Service members committed suicide during 2012 at a record pace: more than 349 took their own lives across the four branches, or one every 25 hours, a Department of Defense spokesperson confirmed Monday.

The Army sustained the heaviest suicide toll at 182, a dark tally that — as NBC News reported Jan. 3 — marked another frightening first as soldier suicides last year outpaced the 176 Army members who were killed in combat while serving Operation Enduring Freedom, according to Pentagon officials.

During 2012, there also were 60 suicides among active-duty members of the Navy, 59 in the Air Force and 48 in the Marine Corps. Throughout the U.S. military, suicides increased by nearly 16 percent from 2011 to 2012, figures show. The Department of Defense has been issuing annual reports that track suicides since 2008, said spokeswoman Cynthia O. Smith.

“We are deeply concerned about suicide in the military, which is one of the most urgent problems facing the department,” Smith said in a prepared news release. “Our most valuable resource within the department is our people. We are committed to taking care of our people, and that includes doing everything possible to prevent suicides in the military.”

The continuing rise in active-duty suicides coincides with a bevy of new initiatives and programs within the military aimed to stem the epidemic. For example, a crisis number has been launched for any active-duty member experiencing suicidal thoughts to dial, or for military family members to call if they spot a mental-health disaster looming within their home: 1-800-273-8255.

“This happens almost every month when they come out with the suicide numbers: (a flurry of media stories and public vows to immediately solve the problem), so I don’t want to get stuck on the number. But it’s too high and clearly it’s not a good trend,” said Kristina Kaufmann, executive director of Code of Support Foundation, an Alexandria, Va.-based nonprofit that advocates for needs of those in the military community, including military families.

“We have a lot of organizations both within the government and within the nonprofit sector that are trying (to curb the military-suicide rate) and people are really, intensively — finally — looking at this. But there’s a lot of damage in the pipeline and that’s the part we haven’t dealt with effectively,” Kaufmann added.

Advocates fear the military suicide rate will climb in coming years as more troops are drawn down in Afghanistan. They worry about a spike, in part, because military families — typically the first people to spot mental-health red flags in their returning loved ones — “are just not effectively integrated into suicide-prevention efforts,” she said.

“We’ve asked too much of too few for too long, and this is the conversation the country needs to have. This is not just a military issue,” she added. “Look at how most of us got through the 10 years of war and the multiple deployments. This is a very tough community, unbelievably resilient. But after everybody comes home, and is home for longer than six months to a year, and we’re all together again in a non-emergency situation, that’s when the cracks will show.

“When we’re finally all able to take a breath, people are going to have to start dealing with the challenging things we’ve all kind of pushed down (internally) for the past 10 years. Remember what works well in battle and in combat and the characteristics that make a good soldier or a good Marine are sometimes not successfully translated when you come home,” Kaufmann said. “That’s where it’s going to be tough for people to readjust.”

The figures confirmed Monday are preliminary suicide statistics and do not include 110 “pending” reported suicides among active-duty troop in 2012 that are still under investigation by medical examiners, Smith said.

Typically, those still-unconfirmed cases receive final rulings by late summer and the Department of Defense releases its annual report on the previous year’s suicides sometime in August. The Pentagon, Smith added, is expected to follow that same timetable in 2013.

NBC News' Courtney Kube and Jim Miklaszewski contributed to this report.

Related: The enemy within: Soldier suicides outpace combat deaths in 2012
Related: Some wounded vets shine on 'Alive Day,' others wear black 

With only 8 percent of reported military sexual assaults ending in the court-martial convictions of offenders, the head of a victims group testified Friday before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that an independent audit of those investigations and trials “would be a wonderful thing.”

“I think that’s a great idea,” testified Nancy Parrish, president of the advocacy group Protect Our Defenders, who was responding to an audit suggestion floated by commission member David Kladney. Parrish also reported that military leaders later reduced some of those rape convictions to lesser charges such as adultery and indecent language, meaning the offenders remain on active duty and had their time in the brig substantially decreased.

“That’s the message. That’s why we’re here today because unpunished sexual assault in the military is an epidemic (and) victims don’t come forward and report because it’s futile,” she testified.

The hearing in Washington, D.C., marked the first time the Civil Rights Commission has taken up the issue of sexual assault in the military in the post-9/11 era, when women began to make up 15 percent of the American armed forces.

The eight-member panel — four appointed by the White House, four by Congress — invited a roster packed with 14 key players in current efforts to stem sexual assaults inside the military, including victim supporters, academics and flag officers from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps.

Courts, not therapy sessions
The commission this year will draft a report and offer its findings and recommendations to President Barack Obama and to the U.S. Senate and House. But based on the tone and content of many questions posed by the commission — including the first question asked by Commission Chair Martin Castro — it seems possible that the White House and Congress may be faced with the notion of removing sex assault investigations and trials not just from the chain of command but from the military altogether.

Castro’s opening question was sparked by the testimony of retired Army Maj. Bridget Wilson, a former judge advocate in the California State Military Reserve and now a partner at the San Diego law firm Rosenstein, Wilson & Dean. She testified that sex-assault investigations must remain in the military “for the process to have credibility” and that “it has to be command driven.”

Wilson testified that a 23-percent increase in reports of sexual assaults at U.S. military academies — revealed by the Pentagon in late December — was simply a byproduct of a military legal process that “is being driven by fear, by the goal being set, as opposed to the truth of the situation.”

Military commanders "were told their goal for the year was to have more reports and, by God, they had more reports,” Wilson said. “Now, the pressure is to have more convictions and, trust me, they will have more convictions. Because that’s what the military does: You give it a mission, it gets it done, regardless of how that works.

“We can reduce sexual assault of our troops. It is a terrible violation ... But we have to do it right. We can’t do it in a way that makes this look like a feeding frenzy and a witch hunt,” she added.

“Would it not be better,” Castro then asked, “to have a civilian process in place, where cases that aren’t being charged (but) that should be charged in the military might have a fresh and different view — in a civilian process?”

“I think we’ve got to have good cases,” Wilson responded. “These are courts of law. They’re not therapy sessions.”

