Domestic extremist groups pose a serious threat to the US military by seeking to recruit service members into their ranks and, in some cases, joining the military to acquire combat experience, a Pentagon report said on Tuesday.
The report, prepared last year at the request of the US Congress, did not assess whether the problem of extremism in the US military is growing, but it cited a number of examples of service members with extremist affiliations.
It said the number of current and former military members who ascribe to white supremacist ideology is unknown.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“Military members are highly prized by these groups, as they bring legitimacy to their causes and enhance their ability to carry out attacks,” the report said. “In addition to potential violence, white supremacy and white nationalism pose a threat to the good order and discipline within the military.”
For example, the report noted that a US marine was discharged in 2018 for having ties to a neo-Nazi group called Atomwaffen Division, and it said the group’s cofounder served in the Army National Guard in Florida.
Another marine was determined to be the founder of a different white supremacist group, called AIM, which stands for American Identity Movement.
The group spread propaganda through an operation it called “Project Siege” and as of March 2019 had about 500 members.
The group’s founder was a former marine sergeant and a former leader was a US Army veteran.
Several other members of the military and the reserves were identified as being associated with the group, and the report said that some were either demoted or discharged.
The report described a social media post, reported by a service member, who claimed to “see plenty of our kind” in combat arms.
The message recommended ways to identify fellow group members, saying “simply wear a shirt with some obscure fascist logo.”
The US military has long been aware of small numbers of white supremacists and other extremists in its ranks, but the problem burst into public awareness after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, where an outsized number of military veterans and some current military members were present.
It quickly fell to new US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to determine the scale of the problem and try to fix it.
On Feb. 5, Austin directed all commanders and supervisors at every level of the military to conduct a one-day “stand down” — a pause in normal business — by early next month to discuss extremism in the ranks.
At his first Pentagon news conference two weeks later, Austin said extremism is a threat to the bonds of trust between service members, who count on cohesion to make them effective on the battlefield.
“I really and truly believe that 99.9 percent of our service men and women believe in” the oath they swear when entering the military, Austin said, adding that the actual number of extremists in the military is unknown.
“I expect for the numbers to be small, but quite frankly, they’ll probably be a little bit larger than most of us would guess,” he said. “But I would just say that, you know, small numbers in this case can have an outsized impact.”
Austin has often mentioned that he has personally witnessed the damage that racism and extremism can inflict.
In 1995, when then-lieutenant colonel Austin was serving with the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, three white soldiers described as self-styled skinheads were arrested in the murder of a black couple who were walking down the street. Investigators concluded the two were targeted because of their ethnicity.
The killing triggered an internal investigation, and all told, 22 soldiers were linked to skinhead and other similar groups, or found to hold extremist views.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited