big thing for drone people based out of Eppley AFB in Omaha. Wake up, drive to work, attack enemies, drive home, sit there eating dinner with your family trying to pretend you didn’t kill someone and can’t talk about it. Combat troops get to lean on each other after a firefight: “dude, good shot. That guy was about to get us!” You get validation that you did something to safe you and your friends, and it’s still a heavy burden, but you have people who were there telling you that you’re a good person and did the right thing.
The Air Force did something shockingly reasonable (according to the newspaper coverage): they require all pilots to attend mandatory counseling sessions. Then there was no sign of weakness or any of that toxic nonsense. “Ugh, guess I have to go talk to the doc today, and I don’t want to, but guess orders are orders.”
America is so obsessed with helping its own murder more and they're surprised when those doing the murdering have feelings, too. The Deer Hunter (1978) taught me this. It taught me that America will go to insane lengths to heal the wounds they cause to their own in the service of murdering others. It's a disgusting culture.
> One of the dead was Technical Sergeant Kevin Stallings, a digital network intelligence analyst whose family told Bloomberg they wanted him to be identified to bring greater attention to the suicides. Stallings was stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland, Cyber Command’s headquarters. He took his own life the month before he’d have turned 37.
These people aren't "drone operators", they worked for USCYBERCOM, which does "hacker stuff".
The narrative peddled here repeatedly, the statistics were "completely normal" is egregiously wrong.
The concentration of deaths is entirely implausibly described as "suicides", while the far more likely explanation is "housecleaning": murdering potential whistleblowers.
Counterpoint, industry cyber security is so generally weak, if there were actually a secret "huge cold cyber war" on-going, we'd see real world impact.
This thing probably never stops and doesn’t have holidays. I read about Operation Gladio back in the day, which was not a cyber operation, but a preparation of guerrilla operations in case the WP occupied EU. But I got the feeling that the war in darkness (cyber is part of it) is non-stop.
There's lots of people working for NATO and federal agencies in Europe that have been assassinated by the luckystrike branch of the FSB. The name comes from the Telegram account with underscores in between, and they're essentially recruiting kids or former inmates for GTA style missions.
Starts with simple stuff like package rerouting, then goes on to gathering intel about places, people, putting in USB flash drives to their laptops, theft, death threats, arsony, and actual murder. Each step of the way the kids get deeper into trouble because they have to prove that they have done it for the payout, making photos of themselves... which gives the other end increasingly more doxxing material on them.
It's a real problem, and they use the luckystrike branch also to go after witnesses in big lawsuit cases, which then fall off due to all witnesses accidentally dying under seemingly random causes.
What gets overlooked here is the US IC itself being a probable cause: the habit of "housecleaning" by killing individuals suspected to be possible (even only prospective) leaks of information is very real.
The recent cluster of weird deaths and disappearances of scientists linked to secret military research has a similar pattern to it: a statistically highly unlikely density of "suicides, accidents & mishaps".
> There's lots of people working for NATO and federal agencies in Europe that have been assassinated by the luckystrike branch of the FSB. The name comes from the Telegram account with underscores in between, and they're essentially recruiting kids or former inmates for GTA style missions.
(Replying to my own post). Also, it’s gotta be mentally draining to be told by the president they have to win but also always let Russian attacks though.
The article doesn't say anything of the sort. Literally just said to put a halt on OFFENSIVE operations.
If I were to guess I'd say it was an overly ambitious negotiation tactic.
Also, that was a year and a half ago. The current status quo is that Ukraine is producing more drones than Russia can deal with, bombing Russian targets daily and the US-Ukraine relationship is much closer, with Ukraine sharing drone technology and intel with the US.
The new US policy under Trump is giving up trying to win the world and instead focusing on internal market and dominance over the American continent. Causing and sustaining friction everywhere is aligned with this policy.
This is the result of a shift of power in the US politics, from the global financial capital of the last decades back to the military and industrial sector.
How about that they do bad stuff and feel bad about it? You make it sound like they are taking a bullet or something. Desillusion is probably way worse.
I wonder whether any American civilians are losing sleep over how the current administration and its supporters' robust "race realist" rhetoric and worldview might be used by adversaries for some very cruel and effective psychological warfare on military and bureaucratic personnel from minority groups in the US.
"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."
Assuming a predominantly male population, the suicide rate should be around 20 per 100000 per year. 5 people in a month gives 18x higher rate. Too short period to draw any statistical conclusions but it’s a large blip.