Undermining authority
Several military leaders invited to the hearing also decried the notion of pulling sexual-assault cases out of the military and handing them to an independent, civilian tribunal where evidence and testimony would be judged and defendants would be either cleared or convicted.

Such a move would undermine the authority of military commanders, who are tasked with training their troops, setting standards then disciplining those service members who fail to follow the established codes of conduct, testified Army Maj. Gen. Gary Patton, director of the Department of Defense Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office.

“It’s important to retain the commanders as a central role in a justice system,” Patton testified. “The commanders own this problem. Commanders are going to have to fix this problem. ... By removing any kind of decision-making, with regard to discipline, away from the chain of command, we are not keeping commanders involved in the problem.”

The Sexual Assault Training Oversight and Protection bill (also called the STOP Act) was introduced to Congress in 2011 by Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., as her plan to address rising reports of sexual assaults in the military — and to encourage more victims to file charges. It remains stalled in committees. The bill would create an autonomous sexual assault oversight and response office staffed by both military and civilian personnel.

During the hearing, commission member Roberta Achtenberg asked Castro if the STOP Act’s recommendations could be made part of the testimonial record. Castro agreed.

Protect Our Defenders has long been a vocal proponent of the STOP Act, and Parrish testified that the 8-percent conviction rate, in part, “validates the standing up of an independent, impartial, expert office.”

'Outlier among the world's militaries'
But another expert, University of California, Hastings, School of Law Professor Elizabeth Hillman, cautioned that the STOP Act doesn’t go far enough. She testified that the U.S. military should follow several of its key allies and remove all criminal prosecutions from the desks of military commanders.

“The United States is an outlier among the world’s militaries in placing the discretion to prosecute in the hands of commanding officers rather than civilian authorities,” Hillman said. “The clear trend in the militaries of our allies is toward civilian control over military criminal prosecutions, not only in sexual assault but in all criminal cases.”

The United Kingdom, for example, named a civil servant as director of its armed service prosecutions; his deputy is a brigadier general, Hillman testified. Similar strategies have been applied to the militaries in Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand — they each have military-justice systems with civilian authority to prosecute.  

Though acknowledging that U.S. military officials are visibly trying to curb sexual assaults with an array of new tools and programs, Hillman said she remains "less sanguine about the likelihood of success under this latest regime.”

Allowing military commanders to retain responsibility for criminal prosecutions leaves them “liable to the scrutiny of the public, to criticism no matter what they do,” said Hillman, an Air Force veteran. It also “leaves their troops vulnerable to a problem that, so far, our military has gained little traction over despite two decades of what I would consider serious and comprehensive efforts to address it.”

Related: Reported sex assaults leap 23 percent at US military academies
Related: Sex-assault victims in military say brass often ignore pleas for justice

Mark Rankin / U.S. Army file

A bulldozer dumps a load of trash into a burn pit just 300 yards from the runway at Bagram Airfield. A law signed by President Barack Obama will create a registry of U.S. service members who may have been sickened or killed by burn pits used throughout Iraq and Afghanistan.

An American flag dangles from the Torres home, the sign of a long battle won: a new law — signed Thursday by President Barack Obama — creating a registry of U.S. service members perhaps sickened or killed by burn pits used throughout Iraq and Afghanistan to destroy waste ranging from batteries to body parts.

But amid occasional smiles over the first step to formally identify the toxic effects of what’s called “this generation’s Agent Orange,” there were tears, too, in that house near Corpus Christi, Texas. Resident Le RoyTorres, 40, a former Army captain, is one of the ill veterans who will land on that list.

“It was a big victory. It justifies the need for health care. And now we know we’re not alone,” said Rosie Lopez-Torres, Le Roy’s wife, who said she “knocked on a lot of doors” in Congressional hallways to push the bill, which passed Dec. 30. The law requires the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to assemble the registry and report back to Congress. 

“But because of (our) finances, because my husband can’t work, today was also one of the toughest days for us,” Lopez-Torres said Wednesday. “Today, he was in tears. I’m not going to sugar coat that. How do I convince this once-strong, 6-foot-tall man who never missed a day of work: ‘You are the same man.’ But as the head of the household, he said: ‘You don’t understand what this has done to me.’ So it’s hard. But we still hang that flag on our porch. This has nothing to do with the military. This has to do with the contractors.”

After a lung biopsy, Le Roy Torres was diagnosed in 2010 with constrictive bronchiolitis, an irreversible disease that squeezes off airways. In 2007 and 2008, he was stationed in Balad, Iraq — home to what may have been largest military burn pit — the size of 10 football fields. Torres, for a time, performed his daily calisthenics near the dark plumes emitted by the smoldering crater.

Forced by breathing problems to later retire from his post-Army job as a highway patrolman, Torres is one of thousands of veterans who have filed more than 50 lawsuits against defense contractors hired to handle waste management in the war zones. The Motley Rice law firm is representing Torres and other veterans and their survivors in one of those class-action suits.

Attorneys allege the contractors — including KBR, Inc. and its former parent company, Halliburton — mismanaged the burns and exposed American troops to poison fumes. Last July, KBR’s lawyers argued that 55 such cases should be dismissed, in part because employees from the Houston-based company served “shoulder-to-shoulder” with service members, which should grant KBR the same immunity given to government entities and personnel, such as soldiers.

Service members, however, have complained for a decade that burn pits scattered across Iraq and Afghanistan were making them sick with cancers and other diseases, and were killing some young troops. In 2007, Army and Air Force health inspectors went to Balad and measured airborne, cancer-causing dioxins at 51 times the “acceptable levels.” They determined the cancer risk for people serving at the base for more than one year was eight times higher than normal. In 2008, the Military Times reported that single burn pit might have exposed tens of thousands of troops to dioxins and toxins such as arsenic.

What has been the health toll on U.S. troops? That’s what the new registry is designed to calculate, said Paul Rieckhoff, founder and chief executive officer of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a group representing more than 200,000 former service members.

