Commentary
Aside from Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s recent mistake of failing to inform the president and his colleagues that he was entering the hospital for prostate surgery, it has now been revealed that he overreached in April 2021, when he launched a sweeping initiative to root out the threat of extremism across our armed forces.
It was the persistence of Will Carless at USA Today that resulted in a report that DOD’s effort to uncover extremist behavior among our military men and women had fallen short.
Had it not been for his piece with the outcome of the study carried by the Arizona Republic, I wouldn’t have known about the findings. After reading about it, my research showed there was scant coverage outside of military oriented publications.
Looking Back
Regular readers may recall my disappointment in Austin as a veteran. It was on May 21, 2021 that I wrote of his effort to purge perceived rampant extremism from the military on the orders of President Biden in the aftermath of the January 6, breach of the Nation’s Capitol.
While only about 30 of the 400 demonstrators that day were current or former military members, it resulted in the two million active duty and reservists became like subjects of a controlled interrogation and indoctrination.
Austin, the first black defense chief, pledged to rid “racists and extremists” from the ranks of the U.S. military, recommending troops better understand and denounce white supremacist and other political extremist ideologies that advocate government overthrow.
In a USA Today op-ed, Austin’s senior advisor, Bishop Garrison, also black, wrote “We are mindful that extremism in our ranks is real, and though we may not have a full grasp on the problem, we know it can have an outsized effect on our force.”
AUSTIN WAS PRESSURED by several leftist groups to find extremism in the military.
Being affiliated with the U.S. miliary is the “single strongest” predictor of violent extremism in the America, according to a report by the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START).
START reported that people who served or are serving the armed forces “are 2.41 times more likely to be classified as mass casualty offenders than individuals who did not serve.”
“It’s inexplicable. Look, people with military training show up too much in domestic terrorism plots, and they’re killing people, including killing troops,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.
If this sweeping effort ends with no measurable impact, that’s “a tragic outcome,” said Kathleen Belew, a Northwestern University historian and author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, adding that Austin’s initiative was “an incredibly powerful lever for real change, and to let it simply fall apart … would be a tragic misstep.”
The Results
It appears to me that the volumes of findings of Austin’s 100-man working group are destined for the shelves to gather dust. “Its contents hidden from public view,” Carless believes. It must be disappointing, certainly embarrassing, to Austin.
The report appears to offer almost nothing in terms of new data on the scope of the military’s perceived extremism problem, and concludes that extremism is dangerous, but rare.
Austin’s effort to root out extremism in the military was but one of his orders that not only affected the morale of the troops, I suggest that it also had a bearing on the poor recruitment record.
In my view, Austin also used the military as his Petrie dish for pushing critical race theory, coupled with his agenda of diversity, inclusion and equity.
Insisting that the Department of Defense takes extremist activity seriously, Commander Nicole Schwegman, a DOD spokesperson, perhaps said it best with “The vast majority of service members serve with honor and integrity and do not participate in extremist activities.”
However, it is unfortunate that charges of extremism had to hang over the heads of our active-duty men and women and their families, veterans, and military-loving Americans for nearly three years.
May God continue to bless the United States of America.
