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The main suspects in two deadly New Year’s Day attacks shared a history of service in the US military, underscoring lingering fears about extremism within the armed services that officials have struggled to root out.
Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the suspect behind a truck attack in New Orleans that killed 14 people, was an Army veteran, while the man allegedly behind the explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, Matthew Livelsberger, was an active duty member of the military.
While not the first acts of military extremism, the two deadly attacks amplify questions about the number of radicalized and unstable veterans and active-duty troops and whether Pentagon efforts to identify and eliminate extremist beliefs are working.
Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, which has studied extremist military activity for decades, said the unresolved issue was particularly dangerous because veterans and active-duty service members can kill more efficient
“The military has not adequately addressed the problem, whether it’s white supremacists or Islamic extremists,” he said. “These cases are a reminder of how important it is that people with the potential to become extremists are not trained in military tactics.”
Jabbar, the New Orleans bomber, drove a Ford pickup across busy Bourbon Street before being killed by police. In addition to the 14 people he killed, he injured dozens more.
Jabbar, 42, was a US citizen from Texas who served in the Army from 2007 to 2020, including a year or deployment to Afghanistan, and retired as a staff sergeant. It is unclear if he served in combat, but he was trained as an information technology specialist.
Police said they found an ISIS flag on his truck and online social media posts sympathetic to the U.S.-designated terrorist group.
Christopher Raia, the assistant deputy director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division, said at a news conference Thursday that Jabbar released at least five videos promoting the ideology of IS, which the suspect claimed to have joined the last year
Raia, who said there is no apparent connection between the New Orleans and Las Vegas attacks, said the FBI was working to understand how Jabbar became radicalized.
“We’re asking ourselves a lot of questions,” he said. “Those are the things that in the next few days, in terms of the path to radicalization, we’re really going to look into and make it a priority.”
Less is known about the motivation of Livelsberger, who police have identified as the suspect behind the Cybertruck that exploded outside the Trump Hotel after being loaded with explosives. Only Livelsberger was killed in the explosion, but seven others were injured.
Livelsberger was an active-duty Green Beret stationed in Germany, but was on leave for the holidays, according to media reports. He was chief operations sergeant.
Todd Helmus, a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation and an expert on violent extremism, said he was surprised to learn about Livelsberger, since violent extremism is more prominent among veterans who often struggle with a range of factors once they leave the service, such as mental health issues, finding work and leaving colleagues behind.
“All of these issues can complicate the challenges for veterans,” he said. “These life challenges that can happen when people leave the military services in close-knit communities, they can be more at risk of radicalization or recruitment.”
Helmus added that it was “harder to be a terrorist” on active duty.
“You’re hanging out with your unit mates on a day-to-day basis,” he said. “And there’s a discipline structure that’s there, so I think you’re probably more likely to get caught if you’re about to carry out these kinds of attacks.”
But it is not the first case in recent history of an active military member involved in extremist violence. In 2023, Robert Card, a US Army reservist, carried out a deadly mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine that killed 18 people.
In 2020, Steven Carrillo, an active-duty airman at the time, killed two police officers after expressing anti-government beliefs. he isserving a 41-year sentence.
And in one of the deadliest shootings ever at a US military base, Nidal Hasan, an Army major and psychiatrist, killed 13 people and wounded more than 30 others. Further investigations found that Hasan’s colleagues were aware of the signs of his radicalisation.
Both veterans and active-duty military personnel have been charged or convicted of participating in the January 6, 2021 riots at the United States Capitol, where supporters attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election in favor of the president-elect trump
The Violence Prevention Project has tracked mass shootings from 1996 to 2024. In your databasethe project lists dozens of mass shooters with military backgrounds.
The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Marylandfound last yearthat at least 721 people with US military backgrounds committed criminal acts in the US from 1990 to April 2024, with a political, economic, social or religious goal.
According to START, the number of individuals with a military background involved in extremist attacks has increased from 11% in 2018 to 18% in 2022.
START data show that white nationalism and anti-government extremism make up the largest share of radicalized veterans and active-duty military extremists, at more than 80 percent. Jihadist-inspired ideology accounts for slightly more than 6 percent of cases.
Under President Biden, the Pentagon has sought to reduce and better identify the number of extremists in the military after Congress required the effort in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2021.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin established a commission to oversee those efforts, but the Pentagon has been slow to adopt recommendations, implementing only one on training service members to understand extremism and why it is prohibited.
The military’s biggest extremism problem is primarily related to far-right ideology, and Austin has faced pressure and pushback from GOP congressional lawmakers who have called the effort a witch hunt politics Republicans have argued that extremism remains a minor concern, with very few people holding radical views compared to the more than 2 million active-duty and reserve troops, along with about 18 million veterans.
Areport end of 2023commissioned for the Pentagon largely sought to downplay the role of extremists in the military, saying he “found no evidence that the number of violent extremists in the military is disproportionate to the number of violent extremists in the general United States”.
He said, however, that there are “some indications that the participation rate of former service members is slightly higher and may be growing.” The report wascriticized for using old data.
While more could be done, a sweeping crackdown on military extremism might not be the best approach, RAND Corporation’s Helmus argued, comparing it to the overreaction of the US national security sphere after the September 11 attacks.
“The best the Pentagon can do is make assessments, track the numbers,” he said. “That’s the biggest issue so far, it’s just open transparency about the number of individuals, of people being discharged. What are they being discharged for? To what extent are people being fired for having ideologies radicals?
But Beirich of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism pointed to multiple problems: The Pentagon has slimmed down its counter-extremism efforts, the Department of Veterans Affairs has no programs to help veterans prone to extremist recruitment, and there are no universal standards for dealing with the problem among the military branches.
“We have a whole host of problems when it comes to this issue. And it goes back to the fact that it was not taken seriously for decades under both the Republicans and the Democrats,” he said. “The Biden administration was really starting that process and then it got stuck in a political divide.”