“This is something we’ve been fighting for, for years. It will be one database where doctors can go and look at the common symptoms. It also will help verify the problem quicker so vets can get the care they need,” said Rieckhoff, who served as a first lieutenant and infantry rifle platoon leader in Iraq during 2003 and 2004. He has experienced respiratory problems, although he cannot pinpoint the cause. “I don’t know too many people who weren’t exposed to a burn pit sometime during their deployment. They were constant.”

The smoking landfills typically contained damaged Humvees, unexploded ordnance, gas cans, mattresses, rocket pods, plastics, medical waste and amputated body parts, and they often were ignited by jet fuel.

The act does not mandate new VA benefits for veterans who chronically inhaled the vapors, Rieckhoff said. But the registry is expected to help private and government doctors document health conditions potentially related to burn pits, and perhaps hasten many diagnoses.

“It will help us get to the bottom of what’s causing so many vets to be sick,” he added. “We don’t know what toxic exposure is going to be (shown). It could be our generation’s Agent Orange (the defoliant used in Vietnam, later shown to be carcinogenic). But it’s important that you start with data. Data will be a critical part of identifying the problem and then creating good treatment. I’m glad we didn’t have to wait decades like the Vietnam veterans did around Agent Orange.”

Le Roy Torres, for example, has been given a 10 percent disability rating by the VA, said his wife, who calls that ruling “a joke” because “he served for 22 years, lost his childhood dreams, his career, just turned 40 and is unable to work because of his lung disease which also has affected his heart.” The Torres family is fighting the VA for a higher disability rating and, thus, higher compensation for his service-related symptoms. 

Before the lawsuits and the law, a handful of military families launched their own, online registries for service members, veterans and their survivors so they could report their symptoms and mark how closely they had served to one or several of the burn pits. 

As Le Roy Torres struggled harder to breathe, he and his wife launched BurnPits360.org. The site lists 11 service members who descended from full health to terminal cancer after serving near a burn pit. That roll includes Air Force Sgt. Jessica Sweet, who died of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) in 2009 at age 30. She served in Afghanistan. Also listed is Army Staff Sgt. Steven Ochs, who died from AML in 2008 at age 32. He served in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

One of the registry's primary goals is to determine if there are tangible links between the deaths of service members like Sweet and Ochs and their exposure to the burn pits.

“How many have been affected? Every week I get an email from someone who has passed,” Rosie Lopez-Torres said. “We started our registry because we weren’t going to wait on the Department of Defense and VA. Our list of people who have self reported their data — whether it’s the loved one of a fallen hero who lost the battle with toxic exposure, or someone who is fighting the battle — is well over 1,000 people. They are from all over the country.

“The hardest thing for us is trying to figure out the finances day to day, and hearing (from the government) ‘just wait’ on your retirement check,” she added. “He’s hearing, ‘wait, wait, wait’ but he’s having to provide for his family. And he’s looking at his life and saying: “What am I going to do now?’”

Officials within the U.S. military are actively targeting over-boozing troops at home and abroad, but addiction specialists and service members say binge drinking remains as rampant as ever inside the armed services.

Among the new initiatives to stem the problem: The Marines, starting next year, will give random breathalyzer tests to Corps members; the Air Force and Army curbed some overnight liquor sales for U.S. military personnel in Germany; and American service members in Japan were barred from leaving their residences after consuming more than one adult beverage.

The restrictions seem to have been independently created by brass within each branch — for example, the new rules for service members in Japan follow the October sexual assault of an Okinawa woman allegedly carried out by two U.S. sailors. Still, the fresh regulations arise three months after a study commissioned by the Department of Defense found that binge drinking by active-duty troops now constitutes "a public health crisis," noting as well that drunken soldiers were cited as a problem as far back as the Revolutionary War.

"But we can do better," said Dr. Charles P. O’Brien, chairman of the panel that authored the report and director of the Center for Studies of Addiction at the University of Pennsylvania. "We have a lot of research, a lot of medication, and a lot of techniques that have been developed over the years. We don’t have to be stuck in the old ways of handling things.

"We found, though, that in the whole Army, there’s only one doctor who's trained in addiction medicine. This is a specialty where we need more people and they're not there. So, most people are not getting treated with evidence-based medicine," O'Brien told NBC News. The study was issued by the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Medicine.

Worse, O'Brien said he has learned — from emails he received in recent days from active-duty personnel — that one of the study's most simple suggestions has not been implemented: that the military's health system, TRICARE, alter its rules and allow substance-abusing service members to be treated with anti-addiction medications like Suboxone.  

"We met a general who is on Suboxone but they (military doctors) are not letting other people have it," O'Brien said. "It's ridiculous ... When we briefed (military leaders in September), they expressed interest in following our recommendations. But, so far, I don't have any concrete evidence that anything has happened." 

NBC News asked the Department of Defense to list which, if any, of the panel's recommendations have been installed to date. 

"The Department of Defense appreciates the hard work of the Institute of Medicine in assessing substance abuse programs and policies in the Military Health System," Cynthia O. Smith, a DoD spokeswoman, responded in an email. "We are in the process of analyzing their findings and recommendations, but most importantly, we want to do the right thing for the Service member. If there are areas in need of improvement, then we will work to improve those areas. The health and well-being of our Service members is paramount."

Click here for more military-related coverage from NBC News.

The agency has a stated policy to "prevent and eliminate drug and alcohol abuse and dependence from the Department of Defense." The U.S. military, therefore, screens for problem drinking, provides treatment for those identified with alcohol or drug problems, and is working to "change attitudes toward binge drinking," Smith said, adding that "such abuse and dependence are incompatible with readiness, the maintenance of high standards of performance, and military discipline."

Indeed, in its analysis of boozing on military bases, the Institute of Medicine found that 47 percent of active-duty personnel engaged in binge drinking during 2008 (the most recent year for which data was available), and the authors concluded the use of alcohol and other drugs are "currently at unacceptably high levels," making it "detrimental to readiness and total force fitness." 

Military members like Marine Sgt. Thomas Brennan, who joined in 2004 and who later served in Iraq and Afghanistan, describe drinking as a staple of life in uniform. He knows of several recent drunken-driving arrests involving his Marine buddies or his former unit members, he said.  

