The rationale behind the Senate Armed Services Committee’s decision to include language to prevent funding for counter-extremism efforts inside the Department of Defense is perplexing on several levels. A not-so-short thread.

rollcall.com/2022/07/20/sen… 1⃣ It oversells the reliability of the data. Most experts believe extremism in the military is underreported, so relying on reported numbers for such a consequential decision is a bit disingenuous.

The U.S. military has an extremism problem. Full stop. Anyone who denies this is uninformed. But that’s not it. That’s not the whole tweet. An inadequately short thread. One key challenge is that the military doesn’t have a good handle on the scope or nature of the problem. It should, but it doesn’t. This leads to statements, like this one from @TRADOC, which only serve to signal a lack of understanding about the problem and potential solutions.

Warning: long thread on the terrorism label and what happened on January 6 in Washington, DC. The label of terrorism should not be tossed around lightly. It can be overused, but its proper application performs important legal, moral, and signaling functions. To be clear, complete consensus in academia/govt does not exist on the definition of terrorism. Still, common themes have emerged: violence (actual/threatened), political goals of the perpetrators, the desire to influence an audience, and the intentional targeting of civilians.