New reporting examines the non-combat deaths of Army women

Terry Gerton Austin, this is a tough topic to talk about. Your reporting uncovered a striking finding about the causes of death among women in the army. Before we get into a lot of the details, what was maybe the very most surprising thing you learned as you reported on this story?

Austin Campbell I think the most surprising thing was that women in the Army were dying by homicide and suicide at roughly twice the rates of civilian women. And intimate partner homicide was at least three times the national average and more than half the women were killed by service members or veterans. So we found significant gaps in the army’s own homicide data between what we found in our reporting.

Terry Gerton What is the explanation for those extraordinary rates of violence? Daniel?

Daniel Johnson Yes. The research front of it points to really the U.S. Army and DoD’s culture of masculinity… It also meant he don’t fit the masculine idea as a key driver of this violence, right? And it’s not just this culture, but it’s a variety of systemic failures. Not just women dying of homicide due to intimate partner violence, or male service members killing them even if they’re strangers, due to lack of safety, but also suicide due to the lack of mental health support in systems that support their well-being. It’s multifaceted, and basically what we found, this leads to these egregiously high rates of death among these personnel.

Terry Gerton Daniel, let’s follow that on with a couple of extra details here. I mean, you looked at more than a decade of data and this is not a story about a single installation or just a handful of cases. What patterns did you find as you looked into that data?

Daniel Johnson So the data came about a lot due to frustrations how the DoD reports on these issues, especially issues like a blast over pressing mortality in their ranks. They often don’t compare their numbers to other populations, so it makes the numbers kind of useless. I started looking at the unique risks suffered by female service members when I was getting my PhD at UNC, and when the Army gave me a spreadsheet with over 5,000 deaths and 14 years of data, it was hard to try to figure out what to make of it. So I had to compare it to DoD, FBI, and CDC numbers, and what I found in the trends is that over this time period, the rates of death for homicide and suicide were higher. And even after the reforms, after the death of Vanessa Gillian, the rates for suicide and homicide actually increased in the United States Army. It was extremely troubling due to all the press and all the legislative changes that had occurred. It implied that these changes perhaps are not effective. And it’s unclear what we can do with that. Because if we attempted to fix the system and it wasn’t fixed and people are still dying, then what are the next steps? And that was really what was troubling to me.

Terry Gerton And Austin, what do you want to add?

Austin Campbell When Daniel and I were looking into the actual homicide data that we had pulled out and acquired from that larger data set, it was overwhelming to see that disproportionately speaking, you had junior enlisted to NCO ranks overrepresented in the homicides and they were primarily women of color that we were seeing. So you have young women of color who were making lower income by DoD standards who are in a greater risk of vulnerability. And I think that was like one of the more systemic issues that we were able to pull out very quickly from the data.

Terry Gerton And Austin, the reporting also raises a question about how the army even tracks these, and Daniel just mentioned that the data is really difficult to make sense of. How confident can anyone be in this situation that military leaders or Congress or even the public, really have a full picture of what’s happening on the ground in army units to women.

Austin Campbell I think my degree of confidence and public perception and lawmaker perceptions relatively low at this point, but I would say the individual anecdotal perspective of service members is probably quite high. I don’t think this was surprising to anybody who was in the force. And that means not just Army, any of the service branches. We had a lot of people approach us after reporting say, hey, I went through something similar, or this is not a one off. That I think was indicative of the greater pattern we said that this isn’t an isolated case and this is something you’re seeing at multiple bases over a recurring period. So the degree of confidence again, to echo, is low at this point for me.

Terry Gerton And Daniel?

Daniel Johnson And I would say, you know, when we contacted the United States Army about our data, we told them that we had a certain amount of homicide deaths and the Army came back and said ‘they found more?’ but didn’t clarify. So this is a foil with all the noncombatant deaths. The Army says that several more deaths occurred in the teeter time period. The question is, how’s the data being tracked and who has the true numbers? And that’s something we could not figure out. Even after the article was released, I went back to the FOIA and I found additional deaths during this time period that the FOIA wasn’t even tracking. So it’s unclear who has the full information. If you don’t have the full formation, how can we adequately deal with this issue or tackle this issue?

Terry Gerton Daniel Johnson is a teaching fellow at the University of Tubingen. Austin Campbell is an investigative reporter, and both write for The Intercept. Daniel, let me follow on with this because I will say here, I am a retired female Army officer and this information is really disturbing. And you mentioned at the top of our conversation, the military’s culture of masculinity. It’s certainly been a topic even in the news over the past couple of weeks. So if institutional attention starts shifting away from these issues, what makes us think the outcome gets better if we make it less visible?