"With the amount of recreational drinking that goes on, it’s like peer pressure times 10," said Brennan, 27. "Everybody’s drinking. The Marine Corps is a brotherhood. You want to be part of that brotherhood, and your brothers are doing it. Nobody forces you to do it but the inclination to do it is pretty strong.”

In a New York Times blog published in October, Brennan wrote that the "golden rule" among Marine officers and non-commissioned officers seems to be: "If you’re going to partake, do so behind closed doors and keep your mouth shut about it. I have heard many leaders tell under-age Marines that if they were going to drink that they should keep their doors locked and be smart about it. Only when they were caught were they told not to do it."

“I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that over the years," Brennan told NBC News on Monday. "I wasn’t perfect either. I let it go on.”

The September study on alcohol abuse within the military also chastised the armed services for allowing "ready access to relatively inexpensive alcohol on military bases." 

At Camp Lejeune, where Brennan was stationed, convenience stores contain large refrigerators stocked with domestic and imported beers, sold tax free. A six-pack of Stroh's, for example, costs about $4, he said.

On base, Marines also can purchase "Military Special" liquors, a cut-rate brand of liquor, including vodka and whiskey, that goes for about $6.50 per liter. At AR15.com, a firearms website popular with military members, one commenter described Military Special booze as: "No good for sipping, but for shots it works;" another said: "I am not sure I would clean battery terminals with that crap." 

One combat-related factor exacerbating the overindulgence of alcohol is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In September, the Institute of Medicine reported that Iraq and Afghanistan veterans diagnosed with PTSD have alcohol-abuse rates that are twice as high as those found among civilian young adult males.

Brennan was diagnosed with PTSD and said that self-medicating with alcohol caused him to suffer a "short-lived drinking problem" after he returned from Iraq.  

"You’re already depressed because of the PTSD. Alcohol’s a depressant. A lot of guys with PTSD just got angry (when they drank) and did dumb stuff, like fighting," Brennan said in a phone interview. "We had one guy throw his refrigerator off the third deck one night when he was drinking. But I don’t know if that was PTSD, or just him being a crazy drunk."

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DENVER -- Nearly 30 Air Force Academy cadets required medical care, with six of them hospitalized, after an annual tradition to mark the first snowfall of the season turned into an out-of-control melee, officials said Wednesday.

An unauthorized ritual last week called "First Shirt/First Snow," in which freshman cadets try to throw their cadet sergeant into a snowbank, grew violent and resulted in injuries, the academy said in a statement.

"A relatively small number of cadets chose to take part in this unsafe activity," Brig. Gen. Gregory Lengyel said in the statement. "This incident was unacceptable."

The six cadets who required hospitalization after last Thursday's incident have all been released, and the 21 others were treated for "bruises and/or lacerations" at the academy's cadet clinic, the school said.

Lengyel, who serves as the commandant of cadets, said school officials are investigating the incident. "Our Air Force expects better. I expect better, and I'm confident the cadets will learn and grow from this."

An internal email about the incident obtained by the Air Force Times newspaper, reportedly written by Brig. Gen. Dana Born to school administrators, said the annual ritual "has turned into a brawl" between freshmen and upperclassmen.

"This ritual has devolved to become increasingly violent, with significant numbers of cadets requiring medical care over the past two years," The Times cited the email as saying, adding that the latest injuries included concussions, an arm bite and cuts that required stitches.

More news from Colorado on NBC affiliate 9News.com in Denver

“Obviously, this has gotten out of hand and cannot be repeated,” Born wrote. “There is no way we can condone or defend this.”

The Times said the internal memo indicated Lengyel might allow the tradition to continue if cadets can show it can be conducted with "good order and discipline and proper risk management."

Located in Colorado Springs, 60 miles south of Denver, the academy has an enrollment of about 4,100 cadets, and graduates are commissioned second lieutenants in the U.S. Air Force.

The reported incident is a fresh blow to the reputation of the Air Force, which has dealt with a number of scandals in recent years.

More coverage of the US military on NBCNews.com

In 2003, the academy was accused of failing to investigate numerous incidents of sexual assaults on the campus.

In 2005, an Air Force panel concluded that officers and faculty members periodically used their positions to promote their Christian faith and failed to accommodate the religious needs of non-Christian cadets.

The academy has also been hit with several cheating and drug-use incidents in recent years, according to the Colorado Springs Independent.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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courtesy of IFS

A new app, Flight Log, designed for the military was released Monday by IFS, a company that already works with the U.S. Army.

Now that we know horses and bayonets are (mostly) outmoded, a U.K.-based company says its new mobile military app can help American forces take another step toward the future by going more paperless in combat. 

IFS, a global “enterprise applications company” that already works with the U.S. Army, released Monday its “Flight Log” app specifically for military smartphones. It is designed, according to IFS, to help personnel aboard planes, boats and vehicles record real-time,mission data that can be relayed to a central command facility.

The on-the-go app, IFS contends, will save the military time, money and mistakes while making it unnecessary to take IT-trained troops with them on deployments to repair any tech glitches that arise in the field.

“Flight Log provides an immediate window into the back (IT) office, rather than having to take the back office with them where ever they go,” said Kevin Deal, vice president for aerospace & defense at IFS North America.

The Army already is investing in mobile apps but those generally are only applied to training, IFS said. Flight Log, which could be in hostile environments, “is very specialized in defense so we’re going to be hosting it internally to start with,” said Brendan Viggers, the company’s U.K.-based head of product management. “You need (to be part of the IFS system) to use. This is not something that we'll put on Google Play or on the Windows store.”

The app’s uses can span terrains. For example, if technical problems arise in flight, the app connects the crew immediately with military IT experts on the ground to alert them that a repair is needed as soon as the aircraft returns to base. Fliers can even take a photo of the glitch — for instance, a panel reading — and share that image with the IT staff at the base.

For land vehicles, Flight Log can help the soldiers record notes on the fly like “change a tire,” “fix a cracked wind screen,” “swap out radio” or “replace part for gun turret,” Deal said. “It’s a quick way of recording information on an app rather than putting that information on a piece of paper.

