Takeaways from The Associated Press’ reporting on extremism in the military
An Associated Press investigation examined extremism among members of the U.S. military and veterans. Here are highlights from the reporting.
How many active-duty military and veterans are involved in extremism?
The number of service members and veterans who radicalize make up a tiny fraction of a percentage point of the millions and millions who have honorably served their country.
The AP received exclusive access to data collected and analyzed by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START, at the University of Maryland.
According to this data, there were more than 480 people with a military background accused of ideologically driven extremist crimes from 2017 through 2023, including the more than 230 arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection. The vast majority of those included in the data were veterans, rather than active-duty servicemembers.
While the pace at which the overall population has been radicalizing has increased in recent years, people with military backgrounds have been radicalizing at a faster rate.
START researchers found that more than 80% of extremists with military backgrounds identified with far-right, anti-government or white supremacist ideologies, with the rest split among far-left, jihadist or other motivations.
What special dangers are posed by extremists with military backgrounds?
Extremist plots involving people with military backgrounds were more likely to involve weapons training or firearms than those plots that didn’t include someone with a military background, according to an AP analysis of the data. This held true whether or not the plots were executed.
The number of people involved remains small. However, the participation of active-duty military and veterans gave extremist plots more potential for mass injury or death, according to the data.
When people with military backgrounds “radicalize, they tend to radicalize to the point of mass violence,” said START’s Michael Jensen, who leads the team that has spent years compiling the data, which captures detailed information about domestic extremists.
His group found that among extremists “the No. 1 predictor of being classified as a mass casualty offender was having a U.S. military background – that outranked mental health problems, that outranked being a loner, that outranked having a previous criminal history or substance abuse issues.”
A mass casualty attack is defined as one that kills or injures four or more people.
The data tracked individuals with military backgrounds involved in plans to kill, injure or inflict damage for political, social, economic or religious goals. While some of the violent plots in the data were unsuccessful, those that succeeded killed and hurt dozens of people. Since 2017, nearly 100 people have been killed or injured in these plots, nearly all of them in service of an anti-government, white supremacist or far-right agenda.
Targeted attacks that the data show military-trained people are making more successful include the 2020 murders of a federal security officer and a sheriff’s deputy in California by an active-duty Air Force staff sergeant and a 2018 attack by a former Army soldier who shot six women at a Florida hot yoga studio, killing two, before he killed himself.
“My primary concern is not a march on the Capitol or any other government building. It’s that somebody with the skills that were imparted on them by the military to be extremely lethal uses those skills,” said Jensen.
What has the Pentagon done to fight extremism in the ranks?
A month after people in tactical gear stormed up the U.S. Capitol steps in military-style stack formation on Jan. 6, the new defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, addressed the long-festering problem. He ordered a force-wide “stand down” to give time to local military commanders to discuss the issue with personnel.
Austin also empaneled the Countering Extremist Activity Working Group to study and recommend solutions. Among the group’s eventual recommendations was to clarify what was prohibited under the military’s ban on extremist activity. The revised policy, released in December 2021, now specifies that anti-government or anti-democratic actions are violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, federal laws that apply to all service members.
Are there other ways to combat extremism in the military?
The Pentagon did develop at least one way to detect extremist incidents across military branches and among civilian defense contractors. But it isn’t using it.
The method was revealed in a research memo published the summer after Jan. 6 that, until now, has not been released publicly. American Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group, obtained the memo through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit it brought against the Pentagon and shared it with AP.
In a project that began in September 2020 and lasted into 2021, DoD researchers studying “insider threats” and other security issues in the workforce developed a way to mine data from a DoD security clearance database to identify white supremacist and extremist incidents. This database included details from security incident reports filed about people who held security clearances – a wide swath of the military population, civilians and contractors included.
The operation identified hundreds of reported incidents of white supremacy and anti-government and other extremist activity over 20 years – the kinds of internal red flags that could identify issues with service members.
The researchers wrote that the results were a first step toward developing a way to identify incidents of extremism, and that the method could be used in other DoD databases.
The research was shared among some departments in the DoD after Jan. 6. But it never made it to the person who was leading the Pentagon’s extremism working group, the leader of that group, Bishop Garrison, told the AP.
A defense official did not address why the report was not sent to the working group. In a statement, the official said the DoD is “committed to understanding the root causes of extremism and ensuring such behavior is promptly and appropriately addressed and reported to the proper authorities,” and that the department has enhanced its ability to track extremism allegations.
___
The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
___
Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org