How to Keep Vets From Being Seduced by Extremists
The training many of our military people get is damn dangerous if abused or put to criminal use once one returns to civilian life. That “battlefield to home” transition IMO can make some people extra vulnerable to extremist messaging such as we hear from the Oathkeepers and Proud Boys. We can’t have military-trained explosives experts making bombs here. DefenseOne took a look and its revealing.
The “small but growing problem” of extremism among veterans is illustrated by the fact that they account for 15 percent of the people charged so far in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol—and that those charges figure heavily in the 350 percent increase in extremist-related crimes committed by veterans in the past decade, one terrorism expert said.
“But it’s not just a numbers problem,” William Braniff, director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, said during a Brookings Institution panel on Friday. “This is a problem regarding American democracy. And it’s a problem for which we have to put a preventative ecosystem in place now before the numbers do get more concerning.”
Since 1990 through the first nine months of 2021, at least 424 U.S. veterans “committed criminal acts that were motivated by their political, economic, social, or religious goals,” said a fact sheet released in October by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, an academic effort led by the University of Maryland. That includes 99 veterans who have been charged with crimes related to the breach of the Capitol on Jan. 6.
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