“If you put that (repair order) on paper, you have to wait for that piece of paper to go through the loop of fax machines versus instantly updating the system to let them (at the base) know you’ve found an error,” Deal added. Relying on paper-based notes to request repairs also “can lead to mistakes." 

Saving time is nice. But saving money — particularly amid all the campaign conversations about military budgets — may be more critical, and it's something Flight Log can help achieve, IFS contends.

“Say you’re working on an F-16 (aircraft) in an avionics bay,” Deal said. “You can sit there and look at a technical component that’s broken and take a picture of it with the app. After an IT member sees the picture, it may turn out that it’s not required that this problem get repaired right at that moment, which is important if you’ve got sorties you’ve got to fly. Or, if you do need to get a new part, you can look at that app and ask it: ‘Where is that part? Can I get it here quickly? If so, I’ll go ahead and make that repair now.’ So it really extends the abilities of the flight-light maintainers.”

Flight Log also gives service members a digital tool to replace mounds of paper instructions that detail highly complex pieces of military equipment. For example, the instruction manual for a C-130 military transport plane can fill an entire briefcase, IFS said. Aside from bulk, paper presents other potential problems: a soldier’s notes on a technical problem get jotted on a slip paper that eventually goes missing, or the problem is simply wrongly described in a written report. The ripple effects of such clerical mistakes can roll into waves of lost time and lost dollars, Deal said.

“Bad data is one of the biggest things that military IT infrastructures face,” Deal said. “It can actually cause you to buy the wrong parts or to procure too many of a particular item.”

Flight Log is not yet in use in the U.S. military — though IFS expects that it soon will become an icon on many service members’ phones.

“In addition to the cost-savings that come with better data accuracy, and the cost savings of (eliminating) paper-captured information, there’s also a reduction of training — and that saves money, too” Viggers said. “They can just download it from the app store and use it straight away, and nobody has to teach them how to find it or how to use it.” 

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Courtesy of Rebecca Morrison

Ian Morrison and Rebecca Morrison, taken at Fort Hood in Texas the day he deployed to Iraq as an Army Apache helicopter pilot. He flew 70 missions in Iraq. In March this year, Ian Morrison committed suicide in Texas at age 26.

The call she placed, and the advice she received, didn’t simply allow Rebecca Morrison to survive one of her worst days. The words she heard, she said, saved her life.

Before a Fort Hood memorial service to honor her husband – an Army chopper pilot who ended his life – Morrison grabbed a scrap of paper from her nightstand, read the scrawled number, and dialed up the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS). In that pitch-black moment, she needed answers to two desperate questions. On the other end, Kim Ruocco listened. Seven years earlier, Ruocco had lost her husband, a Marine major, to suicide.

“I can’t even breathe,” Morrison began, through sobs, from her Texas home. “How do you breathe?”

“It will just come,” Ruocco replied from the TAPS office in Arlington, Va.

“How can I ever be happy again?”

“It doesn’t get less painful,” Ruocco told her. “After time, it just gets ... less present.”

Six months later, Morrison, 25, is breathing. She’s also teaching third graders, running, riding her horse, and — Thursday — remembering Ian on what would have been his 27th birthday. She's also speaking at anti-suicide events and launching a suicide support group near Dallas — all of it, she added, because she placed that call. But with one U.S. service member committing suicide every 19 hours, it’s the breathing that Morrison mentions first when asked how TAPS helped her most.

“Once you lose someone to suicide, you are so prone to suicide yourself. I got to that point. If they hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t be here,” she said. “Every widow I’ve talked to, every family member, has felt that way. You just want to be with that person more than anything. I mean, he was my husband. They’re saving the lives of the survivors.”

The suicide crisis inside the military has, indeed, injected fresh urgency into the larger mission of TAPS, a peer-based, emotional support group for families who have lost active-duty military members overseas or at home. It also has “stretched” the nonprofit’s budget and 53-member staff, said Bonnie Carroll, who founded TAPS in 1994 after her husband, Brigadier General Tom Carroll, was killed in a plane crash.

Courtesy of Bonnie Carroll

Bonnie Carroll founded TAPS in 1994, two years after her Army husband, Tom, was killed in a plane crash. When Rebecca Morrison called TAPS last April, Bonnie answered the phone.

“We are the alumni association for those who have died in the military. There is no one else that does this,” Carroll said. “Whether it’s a motorcycle crash or a death in combat or a suicide, for the family, it’s the same knock on the door, the same folded flag.

“We’re seeing an increase in the death rate, in the casualty rate, but from the public’s perception: ‘Oh, the war is over and everybody’s home and they’re safe.’ Well, in a skewed way it almost seems like you’re safer in a deployed environment. You’re less likely to die there of a hostile attack than you are to die here.”

Some increasingly sad statistics: During the first nine months of this year, 247 Army troops — including active-duty soldiers, National Guard members and reservists, have committed suicide, according to a Department of Defense report last week. (The Army is the only military branch that issues monthly press statements on suicides). In 2012, the Army suicide rate has climbed over last year, despite myriad anti-suicide initiatives, conferences and medical studies as well as prevention promises and get-help pleas both inside and outside the branch. Meanwhile, within the Navy, Marines and Air Force, another 126 service members combined have taken their lives this year, reports ArmyTimes. 

As America transitions from a decade of war toward a hopeful peace, TAPS has rarely been busier. The organization, which staffs a 24-hour hotline, is fielding, on average, 111 calls per day, Carroll said. From November 2011 through this past September, TAPS began working with 4,138 new survivors.

In the military community, the TAPS team is considered credible, Carroll said, because each member has lived that moment.

“The traumatic death of an immediate loved one will knock you out and sometimes kill you. You really need to deal with it on a very deep and serious level,” Carroll said. “And the absolute best support — what we’re really finding with our suicide survivors — is that unless they’re talking with another mom found her son after he died by suicide, they’re just not going to talk.”

As its staff now connects, on average, with 376 new survivors per day, TAPS is feeling the urgent need “to definitely do more,” Carroll said.

But on an already-tight budget, seeking extra dollars to meet the crisis requires a delicate, high wire walk worthy of a Wallenda: A nonprofit must project fiscal stability while also demonstrating its growing obligation.

