Out of curiosity, how did that go? Is it standardized universal training, or can branches / offices modify it (e.g., Navy might have a different syllabus than the Army)?
Did you find it biased to "domestic terrorist white supremacists" as the news seems to report?
Sorry for the delay Ben, I wanted to get to a computer where I could type rather than a mobile device.
The training I had was OK, mostly because I took over from my immediate boss and ran it about halfway through. DOD mandated 8 hours of training and provided a bunch of resources, but specifically said in the memo the actual training should be pushed to the lowest level practicable to engender good discussions. I have heard about this being interpreted as "The whole Brigade will sit in a theater for 8 hours of powerpoint" in some cases, which I suspect should be immediately followed by suicide prevention training, 'cause those soldiers want to kill themselves. As I read the memo and OPORD, that was not the intent of DOD. The Powers That Be wanted this done by the company level leaders and tailored to the individual formations to try and actually reach people. Mileage May Vary.
Of the resources provided we got links to a bunch of DOJ and CID reports with vignettes of DOD personnel that had been radicalized recently (last 6 or 7 years) and what caused it, what signs were evident, and how they were caught. Of those 25 or so stories, 12 or 13 were some version of white supremacy/white nationalism, 6 were islamic extremists, 3 were black nationalists, and 3 or 4 were communists.(the numbers might not add up because there was some overlap with folks having multiple "causes". One member of the Atomwaffen Division got caught because he converted to islam, pledged to ISIS and shot two of his Atomwaffen buddies. Crazy going to Crazy, I guess.) We also got links to TED talks about how people get radicalized, and how people get out of radicalisim. There was also a DOD link to watch the Netflix movie "
The Social Dilemma". Also links to the obligatory Regulations, Policies, and Federal Laws on extremism in the Army as well as powerpoints. Leaders could pick and choose some or all of these resources to craft the 8 hours of training.
My Command (me) chose to do it in 4ea 2 hour sessions over a month. We watched The Social Dilemma the first one, the TED talks (with discussion) on week two, vignettes, reporting and social media manipulation on week three, and indicators, motivations, and balancing with First Amendment and political freedoms on week 4. Each session was no more than an hour and a half of "content" followed by discussion on that content.
I definitely have some folks in my team that didn't bring an open mind to the training, which limited how well it could be done. One guy, over the course of 8 hours would only repeat: "My President said that White Supremacy is the greatest threat facing the nation, and I will report that if I see any." Like he was giving name, ranks and serial or something. I'm not sure the training helped him at all. Ironically he's the most locked into "us vs. them" thinking and dehumanizing others of any of my team, and probably needs the training the most. there were three or four other teammates that were just checking the box and zoning out. The rest of us I think had some decent discussions on why people go can go off the deep end, how they get scooped up by predatory people and radicalized, and how to break that chain.
Here's the TED talk playlist we used:
https://www.ted.com/playlists/569/the_roots_of_extremism"I grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church. Here's why I left"
"What we don't know about Europe's Muslim kids"
"A black man goes undercover in the alt-right"
"How young people join violent extremist groups-and how to stop them"
"How cults rewire the brain"
"A global culture to fight extremism"
I'm sure there are commands out there that threw the powerpoints, recent EO complaints, and CRT into a blender and vomited out 8 hours of "*expletive deleted*ck the white patriarchy" training, but that wasn't what we were supposed to do, and the provided material was certainly able to support a pretty balanced look at all kinds of extremism with just a little work on the trainers part.
