“Burying the lead” (or “lede”) is a form of journalistic malpractice that stuffs the most important information or disclosures in an article under a layer of mostly irrelevant or unoriginal text, likely to deflect readers from noticing them.  This article is a prime example.

Burying the lede can be either accidental or intentional. Here my antennae lean to the unintentional side. This is, after all, the Times Editorial Board, surveying the world from their Olympian perch somewhere high above 42nd street. At that altitude the air gets thin, and the urge to pontificate jostles always with the more mundane impulse to speak plainly; pomposity too often trumps precision.

Here the lede, once exhumed and dusted off, is stark, and should be shocking. In sum, it is: the brief post-insurrection hullaballoo by Defense Department [DOD] brass about cracking down and clearing out extremism in the ranks was little more than posturing piffle and almost 18 months later, has accomplished next to nothing. Resistance from below has stopped it in its tracks.

Not of course, by open defiance of the orders; but delay, deflection and similar well-worn resistance tactics, of which military bureaucrats are the acknowledged masters, appear to be in full play.

While I’m not a military expert, this is a movie I’m familiar with, in the context of another chronic pentagon personnel problem, namely very high rates of domestic abuse and violence.

In 2002 I watched as pentagon spin doctors systematically stifled the work of a congressionally-mandated commission set up to find and address the causes of waves of domestic violence outbreaks which produced not only the corpses of numerous military spouses, but (even worse, from the pentagon’s perspective) caught the attention of media like “60 Minutes” (An account of this dance of deflection is here.)

One of the roadblocks that hobbled the congressional commission was that the separate (rival) services couldn’t (or declined to) agree on common definitions for “domestic abuse” or on standardized ways of reporting and tracking cases. To read about how completely befuddled the leaders of battle-hardened combat units became when faced with the task of counting domestic deaths and injuries, one wondered how they  could fight their way out of the pentagon parking lot.

But when it came to leaving behind a fact-finding commission stranded empty-handed in the dust, the brass were and are without peer.  Last year, 2021, the ambitiously-named Government Accountability Office issued a report titled “DOMESTIC ABUSE- DOD Needs to Enhance Its Prevention, Response, and Oversight,” which reported as among its key findings that

“while there has been a longstanding statutory requirement, DOD has not collected comprehensive data on allegations of domestic violence . .  . [B]ased on our review of military service FAP ([Family Assistance Program] data, we found that it is not possible to determine the total number and type of domestic abuse allegations received across DOD because the services use different data collection methods, which may result in DOD’s undercounting of the number of allegations received by two military services. As a result, DOD is unable to assess the scope of alleged abuse and its rate of substantiation . . . .”

Which is to say, after fighting two big and several smaller wars since 2002, the DOD leadership is still pinned down in the pentagon parking lot when it comes to even counting military domestic abuse incidents. That’s 20 years of successfully fending off oversight and accountability; somebody ought to get a medal for that; I believe some probably did.

There are many parallels between the domestic abuse accountability blockade and the current interdiction that’s making mockery of the anti-extremism orders. They are described below, and should have been emphasized at the top of the piece, not a dozen paragraphs down.  The more I think about it, in fact, the more my antennae vibrate away from regarding its burial as just reflexive pomposity.

Maybe it wasn’t an accident at all.

For decades, police departments, the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs have known about the problem, yet they have made only halting progress in rooting out extremists in the ranks.

Jan. 6 changed that. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was so alarmed by the events of that day that he ordered all military commands to reinforce existing regulations prohibiting extremist activity and to query service members about their views on the extent of the problem.

The Defense Department standardized its screening questionnaires for recruits and changed its social media policies, so that liking or reposting white nationalist and extremist content would be considered the same as advocating it. Service members could face disciplinary action for doing so. The department also began preparing retiring members to avoid being recruited by extremist groups.

But those reforms were more easily ordered than executed.
A department inspector general report released this year found that the Pentagon’s sprawling bureaucracy was unable to identify the scope of the problem across the services because it used numerous reporting systems that were not interconnected. Commanders often didn’t have a clear understanding of what was prohibited.

As a result, the department “cannot fully implement policy and procedures to address extremist activity without clarifying the definitions of ‘extremism,’ ‘extremist,’ ‘active advocacy’ and ‘active participation,’” the report concluded. (Emphasis added.)

After 20 years of the war on terrorism, the country is now seeing many veterans joining extremist groups like the Proud Boys.

The end of wars and the return of the disillusioned veterans they can produce have often been followed by a spike in extremism. The white power movement grew after the end of the Vietnam War, with veterans often playing leading roles.

Antigovernment activity climbed in the 1990s after the first Iraq war, culminating in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh, an Army veteran who had served in Operation Desert Storm.

“These groups can give disaffected veterans a sense of purpose, camaraderie, community once they leave military service,” said Cassie Miller, an extremism researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center. . . .

Americans have a nearly unlimited right to free speech and association, and any effort to stop extremist violence must ensure that those rights are protected.

Across the board, extremists and their sympathizers, whether they act on their beliefs or just spread them, erode the public’s trust in the institutions that are designed to keep the country safe. Extremists bearing badges can put at risk ongoing police investigations by leaking confidential information.

In the military, extremists pose a threat to good order and discipline. In law enforcement, extremists — particularly white supremacists — pose a threat to the people they are meant to protect, especially people of color.

In federal agencies, extremists can compromisenational security and make our borders even less secure. Protecting those institutions and the nation they serve demands urgent action.