“After 9/11, why did people continue to give to the Red Cross even though it was funded in the billions? It’s because people give to organizations that are financially sound. Which is counterintuitive. You’d think they’d give to the ones that have a more desperate need for the funding,” Carroll said. “So it’s a really tough balance there. We are financially sound. We take every penny and put it toward appropriate programs. We have wonderful partners. But we are constantly searching to meet that need.”

TAPS spends $450,000 per month, Carroll said. In addition to its paid staff and the 24-hour hotline they manage, the group publishes a quarterly magazine and stages dozens of survivor events around the country, including a conference for military-suicide survivors earlier this month in San Diego.

Funding is funneled to the nonprofit from neighborhood bake sales on to large checks from corporate partners, including foundations affiliated with Prudential, New York Life and Hasbro.

“There is no membership — no fees, no dues,” Carroll said. “The cost of admission is the sacrifice of a loved one. And the care they receive is forever and always.”

TAPS further squeezes its budget by leveraging a 1,000-plus legion of volunteers — survivors who are, themselves, at least two years beyond their own loss and trained in how to support the newly bereaved. That network is the bittersweet result of the mounting losses on the home front: as more service members die after returning from war, more of their survivors are volunteering with TAPS.

“That is the holy grail of why this works. It’s a concept of: when you help another person, you continue your own healing,” Carroll said.

Courtesy of Bonnie Carroll

Bonnie and Tom Carroll. They met in Alaska in 1988 during a massive attempt to save three gray whales trapped beneath pack ice.

This is the sacred notion that inspired Carroll to build TAPS. While working for the Reagan White House, she met her Army husband, Tom, on a massive spread of pack ice in Barrow, Alaska, in 1988 amid a globally watched effort — dubbed “Operation Breakthrough” — to free three trapped gray whales. That rescue inspired the 2012 film "Big Miracle."

Tom, portrayed by Dermot Mulroney, and Bonnie, portrayed by Vinessa Shaw, later married. Their wedding — complete with a cake topped by icing-laden whale replicas — was re-enacted in the film. (Their characters had different names in the movie — a choice made by the filmmakers because “Big Miracle” is not a documentary).

“That’s Tom, that’s us. He’s that guy, and I’m that White House girl,” Carroll said.

Four years after the whale rescue, Tom Carroll died along with eight other soldiers in an Army C-12 plane crash in Alaska.

“When Tom was killed, that was my family. Now I have this extraordinary family of tens of thousands of incredible Americans who have made the ultimate sacrifice for this nation’s freedom,” Bonnie Carroll said. “We’re a family healing together."

Courtesy of Rebecca Morrison

Last weekend, Rebecca Morrison ran the Army Ten-Miler in Washington, D.C. to help raise money and awareness for TAPS - and as part of her own healing following the loss of her husband.

Now, Rebecca Morrison wants to join that family.

With a degree in counseling and the life experience of a survivor, she’s hoping to eventually work with TAPS.

In the meantime, she already has become closely aligned with the nonprofit. On Oct. 21, she ran in the Army Ten Miler — which started and finished at the Pentagon — and helped raise money for TAPS. In June, she spoke as part of a TAPS survivor panel during the annual Department of Defense/Department of Veterans Affairs Suicide Prevention Conference in Washington, D.C. And in July, Kim Ruocco of TAPS asked Morison to share her raw story for a Time magazine cover piece on military suicides titled “One A Day.”

“For me to feel better about this, I have to help other people,” Morrison said.

“Bonnie, Kim and everybody made that possible. Through speaking out, I have been able to heal.”

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Courtesy Brian Henley

Brian Henley during his Air Force days.

Brian Henley’s life plan changed with a kiss.

An aspiring air traffic controller, he was a 22-year-old airman in 1994 out partying with friends at the Enlisted Club on the Royal Air force Base in  Mildenhall, United Kingdom.

He and his friends, he said, were laughing it up and talking when, in an act he said he doesn’t even remember, he kissed one of his fellow male airmen.

“I was drunk,” Henley, who lives in Clermont, Fla., told NBC News. “I don’t even remember it. My straight friends told me later it wasn’t even true kiss, just a joke.”

Study: No negative impacts from repeal of 'don't ask, don't tell'

Still, that kiss would provide the proof military investigators would need to kick him out of the service. He said he had been investigated before for being gay, but investigators weren’t able to come up with any proof. Plus, he said, he had the backing of a lot of straight military members. But a friend disclosed in a classroom discussion that Henley was gay, and then was pressured into telling about that kiss that the military deemed a “homosexual act” on Henley's discharge papers.   

By engaging a civilian lawyer he was able to gain an honorable discharge. But he was denied GI Benefits that he paid into, and was kicked out of the Air Force with $2,000 in his bank account and even unable to collect state unemployment in his home state of California.

Even though the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays in the military was repealed a year ago, on Sept. 20, 2011, thousands of men and women who served and were kicked out for their sexual orientation still feel the sting of the policy. For many, like Henley, their lives took a much different path than they would have otherwise.

Military should better address growing alcohol and drug abuse, report says

Henley, for example, finally was able to get on his feet and complete college and is now studying to be a paralegal in Florida, but he has incurred some $25,000 in student loan debt that he otherwise would not have had if he had been able to complete his service.

Now an activist on gay issues in the Orlando area, Henley, 45, has spent the past 18 years fighting to receive those GI bill benefits to no avail. He even sent a letter to President Obama, but was referred back to the Department of Veterans Affairs, which pointed out that he had never completed his term of service, and that the 10-year window to claim the benefit had expired.

Of course the reason he didn’t complete his term of service was that he was gay.

According to a comprehensive Defense Department review of policy on gays in the military, published on November 2010, more than 32,000 service members were separated from the military due to homosexuality or homosexual conduct under "don’t ask don’t tell" and its predecessor policy. Of those, more than 13,000 were "under don’t ask don’t tell."

Generally, the Department of Defense doesn’t provide retroactive compensation unless authorized by Congress. And that doesn’t look like it is in the works, according to legal experts.

