The Associated Press investigated extremism among U.S. troops and veterans. The main contents of the report are as follows:
The AP received exclusive access to data collected and analyzed by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland.
According to this data, more than 480 military personnel were indicted for ideological extremism crimes from 2017 to 2023, and more than 230 people were arrested in connection with the January 6 Uprising. The majority of those included in the data were veterans rather than active-duty military.
While the rate of radicalization of the overall population has increased in recent years, people with military backgrounds are radicalizing at a faster rate.
START researchers found that more than 80% of ex-military extremists have far-right, anti-government or white supremacist ideologies, with the remainder split between far-left, jihadist or other motivations.
The number of soldiers and veterans who have been radicalized represents only a small fraction of the millions of people who have served their country with honor.
Extremist plots that included people with military backgrounds were more likely to include weapons training or firearms than plots that did not include people without military backgrounds, according to an analysis of data by the Associated Press. This applies regardless of whether the conspiracy has been carried out or not.
The number of people participating is still small. However, data shows that the involvement of active-duty military and veterans makes extremist plots more likely to result in mass injury or death.
People with military backgrounds “tend to radicalize to the point where mass violence occurs,” said START’s Michael Jensen, who leads a team that has collected data for years to learn more about domestic extremists.
His group found that among extremists, “the number one predictor of being classified as a mass-victim offender was having a military background, which was a higher priority than mental health issues, loners, prior criminal records, or substance abuse issues.” It was the background.”
A mass casualty attack is defined as an attack that kills or injures four or more people.
The data tracked individuals with military backgrounds involved in plans to kill, injure or harm for political, social, economic or religious goals. While some of the violent plots in the data did not succeed, those that did resulted in dozens of deaths and injuries. Since 2017, the plot has killed or injured nearly 100 people, nearly all of whom served anti-government, white supremacist or far-right agendas. Those numbers do not include the violence of Jan. 6, which left dozens of police officers injured.
Targeted attacks in which people with military training are becoming more successful, data shows, include the 2020 killing of a federal marshal and a sheriff’s deputy in California by an active-duty Air Force staff sergeant and six attacks by a former Army soldier in 2018. It works. He killed two women at a Florida hot yoga studio before taking his own life.
“My primary concern is not the march on the Capitol or any other government building. The idea is that someone in the military is given extremely lethal techniques and uses those techniques,” Jensen said.
A month after men in tactical gear stormed the steps of the U.S. Capitol in a military-style stack formation on Jan. 6, new Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin addressed a problem that has been festering for a long time. He ordered a military-wide ‘pre-pause’ to give local military commanders time to discuss the issue with their staff.
Austin also established a Countering Extremism Action Working Group to study and recommend solutions. One of the group’s final recommendations was to clarify what is prohibited under the military’s ban on extremist activities. The revised policy, announced in December 2021, now states that anti-government or anti-democratic actions are a violation of the Uniform Military Code, a federal law that applies to all military personnel.
The Pentagon has developed at least one way to detect extremist incidents across the military and among civilian defense contractors. But I’m not using it.
The method was revealed in a research memo released the summer after January 6, but has not been made public until now. American Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group, obtained the memo through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit it filed against the Department of Defense and shared it with the AP.
In a project that began in September 2020 and continues through 2021, DoD researchers studying “insider threats” and other security issues in the workforce will mine data from the DoD security clearance database to identify white supremacist and extremist incidents. developed. This database contains details of security incident reports submitted for people with security clearances (including military, civilians, and contractors).
The operation identified hundreds of incidents of white supremacist, anti-government and other extremist activity reported over the past two decades. This is a kind of internal red flag that can identify a problem in a soldier.
The researchers wrote that the results are a first step toward developing a method to identify extremist incidents, which could be used in other DoD databases.
The study has been shared with select departments of the Department of Defense since January 6. But the study was not communicated to anyone who leads the Pentagon’s extremism working group, Bishop Garrison, the group’s leader, told the AP.
Defense Department officials would not comment on why the report was not forwarded to the working group. The official said in a statement that the Department of Defense is “committed to understanding the root causes of extremism and ensuring that such behavior is quickly and appropriately addressed and reported to the appropriate authorities” and has strengthened its ability to track allegations of extremism.
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