Opinion | Enemies foreign and domestic: Inside the U.S. military's white supremacy problem

There will always be a fine line between ethnocentricity and racism. There are entnic neighborhoods of all types. Places where you can live entirely in the other culture. I grew up in a part of Philad lphia where the movies were in German. Someone could come from Germany, speaking no English, find a resid nice and employment where english was not necessary and go through life that way. It,was their children going to school that dragged them into reality.

Here's the statement that lost me: "it is important to note that Army and Marine Corps recruits are disproportionately from the southeast and northwest." I checked the link to cfr.org, and all I saw were numbers regarding where members of the military come from, and their economic and ethnic dispersion-nothing, nada, zip about affiliation with white supremacy groups or other organizations. Even the more pointed study from the late '90s (more than twenty years ago) did little to support NBC's early statement-merely suggesting that recruitment by extremist groups was targeting military members (which kinda makes "sense" if you're planning on illegal confrontation with the authorities, to include the Armed Forces). Clearly, NBC is trying to assert that because so many of us come from these areas, are largely from the middle and lower middle class...and largely Caucasian...there MUST be a connection. Not buying it NBC...just because evil people may sometimes be attracted to a profession that offers tactical training and means of fulfilling their own self-aggrandizing and deluded fantasies, doesn't mean that the Military, or the majority of innocent, patriotic, hard-working members thereof, have a "problem". Remember the African-American naval reserve officer who decided to launch a one-man war on the police? What about the Muslim Army officer who decided to enact his on version of jihad on his own soldiers? Wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald a Marine? Heck, Hitler used his own status as a "vet" to defend his war on humanity... then spat on the graves of the many Jewish-German soldiers from WWI he served alongside. What about the Russian sailors and soldiers who suddenly turned their guns on their own countrymen during the Russian Revolution? The "problem" is that there's no litmus test for "Potentially Lethal Sociopath", or "Mindless, Self-Absorbed Cretin"... so we have to fight the problem where it actually exists: those groups or individuals who cross the line between having an opinion...and taking illegal actions to forcibly enact their will.

There are other domestic enemies in the military.