“Repeal was an enormous step forward for gay and lesbian military service members. I don’t think we can underestimate the importance of it. But it intentionally was not designed to remedy past wrongs,” David McKean, legal director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network told NBC News. “It didn’t attempt that and doesn’t do that.”

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Anyone who was kicked out under "don’t ask, don’t tell" or the regulatory ban that preceded it can apply to join up again. But they don’t get the time they lost, the back pay for the time they would have served or other benefits they would have received had they stayed in the military.

Though the Defense Department doesn’t allow the collection of educational benefits or back pay, those service members kicked out under the policies are eligible for medical benefits if they received an honorable discharge, Randal Noller, Department of Veteran’s Affairs spokesman, said.

“For the people that werekicked out under the regulatory ban or for DADT, that was an incredibly damaging event in thousands of people’s lives,” McKean said. “That has continuing lasting consequences. That’s just something the repeal couldn’t have remedied unless it was a much broader bill."

The next step in moving to full equality for gays in the military is recognition of the spouses of homosexual service members. The Defense of Marriage Act prevents the military from recognizing same-sex spouses.

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However, family readiness has always been considered mission critical in the military. That’s why it provides health care for families, deployment support services and moving assistance when service members are transferred among bases.

For now, spouses of same sex couples are cut out of the support and benefit system. They can’t even go on the base to go the grocery store because they are not given base identification.

That, according to activists, has set up a two-tiered system within the military, with heterosexual spouses taken care of but homosexual spouses cut out of that support.

The Democratic Party has long supported repeal of the 1996 act. President Barack Obama vowed not to defend DOMA in court, and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., unsuccessfully introduced legislation to end it.

Meanwhile, activists hope that more administrative measures could help the spouses of gay service members, such as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ordering that base IDs be issued for spouses.

As for Henley, he is happy that the new policy is going so well but thinks someone should be looking to remedy situations such as his.

“For people like me that have already been discharged, there is nobody lobbying for us,” he said. “If I would have already paid off my student loan debt, I don’t think it would bother me so much. But when I get a monthly statement showing that debt and I know I shouldn’t have it, that’s what’s kept it on my mind all these years.”

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Thousands of sailors and Marines from the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla., are taking refuge from Hurricane Isaac at a Georgia military base, more than doubling its population.

Charter buses carrying about 4,000 service members arrived at the Marine Corps Logistic Base in Albany, Ga., on Monday night.

Related: It's now Hurricane Isaac as New Orleans hunkers down

The Albany base, primarily a maintenance depot, normally has a population of only 3,500, with 90 percent of those being civilian personnel, Lt. Kyle Thomas, spokesman at the Georgia base, told NBC News on Tuesday.

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"There's a noticeable increase in the population," Thomas said. "It's typically pretty quiet around here."

Albany officials have converted several large warehouses used in the maintenance operation into temporary housing for the evacuees.

"We're trying to support them and make them as comfortable as possible until they go home sometime later in the week," Thomas said.

About 45 training aircraft from the Pensacola base were moved to a Joint Reserve Base near Fort Worth, Texas, and Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonia, Texas, on Sunday in anticipation of the storm.  

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In addition, aircraft from several other military installations in Isaac's path were moved out of harm's way to bases in Texas and Kentucky, the Air Force Times reported.

Eglin Air Force Base in Florida was closed on Tuesday and Wednesday. 

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Reuters file

U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz at the Pentagon, who recently retired. Schwartz was criticized by both sides for his handling of religion in the military.

Just days before retiring as Chief of Staff of the Air Force, Gen. Norton Schwartz issued a document designed to dictate the conduct of U.S. airmen worldwide — all violations enforceable by military law. For the first time, amid regulations on tattoo size and flag handling etiquette, it laid down the law on religious proselytizing by leaders: Don’t do it.

Section 2.11 of the 27-page Air Force Instruction AFI 1-1 Standards of Conduct is the latest salvo in a battle over religious bias and Christian proselytizing in the military branch. It calls on officers and supervisors to "avoid the actual or apparent use of their position to promote their personal religious beliefs to their subordinates or to extend preferential treatment for any religion." 

The document's section on religion echoes a memo Schwartz sent out to all Air Force leadership on religion last September, but adds the threat of penalty for violations.

"COMPLIANCE WITH THIS PUBLICATION IS MANDATORY," the memo says in bold, adding that "failure to adhere to the standards set out in this instruction can form the basis for adverse action under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ)."

"It carries a lot of weight inasmuch as it’s careful to point out that an individual who violates it can be subject to court martial," said Gary Solis, who teaches military law at Georgetown University. "So the things that are covered in the document, which are very wide ranging, open up violations to court martial prosecution, that is federal conviction should there be a conviction. So it carries significant weight."

What is harder to predict is how AFI 1-1 — called by an Air Force Press release "the capstone act" of Schwartz’s 29-year career — will be interpreted, distributed and enforced where it applies to religion.

"It certainly is important and binding ... and it could lead to punishment. But then it could lead to punishment if you wear your hat backwards," said Elizabeth Hillman, professor of law at University of California Hastings College of Law and President of the National Institute of Military Justice. "It is still going to be up to individual commanding officers to decide what’s OK and what’s not. They have a great deal of discretion."

As in U.S. public institutions more broadly, there has been a long string of battles between those in the military who want to root out religious content and others, mainly fundamentalist Christians, who argue that to do so impinges on religious freedom.

Related: Outrage, calls for action over anti-Muslim materials in military training
Related: Marine werewolves transform into Crusaders, and back again

The conflicts have arisen over military leadership promoting Christian religious meetings through official channels, military courses incorporating Biblical material in coursework, officers trying to convert non-Christians and allegedly favoring "born again" Christians and using Christian doctrine and imagery in logos and official military materials and Christian prayer in official events.

The military has been sued for using Christian doctrine to recruit new members, and pressured to change logos and review course materials that incorporate Christian doctrine, and more recently, those that are anti-Islam.

In 2006, after complaints by non-Christians that they were being pressured by evangelicals to convert, the Air Force issued guidelines cautioning superiors from pressing their personal religious views on subordinates. But months later they eased the guidelines after Christian conservatives argued that the guidelines restricted freedom of religion.

