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US Military’s ‘Extremist Briefing’: An Inside Take
My daughter is active-duty Air Force and she is currently deployed overseas. She works in a direct mission career field which requires a top-secret clearance. Her work schedule on deployment is much more intense than it is when she is stateside. She works with all sorts of people: ages 19-50, all races, all genders, officers, NCOs, and enlisted. Her field is highly technical and competencies are more important in some aspects than how many stripes you may have. Her unit was tapped for the required “Extremist Briefing” recently and this is her report.
There was about 90 personnel in attendance. The briefing was two hours in length, despite their tight mission schedule. The briefing room required masks and chairs were positioned two feet apart. The briefing started with a video on the big screen with speeches from the SecDef, a four-star, the Chief MstSgt of the USAF, Commander of Air Combat Command, and on down the command structure until the video featured my daughter’s immediate command. She said that the way it drilled down to a face she knows made it feel very personal. The talking heads kept using the term “extremists” and “extremism” but the terms were not specifically defined, and that the terms were used very generally. (Kind of a “we all know it when we see it” kind of way). She said the video was creepy and made her feel uncomfortable. As a “Hunger Games” book fan in middle school, she said that she felt like it was a scene out of a Hunger Games book where the “Capital District” was telling everyone in other districts what the reality was, but that the ones out of touch with reality were on the screen.
After the video and some PowerPoint slides (can you have a briefing in the military without PP slides?), my daughter said they were broken up into smaller groups and a “facilitator” (another military person) then asked questions of the group members such as “Tell me about a time in your military career that you saw or experienced extremism.” The groups were told that the facilitators were required to write down their responses and would be sending them back into the SecDef. One group member tried to pin down the facilitator about what did they mean by “extremism?” (Still no clear definition.) One group member, a black airman, stated that he may have experienced a couple of jerks during his AF career who were racist, but when were they going to be asked about the thousand other incidents of his colleagues going out of their way to support him professionally and personally? Another group member wondered why they were not talking about extremism in the context of Antifa and Portland. Another black female airman said that the AF was a melting pot and, although she came from an all-black neighborhood, she had met and worked with great people of all walks of life. No one in the group offered any examples of “extremism” despite the lack of definition.
At the end of it, my daughter said that she had previously ignored all the talk of this and focused on her job and her life. She said this briefing crystalized to her that, in her words, s&*t just got real. She said that she felt like the term “extremist” was being used as a euphemism for “conservative” or “libertarian” but they couldn’t come right out and say that. She is not a big user of social media but she said that she “likes” and “follows” several conservative voices so, even though she doesn’t say anything herself, she’s worried about her “follows” being used against her. My daughter said that no one had ever had any issues with “extremism” that she is aware of, but she said that her job/unit is very mission-centric and she wondered about other areas of the service that were not so primary-mission focused such as finance/dining services/medical which would harbor disgruntled airman with a laundry list of extremism examples to share. No doubt we will later see a “report” issued by SecDef about all the problems with extremism as reported from these active-duty wide briefings since they were taking all these answers down.
My daughter’s conclusion is that it was very poorly focused, creepy, and a waste of time. But yet, illuminating as to the direction of the service branches. She said that she will be even more mindful of herself in her workplace and even out of the workplace due to this.
Published in Military
It’s a nom de plume. For whatever anonymity that may offer. So I totally agree with your concerns. I’m a pretty jaded lady!
I understand but as alifer friend of mine once told me that the downside of working in the military is that at any time he can be jailed if he does not live up to what the officiers want. I am suspecting this downside might be why folk such as your nephew and my Goddaughter need to get out, and get away.
You make me realize I’ve been trying to ignore the severity of the crisis.
Great OP. Having sat through the Navy version of the same training 2 weeks ago your daughter’s account sounds familiar. The facilitators were not political indoctrinators sent from DC, they were mid-grade officers and senior enlisted from the command itself who were given none-to-thorough training and then told to run through the slides with their discussion groups of 10-20 people.
Let’s be deeply suspicious of attempts to politicize the military. This stand-down could be a step in that direction, and perhaps is, but it was not obviously so in execution: No mentions of right-wing or conservative, no mentions of BLM or antifa. Pretty sure the Nazis were the only group mentioned repeatedly. The Constitution IS mentioned 14 times in the discussion guide, which is nice. Free/freedom/freely are mentioned seven times. The slides largely focused on politically-related behaviors (thou shalt not campaign in uniform) and other long-standing restrictions on free speech imposed by law and regulations.
In addition to the 6 January incident, this effort may have been sparked by at least two recent incidents of low-life Sailors hanging nooses on Navy ships.
Been in a long time and no one loves the Navy more, so don’t think I’m pooh-poohing this. On the other hand, misperceptions about this kind of thing could turn the military into a political punching bag (think post-Vietnam era). That would be disastrous.
For anyone that’s interested, here is their official Powerpoint presentation. Your tax dollars at work.
https://www.airforcemag.com/heres-how-the-air-force-resourced-leaders-for-extremism-stand-downs/
I don’t expect the military to be a punching bag. I suspect it will become the source of Democrat power, which it has.. Just like every other government agency has become or is in the process of becoming. The military has installed a corrupt POTUS from a corrupt election and is using its force to make it happen. Do you see any conservatives protesting anything? No. Why? Because everybody understands to do so means jail or death.
Those troops asking those questions can look forward to their next assignment on Kwajelein Atoll or Diego Garcia.
Seriously I wouldn’t put it past them to start noting who the “resistant” are and taking not so subtle administrative punishment .
There can be a lot wrong with military justice depending on what command is enforcing it but that’s a very strange statement for your friend to make. Does he or she refer to themself as a lifer as you did?
What if that is the purpose of the exercise?
I have no doubt they will be corrected in their outlook. Just like all of us was.
No, he was just in the navy for as long as they would let him before he aged out. I figure that makes him a lifer but feel free to correct me if I am wrong.
Your commander may not be able to jail you on a whim, but they can make your life a living hell. My Bipolar former commander got angry at a co worker and had her work every single day for a month in the ER. 31 straight days of 12 hour ER shifts. Leaves cancelled on a whim. Promotions denied.
Another commander who disliked a colleague ordered him to have an inpatient psych eval. The doctor he ordered the eval on was completely sane, just would question stupid orders from the commander. As a physician a psych eval like that is a death sentence. Every time you apply for a license or hospital privileges, or a new job you have to submit reams of documentation on your psych eval. When the doc got to the inpatient unit, the psychiatrist evaluated him and said “why the hell are you here?”.
One funny outcome from that though. The doctor was married to a woman from Massachusetts and had a relative in congress who was her congressman, the Hon Tip O’Neill Speaker of the House of Representatives.
When the Congressional Inquiry came down on the commander from the office of the speaker, he was reassigned to USAF Hospital Kunsan ROK and was gone in less than a week.
Yes, I saw a couple of commanders use the mental health route to harass malcontents. Very Soviet-ish. But they took advantage of that because the official military justice system wouldn’t have allowed that sort of harassment. PRP was also sometimes abused the same way. Administrative actions didn’t get the scrutiny of UCMJ actions, so there are way more UOTHC discharges that rightly could have been BCD or Dishonorable, but no one wanted to take a chance with a jury.