The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Military’s extremists concern watchdogs
Some see recent alleged plot as another sign of problem.
Cases involving current or past armed forces members have experts saying Pentagon must do more to address issue.
The U.S. military is one of the most ethnically diverse and integrated institutions in the nation, and has long promoted racial equality. Yet in a string of cases in recent years, Americans bent on racist extremism have been current or former members of the armed forces.
The arrest of a Coast Guard lieutenant whom federal prosecutors accused last week of stockpiling weapons and planning to start a race war raised the question of whether the military, for all its efforts to fight discrimination, has a continuing problem with white supremacists in the ranks.
A persistent problem
Watchdog groups that monitor domestic extremist activity were quick to cite the allegations against the Coast Guard officer, Lt. Christopher Hasson, as a fresh cause for concern, one of a number in recent years involving people with military backgrounds. They have warned that the armed forces can be a training and recruiting ground for hate groups.
“If you look at the list of domestic terrorism attacks, you will find a lot of veterans,” said Heidi Beirich, director of the intelligence project at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The trouble, Beirich said, is the Pentagon does not see white nationalists in the ranks as a major issue. “We’ve had a hard time convincing the military of the seriousness of this problem,” she said.
The Defense Department did not respond to requests for comment for this article, but its posture has generally been that the number of troops involved in extremist activity is tiny, that there are strict regulations against discrimination and extremist activity, and that military commanders are empowered to discipline and discharge troops who break them.
The department told Congress in a 2018 letter that, out of 1.3 million serving members of the military, only 18 had been disciplined or discharged for extremist activity over the past five years.
Experts say, though, that because extremists generally try to keep their activities in the shadows, the official discipline figures probably understate the scale of the problem.
In and out of the service
In a number of cases, white supremacists have served in the military and then turned to deadly violence afterward. Examples include Wade Page, who opened fire at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012, and Timothy McVeigh, who bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. More recently, a half-dozen current and former service members were linked in 2017 to the Atomwaffen Division, a violent white supremacist group.
Saying that the military radicalized these men would be wrong, Beirich said. “The military is one of the most diverse, multicultural places you can go get a job,” she said. “If anything, it de-radicalizes people.”
Even so, an FBI report in 2008 found that right-wing extremists with military experience were a persistent problem in civilian life. And since then, a number of participants in violent protests mounted by so-called altright groups have been activeduty troops or veterans.
Drawn to join up
Some extremist groups encourage their younger members to enlist to get weapons training, Beirich said, adding that the military often has little awareness of these groups and how they operate.
And for individuals, she said, the personality traits that may predispose them to extremist views may also predispose them to seek a career involving weapons and the use of force.
The military does not want such recruits, but it does not have a comprehensive system for screening them out. All recruits go through a criminal background check when they enlist, but that would only detect extremists if they have been charged with a crime related to their beliefs; those who have not can slip through. Recruits’ medical records are reviewed for signs of significant mental illness, but there is no formal psychological assessment that might detect extremist views.
A long history
The history of white supremacism in the ranks stretches back to the segregated regiments that fought the Civil War and, before 1862, to laws that barred blacks from serving in the Army at all.
The Ku Klux Klan recruited openly in the armed forces for decades, and at the peak of its influence in the 1920s it even had at least one official chapter aboard a Navy battleship, the USS Tennessee.
President Harry S. Truman ordered all branches of the military to integrate in 1948, but for decades afterward, many in uniform still held extreme racist views and commanders often did little to dissuade them.
Klan members paraded in makeshift white robes and burned crosses on a U.S. base in Vietnam to mark the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Marines wore KKK patches and held Klan meetings in 1976 at Camp Pendleton in California. After black Marines tried to forcibly break up a Klan meeting, they were charged with assault, while 17 Klan members were transferred to other bases to “defuse the situation,” as a commander said at the time, instead of being disciplined.
The Klan held what it billed as a military recruiting rally in Virginia Beach, Virginia, in 1979, hoping to sign up some of the 50,000 sailors and Marines based in the area. Commanders told the troops the rally was off limits, but a number attended anyway, confident that they would face no consequences.
“The Navy’s policy is that membership in the Klan is no more illegal than membership in the Elks,” a spokesman said at the time, explaining why none of those who attended were reprimanded, even after fights broke out at the rally.
Changes in the 1980s
Though critics say the military is not doing enough to root out extremism, it does much more now than it once did. Significant change came in the 1980s, when the military began to see right-wing extremists as a national security issue and began to impose new restrictions, usually in reaction to egregious episodes.
In 1986, after soldiers and Marines were photographed in uniform at a rally with a flag that read “KKK rally, no Jews allowed,” the Pentagon issued new regulations barring service members from belonging to extremist organizations. The troops in the photo had joined a paramilitary group begun by a retired Army Special Forces master sergeant that government prosecutors said was training to overthrow the government. The master sergeant was later convicted of murder.
The year of the rally, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger issued a directive requiring everyone in the military to “reject participation in white supremacy, neo-Nazi, and other such groups which espouse or attempt to create overt discrimination.” The ban applied both on and off duty.
Even so, the military, reflecting society as a whole, still struggled with hate groups and racist violence.
How large is the problem?
Experts generally agree that the problem is more widespread than the military acknowledges.
In 1995, after the Oklahoma City bombing and the killing of a black couple by a paratrooper and skinhead near Fort Bragg in North Carolina, the Army conducted a sweeping investigation of extremism in its ranks. It turned up 22 skinheads at Fort Bragg, but the Army found a “very, very, very small amount of extremist activity” overall, a spokesman said at the time.
That has largely been the posture of the military ever since, according to Carter F. Smith, who served for 30 years as an Army criminal investigator and now teaches criminal justice at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee.
“They always say the numbers are small, and because of that, it is not a priority,” Carter said of military officials. “Well, the numbers might be small, but they are like a drop of cyanide in your drink. They can do a lot of damage.”
Smith said that while the military is required to prepare a report every year on the number of domestic extremists in its ranks, it has no law enforcement task force to monitor extremist networks and generate comprehensive data.
“So every year they get a report based on what they were never looking for,” he said.
As a result, he said, the figures include only the small number of disciplinary cases that arise on their own, and the military goes on assuming that extremists in the ranks are a minor issue.
Onus on commanders
Responsibility for identifying and discharging extremists is left to individual unit commanders. Smith said that many line officers may lack the time and the training for the task, or any feeling that it is necessary.
Over the years, he said, when he has offered to brief commanders about the issue of skinheads or gang members in their ranks, the response would often be, “We don’t have a problem.”
Military law enforcement was alerted to the Coast Guard lieutenant’s views by the internet searches he was performing on his work computer, which led to his arrest on drug and gun charges. Smith said it was unlikely that the military will be able to count on other extremists being so careless.
“They will just react when something bad happens,” he said. “I don’t expect this problem to stop any time soon. It never stopped in the 30 years I worked on it.”