I think you’d have some statistical complications around stress: beyond the inherent pressure of the job itself, it’s highly likely that they were understaffed even before losing a lot of support when the DOGE chainsaws were in “cut first, measure later” mode — I know multiple people in the military who are still running at like half productivity because telework was cancelled so everyone’s day is a couple hours longer commuting into an office where they’re sitting on the floor because there aren’t enough desks — and if they were married to another federal employee they might be dealing with loss of income or childcare (DOGE closed the GSA office which handled that, apparently to pressure parents into resigning) at the same time.
The suicide rate isn't uniformly distributed given gender. There are likely screenings (previous mental health history) and rejection of the most affected age group (70+) that should lead the baseline to be even lower. Meaning 18x is probably on the low end.
I think that it would be necessary to correct for things like income and education level since engineers in cyber command are likely not representative of the general public.
This particular population is highly selected because of the work they do and the types of clearances they hold. I would expect the suicide rate to differ significantly from the general population.
Ah yes- your old job where your boss could put you on twelve hour shiftwork indefinitely while making you pt while denying you adequate housing or food all under the threat of military justice and telling you if you tell anyone anything you're breaking a dozen national security laws.
> > In some cases, they suffer from insomnia, memory loss, rumination and physical illness,
> So, like most middle-aged desk jockeys then?
Is this really so common? I'm 38 and had some medical issues this past year, but one of the big things I've been grappling with is severe brain fog and memory loss. I could not tell you any of the projects I worked on in my previous three years, honestly. Maybe longer. It's been pretty demoralizing
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!)
I’ve worked with folks from The Citadel who had parts of their studies they were not allowed to talk about. When doing a hiring reference check that was confirmed by school staff. I don’t know if it was an NDA in the traditional sense; I was just a tech interviewer.
So just suffer in silence because you signed some papers when you were too young to understand what they really meant?
That's horrible.
I almost signed up for the Canadian Military back in the early 2000s and I think my lucky stars every day that I skipped that last recruitment meeting.
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.
Absolutely not. The problem is solely op tempo since the Iran war started. Leadership in cyber is famous for "surging" It's quite normal. But cyber specifically refuses to allow the surge to end. It becomes "the new normal." This was already straining the force before the Iran war but the civilian leadership now demand constant cyber effects and that pressure cascades down. It's hard to emphasize how effective cyber is, bc of course you want proof. But the proof is in the optempo and you can see that leadership is literally killing their Soldiers to get more and more of it.
The LLMs play a part, but it’s the tempo; the pace.
Fully autonomous w/LLM isn’t true. Leadership wants it true. The technological capabilities and acceptance of scapegoating a machine got rejected by society, so that leaves perfectly capable individuals as the gatekeepers of decision making, completely overloaded by the amount of information they need to deal with.
If you as a human can’t keep up, but the onslaught continues, and you’ll be held responsible for the outcome regardless… yeah. People will punch their ticket out. It’s not unique to LLMs, but LLMs have certainly automated the process of reaching the worst possible conclusion.
Don’t for a second try to hold the computers accountable or blame them for this outcome. This is a leadership issue and always will be. Believing otherwise is just allowing suicides to be scapegoated as a computer’s doing.
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.
> "The US Top Secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce is ~700,000 people," science writer, investigator and pseudoscience debunker Mick West wrote on 16 April on his Substack.
> "Ordinary mortality over 22 months predicts ~4,000 deaths, ~70 homicides, and ~180 suicides. The list has 10 … The deaths are real. The families' grief is real. The pattern is not."
> Louise Grillmair, similarly, says that - while her husband "would laugh" at speculation that the deaths might be connected - he would also "probably talk statistically" to squelch conspiracies.
I'm not sure how much value there is in comparing it with ordinary mortality considering the fairly strict selectivity on handing out TS clearances. You're definitely not going to give one to anyone who looks like an alcoholic or habitual drug user. You'll be less likely to give one out to people who struggle with cravings like heavy smokers or the morbidly obese. Gambling and financial instability are are also exclusionary factors. You would prioritize people who are highly disciplined and exhibit a preference for fitness and a survival mindset in general. So before you get into psychological issues at all, your population will be significantly healthier than the median, less likely to fall victim to homicide, and have fewer life problems than the general population.
