A week after the Capitol invasion, 14 Democratic senators wrote a letter calling on the Pentagon's Inspector General to investigate "white supremacy" and "extremism in the military." The next month, a House subcommittee held a hearing under the rubric "Alarming Incidents of White Supremacy in the Military How to Stop It?" Meanwhile, on February 5th, the first Black secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, directed commanding officers at all levels to conduct a one-day stand-down before April 1st to address extremism in the military and provide training in avoiding involvement with extremist groups. At the same time, the Pentagon admitted that it didn't have a handle on the scope of the problem or what to do about it.
The link between extremist culture and the military goes way back, as do efforts to track and deal with it. The names of the groups have changed over the years they used to sound German, now they sound moralistic but the problem hasn't. For instance, in 2009, Operation Vigilant Eagle, an FBI program focused on the recruitment of veterans by white supremacist groups, came to light, and that same year a Department of Homeland Security assessment warned that "right-wing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans" returning, that is, from America's distant, never-ending wars. Conservative politicians, media personalities and veterans' groups found that DHS report insulting to veterans and got it withdrawn.
Keep in mind that active-duty service members are officially restricted in their political activities, so there were undoubtedly many still in uniform who didn't show up at the Capitol but would have liked to do so. And though the Proud Boys have focused their recruiting on the military and law enforcement, it's hardly necessary to join such loosely structured groups to support their ideology and aims. A 2019 Military Times survey, for example, found that 36% of military respondents had "witnessed examples of white supremacy and racist ideologies" in the ranks.
Military rules tend to delineate the rights soldiers don't have more than those they do, but Department of Defense Directive 1325.6 gives active-duty members the right to participate in political demonstrations as long as they are off base, out of uniform, within the United States, representing only themselves, and not slandering the president or high officials. However, activities like fundraising for, distributing the political material of, or wearing the totemic clothing of white supremist and other extremist groups could indeed get you kicked out of the military, as could certain kinds of social-media posts.
Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D-CA) has been pushing to track the social media activities of all enlistees and the Pentagon claims that it's looking for a "scalable way" to add that into background checks.
Members of the armed forces have a duty to report such behavior, though don't count on that, since it's probably seen as snitching. Commanders also have considerable leeway when it comes to how they might respond to the proscribed actions.
It goes without saying, of course, that soldiers are not supposed to engage in any kind of violence except the violence they're ordered to take part in as soldiers.
That's Not Okay ish
America's military was designed to be politically neutral and has prided itself on being nondiscriminatory and merit-based, traits theoretically crucial to maintaining an all-volunteer force (though in racial terms over the years it's been anything but, at least when it came to the high command). All branches now purport to screen for supremacist, extremist, or criminal-gang involvement at the time of enlistment and military leaders, who probably don't want troublemakers in their commands, are reportedly taking pains to confirm that such extremists will not be tolerated.
Except when they are.
The design of military justice makes it hard to track advocates of extremist violence, as there is no centralized record-keeping for such things and, often enough, such behavior is simply brushed aside.
In my own unscientific survey, I recently asked two active-duty soldiers and three Iraq War veterans if they had encountered right-wing extremism while in the service. Four initially said no the fifth, a Black sailor, at one point had had a noose dangled in his face but then began recounting tales of what was permitted or considered normal behavior: a U.S.-based paramedic talking about avoiding a Black neighborhood where he would encounter "animals"; a call from a friend and Stryker platoon leader in Germany who found arbeit macht frei, the slogan at the gates of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, carved into the interior of some of his unit's vehicles; a fellow recruit at basic training revealing a giant swastika on his back. He was soon sent packing, but had made it through the enlistment process where such things are supposed to be caught. (My source thought his quick dismissal came only because his training instructor was Black. He didn't consider such a response typical.)
Nobody I talked to was okay with any of this, but one active-duty soldier admitted, "When I was most brainwashed, I saw it as cathartic, being comfortable without having to worry about 'cancel culture.'"
Extremism in a World of Never-Ending War
Organizing within the military isn't easy. At least, it wasn't for antiwar activists during the Vietnam and Iraq War years (as I found out when researching my book, War Is Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built). But maybe what's going on now among the soldiers of the far right isn't organizing as much as a signaling or sharing of interests and affinities, particularly on the Internet. Or maybe it's "self-radicalizing" reading extremist material, following the websites of supremacist groups, or connecting on social media; what, in other circumstances, we might call educating yourself which breeds sympathy, if not membership.
As separate as the military may seem from civilian culture, it's anything but immune to the vicious discord which now plagues this country. But the military was fertile territory for right-wing sympathies long before Donald Trump became president or the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers came along. The turning of the post-Vietnam War military into an all-volunteer force only seems to have exacerbated such tendencies. As an Army captain emailed me, "The military recruits heavily from the same population that extremist organizations do socially isolated, downwardly mobile, and economically vulnerable young men." Jonathan Hutto, a Black veteran who challenged the racism he encountered in the Navy, wrote that his shipmates didn't need to be "inculcated with Racist-Fascist Ideology" because they had arrived primed for it by their families and communities.
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