The U.S. Department of Defense said it was “a wake-up call” when current and former members of the American military took part in storming the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., on January 6th. Since then, the military has increased efforts to identify and fight “extremism” in the armed forces. A “voluntary, confidential online survey” from Military Times last year found that “about one-third of all active-duty respondents said they saw signs of white supremacist or racist ideology in the ranks.” How serious is the problem?

According to Lecia Brooks—the chief of staff for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which has been working with the military on the issue— “the overwhelming majority of military personnel have nothing to do with extremist activity.” The situation in the U.S. is much smaller-scale than what we’re seeing in Germany, Brooks says, where a government report last year found that the country’s “security services recorded more than 1,400 cases of suspected far-right extremism among soldiers, police officers and intelligence agents” over a three-year period. In March, Brooks told Congress that “the number of extremists associated with the [U.S.] […]