A useful comparator is military suicides, which are a growing problem; among enlisted ranks (E1-E4) the rate is about 26/100k. Enlisted personnel tend to be younger, less well educated, have less personal autonomy, and earn less money etc. Among commissioned officers (with command authority) and warrant officers (occupational specialists) the rate falls to ~14/100k, nearly half. Non-combat morbidity exhibits similar disparities. I would guess that the selectivity for TS clearance is more rigorous that the occupational qualification alone.
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.
Once you know about the NSA backdoors you become a walking security risk. Forget about that vacation in beautiful China, you will be held on a short leash for life.
It seems to me that if you end up adjacent to an operation that exposes you to certain technologies, you will be harassed and attacked with covert directed-energy weapons until you are suicided or institutionalized and discredited.
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.
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.
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 see your point but I think you're overstating it. To be sure, if a pilot is suddenly cut off from the thrill of flying, that's a big psychological blow. OTOH if you're a pilot at 40 it's probably because of diligence and reliability, not the pursuit of thrills - such a pilot would already be mindful of the risk of ocular degeneration with age and have a plan in place to move over to training or operational management in case of having to retire early from flying. There are a lot of transferable skills and career professionals to asist with transitions like that, even individual employer doesn't maintain those support structures.
So he had no qualifications outside of intelligence.
Again, working in the civilian sector certainly means fewer pure thrills than working in military intelligence, but the professional skills are massively transferable to other contexts absent a dishonorable discharge. I find it much easier to imagine some issue that didn't comport with his whole-life military ethos - a personal failing, grossly anti-meritocratic discrimination, repeated subjection/exposure to unconscionable command decisions or somesuch.
Cybersec is not intelligence. The people suiciding in the article seem to be from intelligence rather than cyber. The fields are often conflated but they are different communities. One feeds data to the other.
Clearances are under more scrutiny for intelligence operators than cyber because, generally, the cyber people should not have access to finalized intelligence, the assessments and recommendations passed to decision makers. Cyber people also only work in cyber and know nothing about other sensor areas (ie human spy programs).
That's an interesting theory and I am not saying you are entirely incorrect, but I'd imagine that the vast personnel of cyber-adjacent roles in the US Military have better civilian prospects in tech than a Air Force pilot with an eye problem.
Well, I did say airline pilot. An AirForce pilot is still a military officer and can find work inside or outside the military as a team leader. A modern airline pilot is an infamously hyper-specialized job where all they do is operate the aircraft. They don't even do real flight planning anymore as that is a separate airline trade.
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.
The operators know they are in danger themselves, most notably from gliding bombs on their bunkers, so it's a clear him-or-me, makes things simpler. Also: Bucha.
ps. do you to watch all these videos? how is it affecting you?
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
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.
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.
This was a big thing for drone people based out of Eppley AFB in Omaha. Wake up, drive to work, attack enemies, drive home, sit there eating dinner with your family trying to pretend you didn’t kill someone and can’t talk about it. Combat troops get to lean on each other after a firefight: “dude, good shot. That guy was about to get us!” You get validation that you did something to safe you and your friends, and it’s still a heavy burden, but you have people who were there telling you that you’re a good person and did the right thing.
The Air Force did something shockingly reasonable (according to the newspaper coverage): they require all pilots to attend mandatory counseling sessions. Then there was no sign of weakness or any of that toxic nonsense. “Ugh, guess I have to go talk to the doc today, and I don’t want to, but guess orders are orders.”
Therapy for normal people is one of the absolute worst things that feminism has done to society.
I feel more compassion for the innocent people they killed and it's not even close.
Can’t speak for others but the most damaging part of direct combat is watching people that you consider to be family die or be maimed.
Not bombing weddings could help as well...
America is so obsessed with helping its own murder more and they're surprised when those doing the murdering have feelings, too. The Deer Hunter (1978) taught me this. It taught me that America will go to insane lengths to heal the wounds they cause to their own in the service of murdering others. It's a disgusting culture.
Go ahead and downvote me. I don't give a shit.
https://archive.ph/W2tpE
> One of the dead was Technical Sergeant Kevin Stallings, a digital network intelligence analyst whose family told Bloomberg they wanted him to be identified to bring greater attention to the suicides. Stallings was stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland, Cyber Command’s headquarters. He took his own life the month before he’d have turned 37.
These people aren't "drone operators", they worked for USCYBERCOM, which does "hacker stuff".
