Quiet release of DOD extremism report sparks conservative backlash
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TOP STORY: When Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered an independent investigation into the extent of extremist views in the military in February of 2021, he said that based on his personal experience, he believed “99.9%” of the troops embraced the values of their oaths of service but that while the number of extremists in the ranks is small, they can “have an outsized impact.”
“When I was a lieutenant colonel,” Austin said, referring to his time at the 82nd Airborne Division in the 1990s, “we couldn't tell that story of what we were doing and how great we were because nobody wanted to hear it. They wanted to hear about the skinheads. And so that had an outsized impact.”
Last month, more than a year and a half after it was completed, with little fanfare the Pentagon made public the results of the investigation into extremism in the ranks over the Christmas holiday, but only after requests by USA Today.
The June 2022 report by the Institute for Defense Analyses pretty much tracked with Austin’s gut feelings, finding “no evidence that the number of violent extremists in the military is disproportionate to the number of violent extremists in the United States as a whole” while noting that “there is some indication that the rate of participation by former service members is slightly higher and may be growing.”
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