PROFESSOR AMY GAUDION’S WORK-IN-PROGRESS SELECTED FOR INDIANA LAW JOURNAL 2024 SYMPOSIUM
May 2024 — Professor Amy Gaudion’s work-in-progress, “Discord and the Pentagon’s Watch Dog: Countering Violent Extremism in the U.S. Military from Within,” was accepted for inclusion in the Indiana Law Journal’s Fall 2024 symposium on Law and Technology at the Crossroads: A Centennial Summit. The article is slated for publication in early 2025.
In his recent book, Ward Farnsworth crafts a metaphor from the lead-pipe theory for the fall of Rome to consider how rage and misinformation traveling through today’s technology-enabled pipes are poisoning our civic engagement and threatening our governmental structures: “We have built networks for the delivery of information — the internet, and especially social media. These networks too, are a marvel. But they also carry a kind of poison with them. The mind fed from those sources learns to subsist happily on quick reactions, easy certainties, one-liners, and rage.” Professor Gaudion’s article carries the metaphor into a new context, and considers what should be done when the poison being transported through the pipes is directed at members of the U.S. military.
While violent extremism in the U.S. military is not an entirely new threat, the events of January 6, 2021 brought the threat into much sharper focus. Reports to date show that approximately 14% of individuals charged with crimes connected to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol were current or former military personnel. Jack Texeira presents another illustration of this threat. The 21-year old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard stands accused of leaking classified documents on the Discord server, a group-chat platform where he also espoused racist and white-nationalist ideologies. A 2021 Military Times survey found that about one-third of active-duty personnel have witnessed signs of white supremacy in the ranks, with many of these instances occurring within social media and online platforms. At a fundamental level, the idea that members of the military would join — or even find appealing the objectives of — an antigovernment or white supremist group is deeply disconcerting. Upon entering the military, individuals swear an oath to defend the Constitution and the nation, and they are given tools and legal authorities to use force in defense of the nation. Thus, it should warrant scrutiny when these individuals seek to engage in violence against the very system they swore an oath to protect. At a more visceral level, this threat is concerning because attempts by white supremist and extremist groups to engage in violent acts will be more potent and more effectively executed if individuals with tactical training and technical weapons expertise are involved. And indeed, that is one of the reasons why active duty servicemembers and veterans are such desirable recruits for these groups.
This article’s aim is to expose the challenges of countering the military DVE threat while identifying the actors, tools and mechanisms best suited to the task. It will examine the rise of DVE within the U.S. military, paying particular attention to an increase in efforts by DVE groups to recruit veterans and active duty military servicemembers. It will illuminate the online platforms where such recruitment occurs, and explore why these online communities tend to provide such fertile recruiting environments for DVE groups. The article will examine the existing legal framework for assessing the exercise of First Amendment rights by active duty servicemembers, while also considering the relevant UCMJ provisions and other department directives aimed at prohibiting undesirable online activities. It will then review the flurry of initiatives, studies and policy directives that followed in the wake of the January 6, 2021 attack as the U.S. Department of Defense sought to counter DVE recruitment efforts and to identify and punish servicemembers for certain activities relating to DVE. This part also will look at how quickly support for these efforts faded, from both the legislative and executive branches. The article then will turn its focus to an assessment of one of the efforts with potential staying power: the establishment of the deputy inspector general for diversity and inclusion and extremism in the military (DIEM). The article will profile the attributes that make this institutional player particularly well-suited to the task of countering extremism in the military, and possibly able to offer an antidote to the poison teeming through today’s technology-enabled pipes.
Amy C. Gaudion is an associate professor of law at Penn State Dickinson Law as well as the founder of Dickinson Law’s annual cyberspace simulation with the U.S. Army War College. Her scholarship focuses on national security law, cyberspace, and civilian-military relations, and she leads Dickinson Law’s national security and cyberspace programs.