The narrative peddled here repeatedly, the statistics were "completely normal" is egregiously wrong.
The concentration of deaths is entirely implausibly described as "suicides", while the far more likely explanation is "housecleaning": murdering potential whistleblowers.
Used to work in this field. You're correct: not being able to talk about it is the worst part.
This is equally true of successes as well as challenges.
I did some cool, very impactful stuff in that job. I will go to jail for a long, long time if I ever go into detail about it.
Is there any type of internal support where you're allowed to chat about it?
What can you say, if anything, without going into detail?
/r/thathappened
Wow crazy, what’s it like having a job with absolutely zero ethical consideration?
If you speak to the correct people about illegal activities and unlawful orders you will not.
Counterpoint, industry cyber security is so generally weak, if there were actually a secret "huge cold cyber war" on-going, we'd see real world impact.
Since we don't, it probably isn't happening.
I mean, isn't that all counter-intelligence? They wouldn't want to be seen?
This thing probably never stops and doesn’t have holidays. I read about Operation Gladio back in the day, which was not a cyber operation, but a preparation of guerrilla operations in case the WP occupied EU. But I got the feeling that the war in darkness (cyber is part of it) is non-stop.
WP = Warsaw Pact. Took me a while to decipher, but I get that bytes are expensive these days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
There's lots of people working for NATO and federal agencies in Europe that have been assassinated by the luckystrike branch of the FSB. The name comes from the Telegram account with underscores in between, and they're essentially recruiting kids or former inmates for GTA style missions.
Starts with simple stuff like package rerouting, then goes on to gathering intel about places, people, putting in USB flash drives to their laptops, theft, death threats, arsony, and actual murder. Each step of the way the kids get deeper into trouble because they have to prove that they have done it for the payout, making photos of themselves... which gives the other end increasingly more doxxing material on them.
It's a real problem, and they use the luckystrike branch also to go after witnesses in big lawsuit cases, which then fall off due to all witnesses accidentally dying under seemingly random causes.
What gets overlooked here is the US IC itself being a probable cause: the habit of "housecleaning" by killing individuals suspected to be possible (even only prospective) leaks of information is very real.
The recent cluster of weird deaths and disappearances of scientists linked to secret military research has a similar pattern to it: a statistically highly unlikely density of "suicides, accidents & mishaps".
> There's lots of people working for NATO and federal agencies in Europe that have been assassinated by the luckystrike branch of the FSB. The name comes from the Telegram account with underscores in between, and they're essentially recruiting kids or former inmates for GTA style missions.
Iran too
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyqggvyp1do
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jul/29/norwegian-te...
Haven't found a lot about it online, other than https://www.polskieradio.pl/395/7786/artykul/3438674,russian...
Do you have any references about it?
This is very reminiscent of Iranian intelligence modus operandi in Israel and world wide lately, currently with not a lot to show for
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/06/how-iran-sough...
(Replying to my own post). Also, it’s gotta be mentally draining to be told by the president they have to win but also always let Russian attacks though.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/defens...
Presidents come and go and, hopefully, this one will be held accountable.
> always let Russian attacks though
The article doesn't say anything of the sort. Literally just said to put a halt on OFFENSIVE operations.
If I were to guess I'd say it was an overly ambitious negotiation tactic.
Also, that was a year and a half ago. The current status quo is that Ukraine is producing more drones than Russia can deal with, bombing Russian targets daily and the US-Ukraine relationship is much closer, with Ukraine sharing drone technology and intel with the US.
The US and Russia are allies.
The new US policy under Trump is giving up trying to win the world and instead focusing on internal market and dominance over the American continent. Causing and sustaining friction everywhere is aligned with this policy.
This is the result of a shift of power in the US politics, from the global financial capital of the last decades back to the military and industrial sector.
How about that they do bad stuff and feel bad about it? You make it sound like they are taking a bullet or something. Desillusion is probably way worse.
I wonder whether any American civilians are losing sleep over how the current administration and its supporters' robust "race realist" rhetoric and worldview might be used by adversaries for some very cruel and effective psychological warfare on military and bureaucratic personnel from minority groups in the US.
"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
Assuming a predominantly male population, the suicide rate should be around 20 per 100000 per year. 5 people in a month gives 18x higher rate. Too short period to draw any statistical conclusions but it’s a large blip.