Daniel Johnson I don’t think it will get better. I mean, I honestly think if the DoD or Department of War is shifting away from retention for issues faced by women service members, as we’ve seen with the removal of a lot of organizations, such as the — we wrote about it an article, I apologize —

Terry Gerton DACOWITS

Daniel Johnson DACOWITS! Yes.

Terry Gerton I was just writing it down myself.

Daniel Johnson Yeah, I mean that’s not gonna make the problem better because now we’re not even, we don’t want to have institutions that specifically focus on this issue. I think that things that could be done, there has to be more reporting, the more data-driven reporting, but people we interviewed talked about the need for an independent committee that looks at, like we look at sexual assault, look at homicide among women in the military, the independent committee that looks at domestic violence among women and military, to keep this issue in a national consciousness and to keep the institutional pressure on. Because if we don’t talk about it, it’s just not gonna go away. And then five to 10 years later, it’ll be another report…

Terry Gerton Austin, the current leadership in the Pentagon talks a great deal about standards and discipline and war fighting and lethality. Based on your reporting, do you think that the senior leaders view violence against women and sexual assault and domestic violence as a readiness issue? Or are they thinking this is something for the sexual assault office over in the corner to deal with?

Austin Campbell I would argue they view it as a non-issue. Over the past year or so of my reporting on the different service branches, Army and Air Force in particular, and as you made mention of your service background, both Daniel and I are veterans ourselves. So we have some individual background and knowledge on the matter. But I don’t think the current leadership in the Pentagon focuses on any issues that could deal with retention and recruitment rates, if that tracks with you. I think fundamentally speaking, they try to diffuse and shift blame to be in a way that like it won’t come up when we ask questions. Daniel and I are both sitting on an overwhelming amount of data, data provided to us firsthand by the DoD. And when we approach them with the same data they gave us, they kind of have this walk around pattern of answering as minimally as possible. So I don’t, one of the things that we saw in the reporting that was alarming, and it’s been reported by other outlets as well, is the minimization of resources for family and women and the access to actually seek counseling or what have you. And then a recurring topic that we have come up are FAP and IDC committees. And basically the preponderance of evidence that is needed in order to get a proper attribution to the case for what’s going on can be different from what’s happening with civilian investigators. So it’s difficult for service members to know where to go because these resources are being stripped away, and it’s also difficult for these resources to then get the, I don’t want to say justice, but the justice they deserve for their cases because the DoD is insular in the fact that they don’t necessarily want to prosecute and have these cases come to light in the civilian sense.

Terry Gerton Austin, let me follow up on this and Daniel, certainly feel free to jump in. The impact on women in the force is obvious from just the title of our discussion. Did you uncover any retention or readiness issues on a unit where an incident like this has happened?

Daniel Johnson I would say nothing I could find for, you know, specifically. One of the cases Mary Diaz before she joined the U.S. Army, she had heard about the case of Vanessa Guillen and she told her mother that hopefully this would not happen to her. And unfortunately, as reported, it did in a way. And the army failed her. What that means overall for how the military recruits and retains women is still an open question because it’s not clear what that data shows year after year, but I do know under the Biden administration, it was a big issue because recruiting retention rates were down. I would think if the DoD does care about recruiting retention, then they can take steps to show that they’re dealing with the issue. People we interviewed talked about the need for better data tracking. People talked about the need for things such as barracks safety, things the Department of War could go to Congress and ask for if they say this is hurting our our ability to fight wars and maintain our lethality.

Terry Gerton Austin, do you want to add anything there?

Austin Campbell I think one of the things that we were really optimistic for this year is with the National Defense Authorization Act for 2027. We were hoping that our reporting, given that we had spoken to Representative Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), would maybe make its way into the NDAA for the House. And typically those come out from, I believe, October to January is when they pass the House. And this year, obviously, it passed yesterday in July because of the integration of the SAVE Acts and some of the controversies that were following the Section 219, Section 224 previously regards to the Israel cointegration of military technology. So it doesn’t seem like our reporting will be in the NDAA this year because of some of the I won’t say, political charades, that maybe took place that passed the NDAA so early, but I do think ultimately we’re still optimistic. There are lawmakers who are aware. There are obviously senior leaders of the Pentagon who are aware. And I will say neither Daniel nor I really believe that the DoD or DoW doesn’t care. I do think they care tremendously. But I also, with a caveat, think that the DoD has a track record of self preservation. When you’re in the business of war, things can be really messy and things can be misunderstood by the civilian population very readily. And you don’t want to provide talking points for mainstream media to run on and maybe make retention and recruitment more difficult. So we have people, I’ve had people routinely who have been in senior leadership positions reach out and they’re very moved by this reporting, they’re moved by other reporting that have victims and they want to see a change. But change can only come with from within. And a lot of people will point towards, Congress needs to do something here. And I would argue that the DoD or DoW needs to do something. The data is there. They have the data. We have the data. It’s time for some internal accountability.