From militia groups like the Oath Keepers, which is composed mainly of current and former military and law enforcement, to people like Jack Teixeira, the Air Guardsman who built a following leaking classified material and promoting white supremacist race war ideology, the United States has struggled with a problem for decades: a subset of the military are swayed to homegrown extremist movements.
Writing for The Bulwark on Thursday, former Army Officer and Human Rights First director Michael Breen and Navy veteran Kenneth Harbaugh outlined how to stop extremist groups from recruiting those who serve the country.
"When we served in the military, we confronted insurgencies that seized political power not through elections or persuasion, but with violence," they wrote. "With that experience, we understand the threat posed by organizations like the Oath Keepers, which played a key role in storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and continue to contemplate domestic violence in the United States. Insurgencies, whether their motivations are religious extremism, nationalism, or white supremacy, rely less on technology than on ideology. They need recruits to survive, and the Oath Keepers focus on recruiting veterans of America’s wars. To deprive the Oath Keepers and similar groups of members, as well as to protect our veterans, we must offer those who served community, reimagining the camaraderie we felt during our service. And we must offer purpose, putting the skills and commitment of our veterans to use in meaningful ways."
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The problem, they noted, is that "the ranks of violent white supremacist organizations are still swollen from the last time large numbers of disillusioned soldiers, particularly draftees, returned from abroad after the Vietnam War. Since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the deadliest attack on American soil between Pearl Harbor and 9/11 and the act of a Gulf War veteran, this movement has decentralized and atomized its leadership."
Worse still, some groups like the Oath Keepers enjoy tax-exempt status, despite their leaders now going to prison for seditious conspiracy.
"As we learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, the easiest way to defeat terrorists is to prevent normal people from becoming terrorists in the first place," they wrote.
This involves creating a dialogue with young men returning home from war, and giving them career opportunities at home — while at the same time monitoring active duty ranks for extremist activity like that of Teixeira.
"Disrupting extremists like the Oath Keepers demands more than courtroom victories, though those are important," they concluded. "Together, and only together, can we stem the growing tide of extremism by depriving them of the manpower needed to commit their seditious acts."