Suicides are not independent statistical events and sadly often come in "clusters"
I think you’d have some statistical complications around stress: beyond the inherent pressure of the job itself, it’s highly likely that they were understaffed even before losing a lot of support when the DOGE chainsaws were in “cut first, measure later” mode — I know multiple people in the military who are still running at like half productivity because telework was cancelled so everyone’s day is a couple hours longer commuting into an office where they’re sitting on the floor because there aren’t enough desks — and if they were married to another federal employee they might be dealing with loss of income or childcare (DOGE closed the GSA office which handled that, apparently to pressure parents into resigning) at the same time.
The suicide rate isn't uniformly distributed given gender. There are likely screenings (previous mental health history) and rejection of the most affected age group (70+) that should lead the baseline to be even lower. Meaning 18x is probably on the low end.
I think that it would be necessary to correct for things like income and education level since engineers in cyber command are likely not representative of the general public.
Stress, PTSD, and overwork can and do aggravate mental health issues. All of these are probably hitting these people - probably at the same time.
This particular population is highly selected because of the work they do and the types of clearances they hold. I would expect the suicide rate to differ significantly from the general population.
> In some cases, they suffer from insomnia, memory loss, rumination and physical illness,
So, like most middle-aged desk jockeys then?
> “There’s always a crisis and everything’s always a priority,” said Schoka. “We would burn people out faster than we could produce them.”
Sounds a lot like my job...
Ah yes- your old job where your boss could put you on twelve hour shiftwork indefinitely while making you pt while denying you adequate housing or food all under the threat of military justice and telling you if you tell anyone anything you're breaking a dozen national security laws.
> > In some cases, they suffer from insomnia, memory loss, rumination and physical illness,
> So, like most middle-aged desk jockeys then?
Is this really so common? I'm 38 and had some medical issues this past year, but one of the big things I've been grappling with is severe brain fog and memory loss. I could not tell you any of the projects I worked on in my previous three years, honestly. Maybe longer. It's been pretty demoralizing
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!)
Your tech school is not nda'd.
I’ve worked with folks from The Citadel who had parts of their studies they were not allowed to talk about. When doing a hiring reference check that was confirmed by school staff. I don’t know if it was an NDA in the traditional sense; I was just a tech interviewer.
So just suffer in silence because you signed some papers when you were too young to understand what they really meant?
That's horrible.
I almost signed up for the Canadian Military back in the early 2000s and I think my lucky stars every day that I skipped that last recruitment meeting.
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.
Absolutely not. The problem is solely op tempo since the Iran war started. Leadership in cyber is famous for "surging" It's quite normal. But cyber specifically refuses to allow the surge to end. It becomes "the new normal." This was already straining the force before the Iran war but the civilian leadership now demand constant cyber effects and that pressure cascades down. It's hard to emphasize how effective cyber is, bc of course you want proof. But the proof is in the optempo and you can see that leadership is literally killing their Soldiers to get more and more of it.
The LLMs play a part, but it’s the tempo; the pace.
Fully autonomous w/LLM isn’t true. Leadership wants it true. The technological capabilities and acceptance of scapegoating a machine got rejected by society, so that leaves perfectly capable individuals as the gatekeepers of decision making, completely overloaded by the amount of information they need to deal with.
If you as a human can’t keep up, but the onslaught continues, and you’ll be held responsible for the outcome regardless… yeah. People will punch their ticket out. It’s not unique to LLMs, but LLMs have certainly automated the process of reaching the worst possible conclusion.
Don’t for a second try to hold the computers accountable or blame them for this outcome. This is a leadership issue and always will be. Believing otherwise is just allowing suicides to be scapegoated as a computer’s doing.
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.
it's pretty much impossible to engage with people in a sane way in threads like this. hide and move on.
Its only a conspiracy theory if people on the other side of politics believe it
Nothing like politics to make people miss the beam in their own eye
Wasn't there something similar with scientists recently? I wonder how much of that is just statistical noise.
That turned out to be false. Normal attrition / vacation time.
That's gross disinformation and patently untrue.
Yes, there was a lot of statistical noised amplified by the conspiracy theorist media.
yep, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyw9rpdl4po
> "The US Top Secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce is ~700,000 people," science writer, investigator and pseudoscience debunker Mick West wrote on 16 April on his Substack.
> "Ordinary mortality over 22 months predicts ~4,000 deaths, ~70 homicides, and ~180 suicides. The list has 10 … The deaths are real. The families' grief is real. The pattern is not."
