Terror threat remains alive in USA from military services

Thirty years ago, a former US Army soldier committed the worst act of domestic terrorism in American history: The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people. In the three decades since, dozens of terror plots - some successful, many foiled - have been committed and planned by veterans and active duty members of the United States military, reports USA Today.

Military service remains the "single strongest predictor" of involvement in violent extremism, according to terrorism researchers. And when it became clear that hundreds of the January 6, 2021, insurrectionists had connections to the armed forces, then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced sweeping plans to identify and remove extremists from military ranks and help ensure veterans don't fall down the slippery slope to violent domestic extremism.

That effort was already sputtering by 2023, when Austin still helmed the Pentagon, USA Today found in an investigation that year. Currently the Department of Defense is led by Pete Hegseth, who was himself once removed from a National Guard posting for suspected ties to extremism. Hegseth, like his appointer, US President Donald Trump, has long cast scorn on the very notion that military members are prone to becoming domestic extremists. Hegseth has called efforts to combat domestic extremism in the ranks a "purge," writing that they distract military leaders from their primary role. "Things like focusing on extremism have created a climate inside our ranks that feel political when it hasn't ever been political," Hegseth said during his Senate confirmation hearing, according to NPR. "Those are the types of things that are going to change."

USA Today has found that Trump's cuts to the federal bureaucracy this year have targeted programs that once trained military personnel to spot and quell extremist ideologies in service members. Austin's effort, according to researchers who monitor extremism, has all but disappeared. Key figures have left government posts where they were enacting those reforms, and federal funding for rooting out extremism has evaporated. That has crippled programs to help officers and veterans' organizations identify potential terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the Oklahoma City bombing against a government he believed had overreached.