Military service did not cause recent New Orleans attacks

When we learned the New Orleans attack was committed by a veteran, the usual mainstream media speculation surfaced. It always does when a veteran commits a violent crime.

Was Shamsud-Din Jabbar radicalized while in the Army?

Did he have special weapons skills that enabled him to build the IEDs found near Bourbon Street?

Are vets more prone to lashing out violently?

In the ensuing days, we found the answer to the first two questions was no, and the answer to the third was that vets are not any more prone to violence than radical leftists. As a matter of fact, the most recent attempts at political assassinations – two on Trump and one at the Congressional baseball shooting – have been committed by leftists against Republican officials and candidates.

Reports suggest that Jabbar became radicalized fairly recently, long after his military service ended. Before becoming a radical, he expressed pride in his service for giving him a degree of purpose and discipline that he appears to have lost as a civilian. Further, he apparently learned to make IEDs online from ISIS web sites, not in the military. It appears, perhaps, that the Islamic State offered him a mission focus – however misguided – that he lost after mustering out of the Army.

Some Americans immediately assumed Jabbar was an immigrant; however, he was born in Texas and was not an immigrant—illegal or otherwise.

The truck explosion in Las Vegas was committed by an active-duty serviceman, but it was not an act of terror. Rather, it was a result of mental illness triggered by deep personal issues and PTSD. Suicide is a real problem in the military. Perhaps if Pentagon officials and senior military officers spent more time worrying about mental hygiene and less about rooting out right wing terrorists in the barracks, we would be on our way to solving the recruiting and suicide problems.

The bottom line is both the Biden and Obama administrations were too concerned with domestic right-wing terrorism. Some have speculated our last two Democrat presidents were more concerned with domestic right-wing terrorism than jihadism, whether they be home-grown terrorists or foreign infiltrators from across our porous borders. The effects of this focus are evident in the military, where conservative soldiers, sailors, airman and Marines are viewed as potential insider threats by an increasingly woke senior officer corps. This leftward drift is increasingly identified as a cause for the recruiting crisis among all the services.

Simply put, like all urban legends, the myth that the military creates mass murderers is a falsehood begun by aberrations from the norm and an anti-military bias among liberals.

But there is one military practice that could help prevent tragedies such as New Orleans, and near-disasters, such as the attempted Trump assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania.

If local police and the Secret Service adopted the military’s practice of “Red Teaming” their protection plans, our law enforcement officials might be better able to counter threats when they materialize.

“Red Teaming” is the practice of having independent personnel review plans with an eye toward spotting critical vulnerabilities and correcting them before execution of the plan. I believe that law enforcement officials in New York “Red Team” their security preparations for major events. New Orleans apparently did not for the New Year celebration, nor did the Secret Service before the Trump rally assassination attempt.

A good “Red Team” effort would have spotted the holes in the New Orleans barrier plan as well as the open line of fire in Butler. This does not mean that the New Orleans police or the Secret Service are incompetent—it’s just difficult to grade your own work.

In the wake of 9/11, I led a “Red Team” that looked at airport and airline security. We found a major vulnerability in security in virtually every airline’s security procedure that could result in a 9/11-style hijacking. To date (to my knowledge), no airline has implemented the simple fix we suggested due to public relations concerns. Fortunately, the bad guys have not yet picked up on the vulnerability—eventually, I fear that somebody else will.

Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps Colonel with extensive red teaming experience. He was a senior leader of the Defense Adaptive Red TEAM (DART) and predicted the Iraqi insurgency before the fall of Baghdad in 2003.