Resiliency Starts Within the Force

Every time a service member dies, the system responds with speed and precision. Within days, a $100,000 death gratuity is issued, often alongside up to $500,000 in Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance—evidence of a system built to handle death.

Across the Total Force, 471 service members died by suicide in calendar year 2024. Even with an overall decline from 531 in 2023, the National Guard suicide rate rose by approximately 13 percent, according to the Department’s Calendar Year 2024 Annual Report on Suicide in the Military. The Department of War (DoW) already absorbs billions in downstream costs from these losses. That is the financial reality. The operational reality is harder to measure but no less consequential: units lose cohesion, leaders lose people they trained and trusted, and service members observe a system that reacts decisively to death but struggles to address the conditions that lead to it.

The DoW is already paying for mental health. It is simply paying at the point of failure.

The DoW did not build a broken system. It built one for a different force, where trauma was understood primarily as episodic—tied to combat exposure and addressed after the fact through screening, referral, and treatment.

Stress is no longer an event that can be isolated and resolved. It is a condition that exists across time, roles, and environments. A battalion may return from a deployment cycle only to move directly into disaster response, administrative resets, readiness reporting, and another training cycle while leaders simultaneously manage divorces, financial instability, disciplinary issues, and suicide risk inside the formation. These pressures do not occur independently. They compound. DoW data reflects this shift. Suicide is not driven solely by combat exposure. Relationship conflict, workplace stress, administrative pressure, financial instability, and untreated mental health conditions consistently appear among the most common contributing factors. Many who struggle have never deployed to combat.

This is not a failure of resilience. The force evolved, and the institution did not fully realign.

Current force structures still assume that psychological strain will become visible and declare itself in a way that triggers response. In reality, stress rarely presents that way. It accumulates across time and circumstance.

A deployment layered onto family instability becomes more than the sum of its parts. Administrative pressure layered onto operational demand erodes capacity that once seemed stable. Leaders carry not only their own stress but that of their formations.

Behavioral health research describes this as allostatic load—the cumulative wear that occurs when stress is constant and recovery insufficient. Thresholds lower. What would once have been manageable becomes difficult. What would once have been noticeable becomes routine.

Existing behavioral health models are designed to respond when stress becomes visible, not to track or mitigate it as it accumulates. That is the gap.

The DoW has not ignored mental health. Behavioral health officers, psychologists, social workers, and enlisted specialists exist across the force, and the Defense Health Program reflects significant institutional investment. Many commanders, clinicians, chaplains, and senior NCOs already work aggressively within the limits of the current structure.

But access is not the same as presence. Care remains centralized, scheduled, and dependent on service members stepping outside their environment to engage it, introducing delay, friction, and hesitation in a profession where perception matters and decisions carry career weight.

Even when access exists, utilization is not guaranteed. Service members weigh how engagement will be perceived and whether it will alter how they are viewed within their formation. These are not irrational concerns. They are structural outcomes.

Support exists, but it does not consistently live where the force lives.

In the absence of embedded clinical capability, another system has filled the gap: chaplains.

They are present, accessible, and trusted within the formation. They provide confidentiality and a place to speak without immediate consequence.

Chaplains provide something essential. They are not clinical providers, yet their effectiveness demonstrates what works inside the force: they are embedded, visible in daily life, culturally normalized, and available without appointment friction. Presence matters more than nominal availability. Service members engage because support exists where they live, not because they are directed to seek it.

In my own experience, chaplains often became the de facto frontline responders to mental health crises during deployments and in the years that followed. In formations that endured repeated suicides over a five-year period, that burden made clear how much the force depends on embedded, trusted support—and how inadequate it is to rely on chaplaincy alone to carry it.

This is not a failure of chaplaincy. It is evidence of what works—and of what remains missing.

The DoW has taken steps to address these challenges. Embedded Behavioral Health has placed clinicians closer to operational units in some formations. Holistic Health and Fitness, reflected in Army doctrine such as FM 7-22, has introduced performance-based approaches that explicitly connect mental readiness to overall readiness. Awareness campaigns and resilience training have sought to reduce stigma and improve engagement.

