Extremism in US military is ‘sleeping danger’ says author of Pentagon report

The decorated combat veteran who led the Biden administration’s efforts to counter extremist activity in the US military has warned there could be further domestic attacks by individuals with current or past military ties if the Pentagon fails to take the threat seriously.

Both of the deadly incidents on New Year’s Day were carried out by discharged or serving members of the armed forces. The driver of a pickup truck who killed 14 revellers in New Orleans was a veteran with 13 years service in the US army, while the man who blew up a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Las Vegas Trump hotel, killing himself, was an active-duty Green Beret.

Bishop Garrison, who spearheaded an internal Department of Defense investigation into extremist activity within the military in 2021 and who became the target of a virulent rightwing smear campaign to discredit him and his mission, said that the New Year’s Day attacks should be a wake-up call. “Both incidents demonstrate the sleeping danger that we have failed to deal with as a country.”

In an interview with the Guardian, Garrison said the defense department needed to tackle the dual challenges of radicalisation among military veterans, as displayed in New Orleans, and distress among serving soldiers, as shown by the Las Vegas suicide bomber. “I am worried that we will see more of this type of action taking place, that it will become more bombastic and stronger, and that more people will be injured or killed,” he said.

Garrison was appointed by the current defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, to lead the Countering Extremist Activity Working Group in 2021. It was tasked with investigating the scale of the insider threat within the armed forces and coming up with plans to combat it, at a time of mounting anxiety about extremist activity of many different ideological hues.

He served two tours in Iraq, leaving the military as a captain. He then trained in the law and joined Barack Obama’s second administration as a White House liaison to the defense department. At the time he was tapped to lead the extremist activity working group he was serving in the Biden administration as senior adviser to the defense secretary for human capital and diversity, equity and inclusion. Garrison currently works as a senior fellow at the National Security Institute at George Mason law school.

A makeshift memorial on Bourbon Street days after a US army veteran drove his truck into the crowded French Quarter on New Year’s Day in New Orleans. Photograph: Octavio Jones/Reuters

Garrison’s warning is all the more poignant given the start of Donald Trump’s second presidency now less than two weeks away. The president-elect’s choice for defense secretary, the former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, has called attempts under Joe Biden to root out extremist activity in the military a sham, and has indicated that if he gets the job he would scrap programs designed to combat it.

Hegseth will appear on Tuesday before the Senate armed services committee at the start of his confirmation process. Garrison urged members of the committee to look closely at the nominee’s views on extremism.

“The committee should ask some very direct questions about Hegseth’s previous statements. This is not about political rhetoric, it’s about keeping people safe and ensuring that military units are able to carry out their mission of protecting the country.”

Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, has compiled a list of 70 specific questions that she says Hegseth should answer. They include several points addressing his views on extremist activity within the armed services.

The senator wants to know whether the nominee thinks service members should be allowed to affiliate with white supremacist or extremist groups. She also proposes a question on whether he thinks the presence of extremists in the military who support violence against the US government and fellow Americans “undermines readiness and cohesion”.

Donald Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, visits senators on Capitol Hill last month. Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Warren also deals directly with Hegseth’s opposition to the working group on extremist activity which Garrison led. She asks whether Hegseth will commit to implementing the recommendations of the group.

Garrison’s investigation was initiated at a time when Pentagon leaders had become increasingly alarmed by violent incidents involving current or former military personnel. They included the 2009 mass shooting at the former Fort Hood army base in Texas, the Washington Navy Yard attack in 2013, the 2017 deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

Soon after Garrison convened the inquiry panel, rightwing commentators went on the attack. One of the most acerbic critics was Hegseth.

He used his primetime Fox News platform to denounce the effort to root out extremist activity, slamming it as a “patriot purge”. He personally derided Garrison as the Pentagon’s “Maga purge man”, describing him as a “powerful, radical leftist”.

As part of the Republican “war on woke”, other rightwing commentators piled in, accusing Garrison of being “anti-white”. Hegseth’s then Fox News colleague, Tucker Carlson, called Garrison a “lunatic”.

Much of the criticism focused on a 2019 tweet in which Garrison had called Trump a “racist” after the then president denigrated the majority-Black city of Baltimore as “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess”.

Garrison said he was surprised by the characterization of himself as an anti-white, woke leftwinger out to destroy the armed forces. “My wife is white, I have mixed-race children, and I’m a West Pointer with two tours in Iraq, two Bronze Stars and a combat action badge.”

He was also shocked that Hegseth and others described the working group as a politically motivated attack on Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement, given that it was conceived as a strictly agnostic project. “Secretary Austin regularly reminded us to uphold the first amendment rights of all service members – this was not about the content, it was about the extremist activity we were trying to prevent.”

The working party released its final report in December 2021. It contained a set of 20 recommendations that called for comprehensive monitoring of extremist activity, improved screening of military recruits, training for serving personnel, and an upgrade of insider threat programs.

By then the damage had already been done. Under a barrage of rightwing criticism, the Pentagon in effect shelved the report.

“As far as I know, there was never any implementation of our policies,” Garrison said. “We finished our recommendations, we had been attacked, our recommendations were not adopted.”

Firefighters remove a tarp after extinguishing a Tesla Cybertruck that exploded in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day. Photograph: Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Handout/EPA

Now the Pentagon faces possible erasure of even what little provision exists to combat extremist activity within the ranks. Should Hegseth be confirmed, and carry out his promise to rein back counter-extremism programs that he considers “woke”, the armed services are likely to be even more exposed to infiltration, radicalisation, and violent activity by distressed service members.

Garrison believes last week’s atrocities underlined the danger of such an approach. “On New Year’s Day we suffered an attack and a suicide bombing that relate directly back to preventing radicalisation in our military veterans and extending help to soldiers in distress,” he said.

The New Orleans attacker, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, was born and raised in Texas and shortly before he carried out his car-rampage on Bourbon Street appeared to become inspired by Islamic State ideology. For Garrison, Jabbar’s history underlines the need for more understanding about how some military veterans struggling with the return to civilian life become susceptible to extremist ideologies of all kinds.

The Las Vegas Cybertruck bomber, Matthew Livelsberger, 37, suffered from PTSD having been deployed twice to Afghanistan. “It’s clear that he didn’t feel comfortable getting the type of help he needed, because he was concerned it would have an adverse effect on his career,” Garrison said.

“That’s a cultural problem within the military. And that is something I know that the secretaries of the army, navy and air force are all working very hard to address.”