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The United States has long been blessed with a civil-military relationship that is a model of democratic and civic stability. Extremism in the ranks, however, is growing—and dangerous.
Small but Growing
Last month, the U.S. Department of Defense finally released a report on extremism in the American military after a long delay. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had commissioned the study in early 2021, four months after the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, and a contractor, the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), completed its work in the spring of 2022—but the report wasn’t published for more than a year.
The study wasn’t much of a bombshell. It confirmed what many observers of the military—including me, based on decades of teaching military officers—already knew: that political extremism in the U.S. military is rare but growing. That’s the good news, but as the IDA report notes, the problem doesn’t have to be big to be lethal: “The participation in violent extremist activities of even a small number of individuals with military connections and military training … could present a risk to the military and to the country as a whole.”
The IDA analysts relied on existing data to take a snapshot of the current state of extremism in the military. Analysts tried to track indicators such as military personnel advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government, expressing interest in political violence, and even supporting terrorism. The caveat IDA applied to its findings was probably meant to be reassuring, but it is in fact deeply worrisome:
IDA then added this careful but hugely important footnote: “It does not appear to be possible to compare military and civilian participation rates for nonviolent forms of extremist activities that are prohibited for service members, because these forms of conduct are not prohibited for the civilian population.”
In other words: The evidence suggests that people in the military are no more likely than other citizens to be extremists, but we don’t have a good basis for comparing the two groups because civilians can openly join right-wing extremist organizations and express racist and extremist views, while military people know that there are things they can’t do or say in public.
This caveat necessarily undermines confidence in the conclusion that the military is no more prone to extremism than the general public. But it should be no comfort even to think that the rates of extremism for civilians and military personnel are the same, because a sizable chunk of the public is becoming more extreme. The military isn’t supposed to be an exact mirror of society; as the bearers of the nation’s arms, its members are supposed to be better than their civilian counterparts, at least in terms of self-discipline and awareness of the supreme requirement of loyalty to the Constitution.
Likewise, although the military draws from the general population, initial vetting and training should screen out people who do not belong in the military for various reasons. The military enforces physical and mental standards, and, in theory, also screens people for dangerous ideological commitments. If there are extremists in the military in the same proportion as in the population, the system is failing this basic task.
Nor does the military seem able to spot extremism brewing among its personnel. A Rand study noted that extremist groups target veterans for recruitment in order to gain their training and experience, which means that even small numbers can present outsize dangers. Bob Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago, has studied the backgrounds of the January 6 insurrectionists, and he pointed out to me that veterans were overrepresented among the rioters “even when taking gender and age differences of veterans versus the general population into account.”
The Pentagon is worried about all of this, but it is also concerned about what might happen if military leaders make efforts to investigate the problem in more depth. On the one hand, Americans need to know how many extremists are burrowed in the ranks of the military. On the other hand, efforts to find them and expel them could be deeply divisive. The IDA report warned explicitly that such hazards, especially if some military people believe they are being unfairly “targeted for their views,” could create a situation in which “the risk to the military from widespread polarization and division in the ranks may be a greater risk than the radicalization of a few service members.”
Although it’s true that a 1950s-style McCarthyist sweep—this time looking for right-wing extremists instead of left-wing “comsymps”—through the military would likely be counterproductive, it is unclear, at least to me, what IDA means by “risk.” (IDA has so far issued no further statements on its report.)
Would it have offended or “divided” people, for example, had someone spoken up sooner about Jack Teixeira, the member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard whose alleged dissemination of classified material seems to have been preceded by all kinds of red-flag behavior? Teixeira’s social-media activity reportedly included racist and extremist comments and a fascination with gore and violence, going all the way back to high school. Would checking the backgrounds of young men and women to weed out such recruits be “polarizing”?
Shortly after the January 6 insurrection, the military made a half-hearted effort to address extremism with a “stand-down,” in which units were asked to suspend work for a day so that Defense Department personnel could attend lectures and presentations, all of which amounted to: Extremism is bad. The stand-down itself was a sign of anxiety; the Defense Department’s curriculum given to trainers for the event noted “an increase in concerning behavior” as well as “an increase in the reporting of suspect behavior.”
Conservative legislators decried the exercise as yet more “wokeness” in the military, but such claims are nonsense. I was still a DOD employee at the time, and as a participant in the stand-down I can say there was nothing woke about it. In fact, I recall little substance at all. The whole thing, as one soldier later told the Military Times, was a “one and done,” a box-checking exercise that left almost no impression on the institution.
Such responses are not sufficient. For now, however, no one in the Pentagon really knows how to measure extremism, or what to do about it, in part because (as the IDA analysts admitted) many reports of extremist behavior, such as white-supremacist activity, get papered over by the military before they can make it to courts-martial or other public venues. The military tends to deal with such issues at the lowest possible levels before they become major cases, which means that we’re looking at the tip of an iceberg. How much danger waits below the waterline remains unclear.
The American military-personnel system must change. Screening and security procedures are still rooted in a Cold War mindset about foreign loyalties and blackmail—which are real threats—but the system is woefully inadequate in identifying right-wing extremists, preventing their entry into the armed forces, denying them clearances they should not hold, and expelling them when discovered.
Fortunately, the extremism problem in the military is still small. Is the Defense Department determined and capable enough to keep it that way?
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