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.”
It's Offut AFB, home of StratCom. Eppely is the municipal airport. And Offut doesn't have any drone units, nor do they manage any. They due process reconnaissance for sure, but actual drone strikes aren't conducted from there.
Creech AFB is where most of the drone units operating Reaper/Avenger etc are based.
that's because they were the ones being threatened, they were at risk, and they did the kill shot as self-protection (putting aside whether they should have been there in the first place). Drone warfare isn't the same thing. People who kill by drone aren't "at war", more often than not now, just killers. Their buddies aren't there, they aren't there, and they were really never at risk of much but being sent to the brig if they defied orders.
Took me a year to get my secret clearance in the military, I promise you no one gives a s** about anything you say once you're out. It is a fun way to feel self-important though :-)
I was a part of the world's largest illegal operation in history and again I promise you no one gives a s**.
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.
There are a lot of documented small scale hacks on American infrastructure by state actors. The prevailing theory I have heard was that the point is to find as many vulnerabilities in our internet-connected critical infrastructure, then sit on it until it’s needed. It doesn’t make news when a few water tanks overflow in a random tiny Texas city, but the principle is that these kinds of exploits may generalize to the infra of major cities.
So there is no need for a highly visible active cyber war. We have tons of cyber professionals working on this stuff day in and day out to help keep up prepared.
> 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.
But we do: ransomware stories are in the news all the time; while they likely aren’t being directly executed by the Russian or Chinese governments they are being allowed to happen because they aid state interests: for example, https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa...
…or more insidiously: political influence campaigns, which are very much a cyber concern, and even easier to deny.
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.
This could be a factor, but there are other things that probably do more to explain the uptick in suicides.
1. There's a new hot war with Iran, a country that has put a large amount of resources into its cyberwarfare capabilities after previous U.S. cyberstrikes (e.g. stuxnet). Iran is likely a lot tougher target than it was ten years ago and that means pressure for members of the U.S.'s cyber command to perform.
2. Computer nerds probably struggle with getting respect from the rest of the military even at the best of times. That just got a lot harder with Hegseth as secretary.
3. The U.S. is likely not targeting just Iran right now. Imagine being called upon to go to work against countries you consider to be allies, like Denmark, Greenland, Canada, Spain, etc..
(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.
I suspect Hegseth's atavistic attempt to turn the US military back toward a culture of machismo is resulting in misery for anyone who doesn't fit the part, whether they're skilled at their duties or not.
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.
I have heard of zero murders of NATO and EU agency people, and I think you're quite wrong.
There are of course people like this, recruited on the internet in the many criminal networks that exist, but I don't think they've had any notable successes.
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.
The open AI engineer who was ready to testify in a copyright case against them, also died in weird circumstances. His mom is out on an anti-Altman campaign.
Man this stuff sucks to be so out in the public and out of darkness. I mean we knew these things were happening but they’ve accelerated so much now and what are we going to do about it?
Unjust wars and enabling genocide is probably the more likely factor here, realizing there is no honor in defending these things overseas.
This has been an issue for decades: overseas, not knowing 'why' Americans are dying for nothing, and, the veterans being treated as refuse when they return.
Edit: that may have come across too callous.
The crushing of ones consciesness for unjust foreign wars, protecting a global network of the worst crimes (Epstn files and the international group within it, operating under the umbrella protection network of the US vis a vis NATO).
The most immoral army in the world, the IDF, also has a very high suicide rate - ones conscience cannot be destroyed, it can only be atrophied and dulled, and then depression hunts you.
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.
"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.
From a life spent on count statistics, one thing I think is interesting is how definitively you can reject perfect randomness from a very small sample like this.
The expected event count from 17,000 people exposed to a month of constant uniform event risk with an annual hazard rate of 20 per 100,000 per year is 0.28. The p-value for observing a count of 5 from a (Poissonian) mean of 0.28 is 1 in 100,000. So it's pretty unlikely by perfect random chance.
The other thing you see in a life spent in count statistics is a lot of statistically extreme events that turn out to have no deep or predictive significance.
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 mean, let's be real for a second. It's cybersecurity.
Yes, it does skew male, but you're probably looking at 10x the standard population density of Autistics, and 20x the density of trans women.