> Louise Grillmair, similarly, says that - while her husband "would laugh" at speculation that the deaths might be connected - he would also "probably talk statistically" to squelch conspiracies.
I'm not sure how much value there is in comparing it with ordinary mortality considering the fairly strict selectivity on handing out TS clearances. You're definitely not going to give one to anyone who looks like an alcoholic or habitual drug user. You'll be less likely to give one out to people who struggle with cravings like heavy smokers or the morbidly obese. Gambling and financial instability are are also exclusionary factors. You would prioritize people who are highly disciplined and exhibit a preference for fitness and a survival mindset in general. So before you get into psychological issues at all, your population will be significantly healthier than the median, less likely to fall victim to homicide, and have fewer life problems than the general population.
A useful comparator is military suicides, which are a growing problem; among enlisted ranks (E1-E4) the rate is about 26/100k. Enlisted personnel tend to be younger, less well educated, have less personal autonomy, and earn less money etc. Among commissioned officers (with command authority) and warrant officers (occupational specialists) the rate falls to ~14/100k, nearly half. Non-combat morbidity exhibits similar disparities. I would guess that the selectivity for TS clearance is more rigorous that the occupational qualification alone.
AI wrote the second quote
Were any of these suicides by falling out of a window? That might imply involvement of certain foreign actors.
no, which obviously implies involvement from US government
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.
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.
Once you know about the NSA backdoors you become a walking security risk. Forget about that vacation in beautiful China, you will be held on a short leash for life.
Russia’s ok though. As Tucker Carlson pointed out they have bread and shopping carts.
It seems to me that if you end up adjacent to an operation that exposes you to certain technologies, you will be harassed and attacked with covert directed-energy weapons until you are suicided or institutionalized and discredited.
If they downvote merely speculating about that, imagine their methods regarding those in the know.
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...
Anyone have a non-paywalled source?
https://archive.ph/W2tpE
Thanks! Link added to top text.
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.
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 see your point but I think you're overstating it. To be sure, if a pilot is suddenly cut off from the thrill of flying, that's a big psychological blow. OTOH if you're a pilot at 40 it's probably because of diligence and reliability, not the pursuit of thrills - such a pilot would already be mindful of the risk of ocular degeneration with age and have a plan in place to move over to training or operational management in case of having to retire early from flying. There are a lot of transferable skills and career professionals to asist with transitions like that, even individual employer doesn't maintain those support structures.
So he had no qualifications outside of intelligence.
Again, working in the civilian sector certainly means fewer pure thrills than working in military intelligence, but the professional skills are massively transferable to other contexts absent a dishonorable discharge. I find it much easier to imagine some issue that didn't comport with his whole-life military ethos - a personal failing, grossly anti-meritocratic discrimination, repeated subjection/exposure to unconscionable command decisions or somesuch.
Only one job ? Worked with a ton of ex NSA and CIA people in a large cybersec company.
Cybersec is not intelligence. The people suiciding in the article seem to be from intelligence rather than cyber. The fields are often conflated but they are different communities. One feeds data to the other.
Clearances are under more scrutiny for intelligence operators than cyber because, generally, the cyber people should not have access to finalized intelligence, the assessments and recommendations passed to decision makers. Cyber people also only work in cyber and know nothing about other sensor areas (ie human spy programs).
Interesting to consider foreign intelligence services surfacing - what might seem to these people - as embarrassing information.
The degree clustering requires deep scrutiny and if it is in Bloomberg it's already at the emergency stage.
You could alternately infer things about dni, secdef, or cinc.
That's an interesting theory and I am not saying you are entirely incorrect, but I'd imagine that the vast personnel of cyber-adjacent roles in the US Military have better civilian prospects in tech than a Air Force pilot with an eye problem.
Well, I did say airline pilot. An AirForce pilot is still a military officer and can find work inside or outside the military as a team leader. A modern airline pilot is an infamously hyper-specialized job where all they do is operate the aircraft. They don't even do real flight planning anymore as that is a separate airline trade.
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.
The operators know they are in danger themselves, most notably from gliding bombs on their bunkers, so it's a clear him-or-me, makes things simpler. Also: Bucha.
ps. do you to watch all these videos? how is it affecting you?
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 doubt that was more than a blip due to a logistics failure, and was henceforth used by a bunch of foreign propagandists.
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.
Suicide or closing the loop?
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…