Secretary of Defense Orders 60-day Stand-Down to Confront Extremism in the Military

 

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has called on the services to conduct a 60-day stand-down on the issue of extremism in the military, prompted by the Jan. 6 attack on the the Capitol and subsequent reports of both active-duty and former service members attending a rally calling to overturn the 2020 election and the riot that ensued.

The Defense Department does not centrally track troops who have been investigated for domestic terrorism or extremist sentiment, and neither do the services, making it difficult to get a read on how prevalent the problem is. The FBI opened 143 investigations into troops and veterans in 2020, 68 of those for domestic extremism.

DoD does have a 2012 instruction that prohibits extremist activities, though it doesn’t clearly define extremism itself. Generally, the services handle these investigations at the unit level ― or with the FBI, if it comes to plans for attacks, for instance ― and there is no requirement to report those up to service headquarters.

Military Times’ own polling has shown that, anecdotally, more than one-third of active-duty troops, and more than half of minority service members, have witnessed signs of white supremacy in their colleagues. Further, survey respondents ranked white nationalism as a bigger national security threat domestic terror groups affiliated with Islam, for instance.