I'm sure there are other "sociologically valid" ways you can measure this too, but there is absolutely a correlation between having the type of brain that is able to perform offensive cybersecurity operations and mental illness/social rejection/isolation.
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!)
What is it about being a Navy Seal that makes you want to become an influencer? From the books, podcasts, and misc media appearances you'd think that the Seal Teams were made for media like the Blue Angels.
Citing from the Behind the Bastards podcast, it seems that the guy who started Seal Team 6 wrote a book about his time in special ops (which was mostly lies, AIUI) after he left the military, made a lot of military, and so everybody who has similar dreams gravitates specifically towards the Navy Seals.
Unfortunately, probably narcissism with a small dash of psychopathy. That and also due to the prominent Osama assassination by the Seals. A prime example being "American sniper" Chris Kyle who openly writes in his book how happy he is to shoot people and was sued for defamation. He also claims to have shot a couple of carjackers in a gas station and was let off by the police because he was a badass (???). Couldn't find a primary source for it but see e.g. https://www.mpmacting.com/blog/2014/7/19/truth-justice-and-t...
As a disclaimer I'm not making the claim that all seals, special forces, or military members are mentally ill. I'm just saying that the arch from being able to take the toughest training on earth and going into active combat to influencer sprinkled with some lies and fabrications is not a healthy psyche. There are plenty of seals that have retired and gone on as normal functioning members of society.
There’s a constant cultural stream of validation for their job, and the more narcissistic ones come to collect from it. You’re missing the many who don’t do that.
> You don't really get to sneak a glimpse of operations and write a book like the SEALs seem get to (jk!)
My understanding is their books are reviewed by the pentagon and don’t reveal the real secret operational details and that’s how they get away with it. Presumably someone like yourself could also write a book and have the pentagon redact it in a similar manner?
...that's what's being said here: nothing gets out. Cyber doesn't equal direct action regarding declassification or piecing together bits of unclass doesn't lead to the book.
For every 1 million cybers, three books are written lol
Every manned operation gets a book mention, eventually.
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 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.
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.
Conspiracy theories thrive in environments of silence. If no one can talk about their time in government organizations (military, CIA, etc.), speculation is all we have left.
People who believe nonsense about the government assassinating our own citizens come from all across the political spectrum, especially on the fringes. I legitimately don't know the politics of the people commenting here, nor do you know mine.
> "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.
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.
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.
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 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?
"American Special Forces tried to burn out the Russian Computer Network at Kiernsk. Basic assault module was a Nightwing microlight... A matrix deck, a jockey, and a virus program called Mole..."
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.
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.
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 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.”
Some minor quibbles...
It's Offut AFB, home of StratCom. Eppely is the municipal airport. And Offut doesn't have any drone units, nor do they manage any. They due process reconnaissance for sure, but actual drone strikes aren't conducted from there.
Creech AFB is where most of the drone units operating Reaper/Avenger etc are based.
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I feel more compassion for the innocent people they killed and it's not even close.
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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.
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that's because they were the ones being threatened, they were at risk, and they did the kill shot as self-protection (putting aside whether they should have been there in the first place). Drone warfare isn't the same thing. People who kill by drone aren't "at war", more often than not now, just killers. Their buddies aren't there, they aren't there, and they were really never at risk of much but being sent to the brig if they defied orders.
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News just in: talking about your mental health, especially for men, does not improve your mental health.
For the majority of men, most of the time.
If it did, shouldn’t we see mental health improving by now?
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It appears to be a huge lapse on the part of command. These people should have eaten dinner thinking "I got them good, these fuckers".
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Not bombing weddings could help as well...
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?
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What can you say, if anything, without going into detail?
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Took me a year to get my secret clearance in the military, I promise you no one gives a s** about anything you say once you're out. It is a fun way to feel self-important though :-)
I was a part of the world's largest illegal operation in history and again I promise you no one gives a s**.
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If you speak to the correct people about illegal activities and unlawful orders you will not.
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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.
