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In this century, everything has been extreme when it comes to the U.S. military. After all, the Pentagon's budget is larger than those of the next 10 (or is it 11?) countries combined. Yes, combined! And just about every year it goes up yet again, thanks to unparalleled support in Congress from both Republicans and Democrats (with, until recent weeks, remarkably few dissenters). It's now, in fact, on a path to a trillion-dollar budget within the next few years.
And yet, on a planet where no other military can compare, it seems incapable of winning a thing. Its two major wars of this century, in Afghanistan and Iraq, against remarkably modest (and modestly armed) enemies (no, Saddam Hussein did not have any weapons of mass destruction!) led to" well, double disasters of the first order. The Afghan one against the Taliban lasted 20 years before President Joe Biden decided to -- though no one called it that -- retreat in utter chaos and quite catastrophically. And yet, though he and Donald Trump (but not George W. Bush who launched the disaster) were blamed for the chaotic horror with which it ended, the response in the next budgetary year was -- you guessed it -- yet more money for the Pentagon.
And it wasn't just Afghanistan and Iraq. In those 20-odd years, nowhere on the planet, despite significant harm caused and staggering sums spent, has the U.S. military had a genuine success of any significance in its (all too) global war on terror. So, extreme? Yes, these have been extreme years for that military. Little wonder then that, in a country where those war-fighting extremes abroad proved distinctly unsettling at home (otherwise it would have been almost inconceivable for Donald Trump to have won the presidency in 2016), who should be surprised to discover that another kind of extremism has begun to affect that military right here in the (increasingly dis-)United States of America? But let TomDispatch regular Nan Levinson, author of War Is Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built, fill you in on the extremity that continues to lurk in our very own, increasingly disturbed armed forces. Tom
Hunting the Military Extremist
How Disturbed Is the U.S. Military?
By Nan Levinson
In April, when Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman with a top-secret clearance, was arrested for posting a trove of classified documents about the Russia-Ukraine war online, the question most often asked was: How did such a young, inexperienced, low-level technician have access to such sensitive material? What I wanted to know was: How did he ever get accepted into the Air Force in the first place?
Teixeira seems to have leaked that secret information for online bragging rights rather than ideological reasons, so his transgression probably wouldn't have fallen under the military's newly reinforced regulations on extremist activities. After he was indicted, however, perturbing details about his behavior emerged, including his online searches for violent extremist events, an outsized interest in guns, and social media posts that an FBI affidavit called "troubling" and I'd call creepy.
Ideological zealotry is disruptive wherever it takes root, even if it never erupts into violence, but it's particularly chilling inside the military. After all, servicemembers have access to weapons and the training to use them. Even more significant, a kind of quid pro quo exists between the military and civilians. Trust is paramount within the military and every service member is supposed to abide by a code of ethics, as well as by the Constitution, to which all of them swear an oath.
In theory, a democratic civil society invests its military with the authority to use force in its name in exchange for the principled conduct of its members. Military service is supposed to be a higher calling and soldiers better (or at least better behaving) people. So when active-duty personnel or veterans use violence against the system they're sworn to protect, the sting of betrayal is especially sharp.
Whoops!
In a photo of Teixeira in a neat dress uniform that accompanied media reports, he's a bright-eyed kid with stick-out ears and a sweet half-smile. He looks young and promising, the kind of guy people offer thanks to when they see him in uniform at an airport. In reality, however, everything else about him was a red flag.
The Washington Post found videos and chat logs that suggested he was getting ready for a race war. Former classmates told CNN that he had been obsessed with guns and war. He was suspended from high school for comments he made about Molotov cocktails. His first application for a gun license was denied, but he kept trying and was eventually approved, over time amassing a trove of handguns, rifles, shotguns, high-capacity weapons, and a gas mask, which he kept in a gun locker about two feet from his bed.
Granted, some of this activity didn't begin until he enlisted in 2019 and no one's advocating that military recruiters make bedroom checks. Still, recruits are supposed to go through a careful vetting process. Family, friends, teachers, and classmates may be interviewed to assess a recruit's character and fitness. Such background checks are designed to detect things like racist tattoos, drug use, gang affiliation, or arrest records, but are inevitably limited in what they can discover about young people without much life experience, including the teenage gamers the Air Force woos for their up-to-the-minute technical skills who may not prove to be the most level-headed crew -- people, in fact, like Jack Teixeira.
In his case in particular, the vetting of service members for handling the top-secret or sensitive-compartmentalized-information security clearances he received in 2022 is supposed to be particularly thorough. I was first faced with this reality when a government agent showed up at my door, flashed a badge, and asked me about a neighbor applying for a clearance. He inquired all too casually about whether I had noticed anything telling, like lots of liquor bottles in his trash. (That left me wondering how many people check their neighbor's garbage.)
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