Evaluating Extremism in the Military from a Personal Stance
| by Diego Olivieri
This research note is the culmination of Diego’s Fall 2024 Donnelly Fellowship in which he drew on his own experiences to assist with a CTEC project on extremists’ exploitation of the military.
Many questions have been raised in recent years about possible connections between service members and extremism, especially since their disproportionate involvement in January 6th. Every person who makes it past the military’s basic training will be trained on how to kill, regardless of their job in the military. One uncomfortable question we must consider is whether training to kill, being willing to kill, and being willing to die for an ideology is inherently extreme?
Extremism has two competing understandings. The first views extremist actions and those who commit them as outliers, as being rare in terms of their prevalence in the population. Less than one percent of the United States population joins the military, though figures are higher in other countries. From the standpoint of this definition, joining the military and pursuing its goals qualifies as extremist behavior because it is rare.
The second definition is more nuanced. It argues that extremism is “the belief that an in-group’s success or survival can never be separated from the need for hostile action against an out-group.” But what exactly constitutes “hostile action” from the U.S. military? While the United States military has not been involved in a war of conquest the way Russia is with its invasion of Ukraine, it has been accused of engaging in international conflicts to pursue selfish interests rather than participate in global peacekeeping. Expressing this stance, for example, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan described the invasion of Iraq by the U.S. as illegal and thus necessarily hostile in 2004.
I experienced some of this conflict during my own four years in the Marine Corps. There, I learned “every Marine is a rifleman,” a motto that emphasizes that even Marines (like myself) who are not in combat arms roles must still be trained and ready to pull the trigger if so ordered. While only a minimal number of jobs in the military require service members to engage in direct combat, every service member must accept the possibility of killing and dying in order to protect the country’s interests.
This mentality is partially achieved and reinforced through lessons that the military directly teaches service members about prioritizing patriotism and sacrifice over personal safety. These experiences have been shared by some of the interviewees I’ve spoken with this semester while assisting with a study about veteran’s experiences of extremism. This sample is not representative of the 1.3 million active duty service members, but their collective experiences reflect patterns that reveal the day-to-day exposures to different aspects of extremism.
One interviewee, a Marine Corps veteran, similarly elaborated on lessons about killing to the study’s PI:
The week before we went to Afghanistan, this fucker named Dave Grossman comes and talks to my entire battalion. Dave Grossman. Lieutenant Colonel. Army. Retired. Wrote a book called On Killing that’s maybe the worst thing that’s ever happened to military and law enforcement. But it’s treated as a Bible. It’s a secret handshake among like the pseudo intellectuals of the military. And so he came and talked to us about the warrior’s journey and how to mentally steel ourselves so that we wouldn’t have guilt when we got back after having gone away and killed people. […] And he was like, because if you don’t do [kill them] over there there’s these cells that are operative in the U.S. and they’re gonna come for your kids because that’s the kind of people that they are like that’s what they do. They target kids because they don’t have souls and they’re fucking evil, and they believe in an evil religion. And he talked to 1,200 people in my battalion and he got, I don’t know, 4 or 5 hours of just uninterrupted platform. And it was all under the guise of mental health training right? In the same way that other racist narratives are folded in under the guise of combat training, right? And that makes it hard. It makes it so these narratives are seemingly unimpeachable.
In short, the military explicitly relies on creating and emphasizing outgroup boundaries between the U.S. and its perceived enemies.
Something I noticed during my own service was how these boundaries were also perpetuated inside the ranks. Three separate times, I heard White service members using racial slurs for Black people, never directly to anyone’s face, but one instance involved a White staff sergeant to describe a Black staff sergeant.
What I and others experienced was casual, “everyday” racism, homophobia and misogyny within the ranks. Black service members had their promotions called into question only because of racist perceptions about their race, with the speaker insisting that the promotion only happened as a result of unfair and unearned “affirmative action” efforts. Female service members similarly had their accomplishments questioned because of perceptions about their gender. Superior officers openly referred to junior ranking service members with homophobic slurs, and one interviewee told me that a superior officer openly expressed hope that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” would soon be reinstated.
Two service members interviewees who had completed multiple enlistments stated that the homophobia and misogyny they experienced was much worse in their initial years of enlistment. But over time they had seen a change in attitudes and saw the service becoming more inclusive to all of its members. Eighteen others, 47% of the interview sample, conversely insisted this internal boundary-making became noticeably worse when Trump took office.
Regardless of the timeline, the everyday exclusions and the creation of outgroups within the military constituted most interviewees’ focus on the concerns of extremism within the ranks. Only four of the study’s thirty-eight interviewees reported anything resembling direct recruitment from neo-Nazis or other extremist groups. Some, like me, commonly saw III% bumper stickers on cars on military installation and knew service members who had a III% tattoo. At the time, most of us interpreted these as communicating a grander patriotic narrative and not representing an anti-government militia, but, in retrospect, we know some of these displays may have been communicating something actively extremist.
The pervasive, seemingly casual, exclusionary language alongside less common but more overt expressions of extremism does not necessarily correlate to service members engaging in domestic terrorism: the vast majority of service members and veterans serve honorably, rather than participating in insurrections. But these findings still inform the concerns about the connections between extremism and the military and force us to confront uncomfortable questions about the role the military itself may play in fostering some extremists.