Just days after an Army sergeant killed five fellow soldiers at a military stress center in Baghdad, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen acknowledged the obvious need to “redouble our efforts in terms of dealing with” the psychology of modern warfare.

But Leslie Haines fears those words will ring dangerously hollow unless the military fundamentally changes its traditional response to mental illness – an approach that subordinates the well-being of individual soldiers to the needs of the unit.

The epiphany came earlier this month while attending a seminar in Bethesda, Md., for mental-health workers dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder but, to Haines, the source of the inspiration was as surprising as it was disappointing.

“A chaplain said, ‘We don’t need to send (soldiers with PTSD) home. We can fix it in the field.’ That made me realize his primary client is the military and its need to keep boots on the ground. But if nothing changes, what kind of soldiers will we have on the ground?” said Haines, an Army reservist and founder of the Lutheran Military Veterans and Families Ministries. The year-old Fort Wayne-based organization provides Christ-centered counseling to veterans and their families.

The realization that war inflicts invisible scars is nothing new, as evidenced by the evolution of terminology from shell shock, to battle fatigue, to PTSD. But the changing nature of warfare and the military have conspired to create a unique mental-health threat that demands a new and more individualistic response, Haines said.

Maybe nothing could have prevented 44-year-old John M. Russell from hurting himself or others, but the warnings signs were obvious long before he allegedly opened fire at Baghdad’s Camp Liberty earlier this month. Before his ex-wife sued for divorce in 1991, she accused him of committing “acts of family violence,” and he was later charged with assault. Even so, he was accepted into the Army and served in Serbia, Bosnia and was six weeks away from the end of his third year-long tour of duty before exhibiting signs that caused superiors to confiscate his weapon and send him to a stress-treatment center.

It was all too little, obviously – and too late.

Haines, who is completing deaconess training at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, knows the military has little control over the nature of the war on terror: the constant threat of violence from supposedly friendly people, including children; the profound cultural and religious differences that can cause U.S. soldiers to be viewed not as liberators, but as occupiers. But there are things the military can do, she said:

It could increase its standards to weed out people incapable of even completing high school or who have a history of violence, crime or anti-social behavior.

It could abandon the old “suck it up” mentality that expects soldiers to overcome their problems for the sake of the unit, replacing it with preventive therapy that removes soldiers from the combat zone for treatment when necessary.

It would change the current practice of rotating reserve and National Guard units into and out of combat zones several times, separating soldiers from spouses and children and forcing them to adjust between peace and war not once but several times.

And that, she said, might require the biggest change of all: the need for a larger military.

“We have less than 1 percent of the population serving in the wars. That’s the lowest number ever,” said Haines, who suffers from PTSD herself after serving at Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba and in Iraq with the Fort Wayne-based 384th MP Battalion – an affliction that gives her a special insight and empathy.

But with no return of the draft likely, and with President Obama under pressure to cut defense spending despite his plan to add manpower in Afghanistan, Haines is not optimistic of that. Nor is she optimistic the understaffed Veterans Administration can provide the care returning soldiers need. The fact that she’s counseling about 25 people of many denominations in several states proves it.

One of them has a wife and three children, but is considering a third deployment because he was recently laid off from his blue-collar job. Haines does what she can here, but can only hope the Army will do more when the time comes.

And she can’t help but think about the ancient Volkswagen Bug she drove while in Cuba: It did the job there, but could pose a danger on the streets back home. The same fate shouldn’t await the men and women who have volunteered to serve their country, but some studies estimate that up to 15 percent of the soldiers returning from Iraq suffer some sort of emotional problem.

“We’re going to have wars until Christ comes again,” Haines said. “We’d better figure this out.”