Professor Amy C. Gaudion’s Article on Extremism in the U.S. Military Published in the Indiana Law Journal

PROFESSOR AMY C. GAUDION’S ARTICLE ON EXTREMISM IN THE U.S. MILITARY PUBLISHED IN THE INDIANA LAW JOURNAL

July 2025—Associate Professor Amy C. Gaudion published her most recent article, "Discord and the Pentagon’s Watchdog: Countering Extremism in the U.S. Military,” in the Indiana Law Journal.

In his 2022 book, Ward Farnsworth crafted 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 digital pipes is directed at members of the U.S. military.

While extremism in the U.S. military is not a new threat, the events of January 6, 2021, brought the threat into much sharper focus. It exposed three preexisting trends, each sitting in plain sight but not yet woven together. These trends include a growing acceptance of extremist views and ideologies in U.S. military and veteran communities, an increase in violent extremist acts committed by individuals with military backgrounds, and the enhanced use of digital platforms by extremist groups to target their messaging to and strengthen their recruitment of individuals with military experience.

To return to the metaphor, the extremist poison is teeming through the pipes at an alarming rate, and the number of pipes has increased to include social media platforms, encrypted chat tools, gaming platforms, podcasts, and music streaming apps, including YouTube, Discord, Gab, Telegram, and WhatsApp, among many others. Gaudion’s article outlines the contours of that threat, exposes the structural and legal obstacles that make countering extremism in the military such a fraught exercise, and identifies actors, tools, and mechanisms—beyond the conventional options––able to overcome these longstanding structural and institutional obstacles.

The article citation is 100 Ind. L. J. 1743 (2025).

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.