In Aug. 2011, in a victory for trying to extricate religion from military business, the Air Force suspended a course called “Christian Just War Theory” — which had been required for missile officers at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The PowerPoint for the class drew heavily upon Bible passages and Christian imagery to teach morals and ethics of launching nuclear weapons. In the class students were taught based on a passage in the Book of Revelations that Jesus Christ is a "mighty warrior" who believed some wars to be just, according to Truthout.com which broke the story.

Military Religious Freedom Foundation

A public billboard in Colorado Springs contains the entirety of U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Norton Schwartz's Sept. 1, 2011 directive on religious neutrality. The billboard was put up by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation to assure that it was widely disseminated.

Shortly after this revelation, Schwartz issued a memo using language almost identical to that used in AFI 1-1 calling on all Air Force leaders to "avoid the actual or apparent use of their position to promote their personal religious beliefs to their subordinates or to extend preferential treatment for any religion."

He went on to say that opportunities for worship, religious studies and prayer meetings can be promoted by chaplains, but not by commanders. And he instructed those who felt they were facing unfair bias on the basis of religion to contact a military attorney.

Political blowback
In response to the memo, and other moves, 66 members of Congress led by Randy Forbes, president of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, wrote a letter of protest to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta blaming Schwartz for an "alarming pattern of attacks on faith in the Air Force."

"We believe this statement exemplifies the troubling 'complete separation' approach that is creating a chilling effect down the chain of command as airmen attempt to comply," it said, according to a report in Air Force Times.

For those who advocate a "complete separation" of church and state, the Schwartz memo would have been a victory, except that some commanders refused to disseminate the memo, according to Mikey Weinstein, founder of the nonprofit Military Religious Freedom Foundation. 

That omission prompted MRFF to receive "a literal torrent of complaints" from military members who Weinstein says are afraid to directly confront the pervasive Christian culture in the Air Force.

The organization invested in a large billboard down the street from the academy containing the text of the entire memo.

As for dissemination of AFI 1-1, the Air Force has a plan "to ensure all Air Force personnel have access to this Instruction," said Air Force spokesman Capt. Derek White.

White did not have the Aug. 7 instruction before speaking to NBC News on Aug. 20. 

Forbes of the Congressional Prayer Caucus did not respond to a request for comment on the new regulations.

For Weinstein, it remains to be seen if AFI 1-1 marks a move in the right direction — and it depends on distribution and enforcement.

"It looks very nice," he said. "The problem is if you create a mandate that is complied with more frequently in the breech than in the conformance you create a problem 100 times worse than if you had not created the mandate in the first place ... It is looked at with scorn and derision."

Weinstein, who has been involved in dozens of battles to extricate religious materials from military settings, recently lambasted Schwartz for his "scandalously non-confrontational approach to the Christian extremist predators" in the Air Force.

"It was a transparent and likely guilt-ridden concession by Schwartz, yet it was both too little and too late," Weinstein wrote in an op-ed article. "With Schwartz’s butt-covering, last second, 'midnight drive-by' delivery of AFI 1-1, we have no alternative left but to look to the new USAF Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Welsh III, to show the all-too-rare backbone once required of all top leaders within the U.S. Military."

Eugene R. Fidell, who teaches military law at Yale Law School, said  the document could make a difference in Air Force culture.

"It’s one thing for a Chief of Staff of the Air Force to issue a letter that goes around," said Fidell. "It is another to put it in permanent form so the next chief won’t take a different approach. I think for him to have done what he did ... I think it was appropriate and gutsy."

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A top commander has been relieved of his position in the wake of a sex scandal at Lackland Air Force base.

Col. Glenn Palmer had been in charge of basic training for new Air Force recruits at the 737th training group at the base in San Antonio, Texas. A senior U.S. military official confirmed to NBC on Friday that Palmer had been relieved. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the wing commander lost confidence in Palmer's ability to lead the training group.

Allegations that basic training instructors behaved inappropriately with female recruits have rocked the base. Some of the alleged victims have claimed sexual abuse and assault. 

Staff Sgt. Luis Walker, a former instructor, received a 20-year prison sentence last month in a military court-martial after being convicted of rape and sexual assault. Walker was convicted on all 28 charges he faced. 

Tech. Sgt. Christopher Smith, 33, was sentenced to 30 days in jail and a reduction in rank to airman first class last week. He was convicted of developing an intimate relationship with one female trainee and fraternizing with another.

Other training instructors are scheduled for courts-martial in the coming months. 

The military hasn't seen a sex scandal of this magnitude since the 1990s, when accusations of sexual misconduct surfaced at the Army's Ordnance Center and School in Aberdeen, Md., where officers were accused of using their positions to sexually assault female trainees under their command. The scandal resulted in one company commander and two drill sergeants being sent to prison. 

Lackland is where all new recruits go through eight weeks of basic training. The installation graduates 35,000 new airmen every year. About one in five recruits are female but most instructors are male.

Courtney Kube contributed to this report.

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(This report has been updated to correct an error.)

Updated at 5:03 a.m. ET: A senior Army leader was among three servicemen killed by a suicide bomber in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, a senior U.S. military official told NBC News.

www.carson.army.mil

Command Sgt. Maj. Kevin Griffin earned a Bronze Star.

The victims included Command Sgt. Maj. Kevin J. Griffin, the most senior enlisted soldier for the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division. Griffin, 45, of Riverton, Wyo., was a Bronze Star recipient who first enlisted in the Army in 1988.

Maj. Thomas E. Kennedy, 35, of West Point, N.Y., and Air Force Maj. Walter D. Gray, 38, of Conyers, Ga., were also killed.

The attack occurred in Kunar province.

Afghan officials: 3 US special forces troops killed

(Citing a military official, NBC News earlier reported that Brigade Commander Col. James J. Mingus was badly wounded in the attack. However, an ISAF official said early Friday said that Mingus had not been injured.)

While their names may be not be well known, U.S. officials consider this a significant attack because the brigade leadership was taken out by a suicide bomber. 

The soldiers were all assigned to the 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 4th Infantry Division based in Colorado Springs, Colo.

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