There are a lot of documented small scale hacks on American infrastructure by state actors. The prevailing theory I have heard was that the point is to find as many vulnerabilities in our internet-connected critical infrastructure, then sit on it until it’s needed. It doesn’t make news when a few water tanks overflow in a random tiny Texas city, but the principle is that these kinds of exploits may generalize to the infra of major cities.
Example: https://texasstandard.org/stories/russian-hackers-muleshoe-t...
So there is no need for a highly visible active cyber war. We have tons of cyber professionals working on this stuff day in and day out to help keep up prepared.
> 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.
But we do: ransomware stories are in the news all the time; while they likely aren’t being directly executed by the Russian or Chinese governments they are being allowed to happen because they aid state interests: for example, https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa...
…or more insidiously: political influence campaigns, which are very much a cyber concern, and even easier to deny.
I like the argument and it seems valid, but I have heard the opposite from people working in commercial cybersecurity.
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I mean, isn't that all counter-intelligence? They wouldn't want to be seen?
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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
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This could be a factor, but there are other things that probably do more to explain the uptick in suicides.
1. There's a new hot war with Iran, a country that has put a large amount of resources into its cyberwarfare capabilities after previous U.S. cyberstrikes (e.g. stuxnet). Iran is likely a lot tougher target than it was ten years ago and that means pressure for members of the U.S.'s cyber command to perform.
2. Computer nerds probably struggle with getting respect from the rest of the military even at the best of times. That just got a lot harder with Hegseth as secretary.
3. The U.S. is likely not targeting just Iran right now. Imagine being called upon to go to work against countries you consider to be allies, like Denmark, Greenland, Canada, Spain, etc..
or they just got tired of feeding data into Palantir that results in hundreds of civilians being butchered
Regular Cold War people could not disclose anything to their families either...
it is very harsh pressures both professional and personal
yeah, I can't imagine how stressful.
(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.
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> 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.
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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.
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I suspect Hegseth's atavistic attempt to turn the US military back toward a culture of machismo is resulting in misery for anyone who doesn't fit the part, whether they're skilled at their duties or not.
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.
I have heard of zero murders of NATO and EU agency people, and I think you're quite wrong.
There are of course people like this, recruited on the internet in the many criminal networks that exist, but I don't think they've had any notable successes.
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".
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> 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...
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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...
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The open AI engineer who was ready to testify in a copyright case against them, also died in weird circumstances. His mom is out on an anti-Altman campaign.
Man this stuff sucks to be so out in the public and out of darkness. I mean we knew these things were happening but they’ve accelerated so much now and what are we going to do about it?
Unjust wars and enabling genocide is probably the more likely factor here, realizing there is no honor in defending these things overseas.
This has been an issue for decades: overseas, not knowing 'why' Americans are dying for nothing, and, the veterans being treated as refuse when they return.
Edit: that may have come across too callous.
The crushing of ones consciesness for unjust foreign wars, protecting a global network of the worst crimes (Epstn files and the international group within it, operating under the umbrella protection network of the US vis a vis NATO).
The most immoral army in the world, the IDF, also has a very high suicide rate - ones conscience cannot be destroyed, it can only be atrophied and dulled, and then depression hunts you.
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How can you fight such fight if the government at highest level is compromised by the enemy - Russia?
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.
"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.
From a life spent on count statistics, one thing I think is interesting is how definitively you can reject perfect randomness from a very small sample like this.
The expected event count from 17,000 people exposed to a month of constant uniform event risk with an annual hazard rate of 20 per 100,000 per year is 0.28. The p-value for observing a count of 5 from a (Poissonian) mean of 0.28 is 1 in 100,000. So it's pretty unlikely by perfect random chance.
The other thing you see in a life spent in count statistics is a lot of statistically extreme events that turn out to have no deep or predictive significance.
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.
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Suicides are not independent statistical events and sadly often come in "clusters"
I mean, let's be real for a second. It's cybersecurity.
Yes, it does skew male, but you're probably looking at 10x the standard population density of Autistics, and 20x the density of trans women.
I'm sure there are other "sociologically valid" ways you can measure this too, but there is absolutely a correlation between having the type of brain that is able to perform offensive cybersecurity operations and mental illness/social rejection/isolation.
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.
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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.
Stress, PTSD, and overwork can and do aggravate mental health issues. All of these are probably hitting these people - probably at the same time.