The DoW has already laid important groundwork. Embedded Behavioral Health teams, Navy Embedded Mental Health initiatives, and the Army’s Holistic Health and Fitness framework have shown that placing providers closer to operational units improves utilization, trust, and commander confidence. This proposal does not replace those efforts. It standardizes and internalizes them across the Active, Guard, and Reserve components as a permanent structural capability rather than a fragmented collection of programs.

This patchwork must give way to a unified structure. The solution is not additional programs layered onto the existing system, but a reorganization that places capability where the force actually operates.

Mental health must be structured as a warfighting capability, not treated as an external service.

At every battalion-equivalent unit across the DoW, a standardized mental health section should exist as an organic force element, composed of dedicated leadership, clinical providers, and enlisted behavioral health specialists.

This team provides continuous presence within the formation. It enables early identification of cumulative stress, routine engagement, education, and coordination with higher-level care when required.

Medics should align with this structure, reinforcing the connection between physical and psychological readiness. Leaders are central to the model; their ability to recognize strain, engage the system, and normalize its use will determine whether it becomes part of unit life.

Across approximately 2,500 to 3,500 battalion-equivalent units, implementation would cost an estimated $1.2 to $1.7 billion annually (rough-order estimate based on current force structure and average personnel costs)—less than one percent of personnel-related spending. Those costs are dwarfed by the multi-billion-dollar downstream expenses the DoW already absorbs through suicides, medical separations, replacement training, lost readiness, and long-term healthcare.

The issue is no longer whether the force needs psychological support. The issue is whether that support will remain external to operational life or become integrated into it.

Internalizing mental health as a permanent warfighting function inside the DoW requires the following actions:

Establish a standardized mental health section at every battalion-equivalent element across the DoW. This section must exist as an organic component of the formation, internalizing screening, early identification, education, group engagement, and intervention within the unit.

Normalize mental health as a core function of readiness. Engagement must be routine, expected, and free from stigma or professional consequence. Service members and leaders must interact with this capability the same way they engage other readiness requirements.

Authorize commanders to recommend consults as part of standard leadership response. This includes cases of misconduct or performance issues, recognizing that such outcomes often reflect accumulated strain. These consults must not automatically trigger adverse action.

Operate the mental health section alongside the Chaplain Corps as a complementary system. Chaplains provide spiritual care. The mental health section provides clinical care. Both must be embedded and accessible.

Shift assessment from episodic to continuous. Annual evaluations and event-driven assessments must capture cumulative exposure and high-stress events.

Maintain clinical independence. Behavioral health authority must remain separate from command influence to preserve trust and ensure utilization.

Integrate fully with medical capability. Physical and psychological readiness must function as a unified system, with the mental health section deploying alongside the force.

This approach shifts resources toward prevention while preserving personnel and operational readiness.

Implementation should begin with phased integration in high-OPTEMPO units, National Guard formations, and selected brigade combat teams before expansion across the broader force.

Progress should be tracked through utilization rates, time-to-access, command climate indicators, medical separations, and suicide-related behaviors to measure whether embedded capability is improving readiness and reducing risk.

The DoW has already recognized that stress now operates as continuous cumulative pressure embedded in daily operations, not as isolated events addressed after the fact. That recognition matters, but it must now be matched by structural alignment.

The question is no longer whether the problem exists. It is whether the DoW will continue to respond after failure occurs, or whether it will build the capability required to address strain where it actually develops—inside the formation, at the point of leadership, as a permanent element of the force.

Service members should not have to reach the point of collapse before support becomes structurally visible.

A force that depends on people to generate combat power cannot treat psychological stability as external to readiness. It must be built into the force like every other critical capability. Until that happens, the DoW will remain reactive—responding after collapse instead of building resilience inside the force itself.

Mark W. Castillon served in the Army National Guard from 2004 to 2024, with deployments in support of Operations Iraqi Freedom and New Dawn and emergency response from Hurricane Katrina through the COVID-19 pandemic. He advocates for veteran mental health, whistleblower protection, leadership accountability, and due-process reform in military personnel systems.