US special forces have been committing suicide at record levels for the last two years, the head of the US Special Operations Command (SOCom) admitted in a speech on Thursday. He blamed the high numbers on the length and difficulty of combat.

“There is a lot of angst. There’s a lot of pressure out there. My soldiers have been fighting now for 12, 13 years in hard combat. Hard combat,” Adm. William McRaven, the head of SOCom, said at a conference in Florida. “And anybody that has spent any time in this war has been changed by it. It’s that simple.”

Since the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, military troops – including special forces units like Navy SEALs and Army Rangers – have endured multiple deployments. Military suicides increased across the board during that time, to the point that suicides (349) outpaced combat deaths (311) in 2012, according to a Guardian analysis in 2013.

McRaven did not give the rate of military suicides in his remarks to the GEOINT Symposium, an intelligence convention in Tampa organized by the US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation. SOCom declined a request by the Tampa Bay Times to provide the figures that McRaven alluded to.

In January, McRaven directed the formation of a suicide-prevention working group to address the unique needs of the elite troops that make up SOCom, the Tampa Bay Times reported.

“The welfare of these brave service members and their families is critical to our command’s readiness and our ability to accomplish the mission. It is also a moral imperative,” McRaven said in a congressional testimony in February. SOCom’s head detailed steps that the command is taking to provide psychological help to its special forces, including embedding behavioral health professionals throughout the command’s units.

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