That's not saying much. The real distribution is probably heavily skewed by risk factors such as poverty, age, drug abuse, etc.
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> 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.
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> > 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
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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 get to (jk!)
What is it about being a Navy Seal that makes you want to become an influencer? From the books, podcasts, and misc media appearances you'd think that the Seal Teams were made for media like the Blue Angels.
Citing from the Behind the Bastards podcast, it seems that the guy who started Seal Team 6 wrote a book about his time in special ops (which was mostly lies, AIUI) after he left the military, made a lot of military, and so everybody who has similar dreams gravitates specifically towards the Navy Seals.
Unfortunately, probably narcissism with a small dash of psychopathy. That and also due to the prominent Osama assassination by the Seals. A prime example being "American sniper" Chris Kyle who openly writes in his book how happy he is to shoot people and was sued for defamation. He also claims to have shot a couple of carjackers in a gas station and was let off by the police because he was a badass (???). Couldn't find a primary source for it but see e.g. https://www.mpmacting.com/blog/2014/7/19/truth-justice-and-t...
As a disclaimer I'm not making the claim that all seals, special forces, or military members are mentally ill. I'm just saying that the arch from being able to take the toughest training on earth and going into active combat to influencer sprinkled with some lies and fabrications is not a healthy psyche. There are plenty of seals that have retired and gone on as normal functioning members of society.
I should write a book about being a fobbit in the Army who sits around all day bored as hell. I suspect it would sound strikingly similar to Catch 22.
There’s a constant cultural stream of validation for their job, and the more narcissistic ones come to collect from it. You’re missing the many who don’t do that.
> You don't really get to sneak a glimpse of operations and write a book like the SEALs seem get to (jk!)
My understanding is their books are reviewed by the pentagon and don’t reveal the real secret operational details and that’s how they get away with it. Presumably someone like yourself could also write a book and have the pentagon redact it in a similar manner?
...that's what's being said here: nothing gets out. Cyber doesn't equal direct action regarding declassification or piecing together bits of unclass doesn't lead to the book.
For every 1 million cybers, three books are written lol
Every manned operation gets a book mention, eventually.
Just write a fiction book
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.
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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.
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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.
Honestly, at this point I think that people are just holding on and helping others where they can.
There is a tv show about in-the-know government employees dying by suicide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormwood_%28miniseries%29
Is this higher than the general public?
About 18x higher.
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.
HN wasn’t always this way, and was one of the last to fall. But yeah, it’s a shame
Conspiracy theories thrive in environments of silence. If no one can talk about their time in government organizations (military, CIA, etc.), speculation is all we have left.
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
People who believe nonsense about the government assassinating our own citizens come from all across the political spectrum, especially on the fringes. I legitimately don't know the politics of the people commenting here, nor do you know mine.
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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.
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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.
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AI wrote the second quote
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Yes, there was a lot of statistical noised amplified by the conspiracy theorist media.
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…
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.
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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...
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.
Anyone have a non-paywalled source?
https://archive.ph/W2tpE
Thanks! Link added to top text.
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.
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.
A firm belief that one is doing the right thing is incredibly protective of mental health in war.
Ukrainian drone pilots have few doubts about what future they're working towards and what one they're preventing when they kill Russian soldiers.
US soldiers coming home from Iraq 2 (or Vietnam) don't have anywhere near that ideological buffer.
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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?
"American Special Forces tried to burn out the Russian Computer Network at Kiernsk. Basic assault module was a Nightwing microlight... A matrix deck, a jockey, and a virus program called Mole..."
https://williamgibson.fandom.com/wiki/Screaming_Fist
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.
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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.
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Russia’s ok though. As Tucker Carlson pointed out they have bread and shopping carts.
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What does not alone in our minds mean? Also, you mention America, do you think this is bounded to the physical US?
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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).
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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.
Here’s another list up dig into and prove no foul-play:
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/deaths-disappearances-scien...
Good luck.
Suicide means you killed yourself, and we frankly don't/can't know if they did or not.
Shoot and cry
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
Suicide or closing the loop?
Is it weird that I read the title differently:
"A number of cyber command unit personnel found the secret files and had to be dealt with"