Tag:military

The Soul of the Sword: When the Pentagon Measures a Soldier’s Faith

Posted on by Jaustin
Empty chaplain chair in an editorial collage about the Pentagon Office of Religious Affairs

“What do I tell a soldier who believes an action is immoral, but also believes that God commanded it?”

An active-duty Army captain working as a non-Christian chaplain posed that question to The Intercept. He was talking about the Pentagon’s new Office of Religious Affairs. He spoke anonymously because he feared retaliation. The question is the kind a chaplain might hear in private after an order has been given and before someone has to live with what it means.

On September 30, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that office at Quantico. Its director reports directly to him and the deputy secretary. In Hegseth’s telling, chaplains needed a voice without “bureaucratic dilution.” Some of the chaplains and religious endorsers asked about this new voice say they did not request the microphone.

A Direct Line to the Top. A Question from Below.

There is a real case for giving chaplains more support. A service member stationed far from home should be able to find a religious leader, or someone to talk to about grief and conscience, without begging through a broken chain of command. Hegseth says this is what his office will fix. The Pentagon’s September 30 memorandum says it cannot compel religious participation or diminish the rights of people of any faith or no faith.

Then you read the rest of the memo.

The director has direct access to the secretary and authority to coordinate control of religious-affairs functions. The office will oversee the Armed Forces Chaplains Board and relations with the civilian organizations that endorse chaplains. It will advocate funding for ministry, facilities, training, faith-based homeschool support for military families, faith-based suicide-reduction efforts, and contracts with religious organizations. It will sponsor tools to assess “spiritual fitness,” “spiritual readiness,” and “spiritual resilience.”

A direct line can be a lifeline. It can also be a very efficient way to decide whose needs count.

The anonymous Army chaplain asked whether non-Christian chaplains would be admitted and promoted at the same rates, and whether Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Humanist and other organizations would receive comparable support. Those are questions about future decisions, not proof that the office has already discriminated. The office had existed for less than a month when he spoke. What we can examine now is the authority written on paper and the people warning about where it leads.

The Spreadsheet Has a Theology.

This problem did not begin with a new office. In June, Rev. Dr. Rebekah Savage joined ten other religious endorsers in a letter objecting to changes in the military’s Religious Affiliations Code list. According to The Intercept’s reporting on the letter, the signatories said the revisions removed or obscured identities including Unitarian Universalists, historically Black churches, and Wiccan and Pagan practitioners. They worried that the codes could affect access to clergy, accommodations, and the allocation of chaplaincy resources.

“Classification is resource allocation,” they wrote.

That sentence is the whole fight in five words. If an institution cannot see your community clearly in its records, it can claim to serve everyone while budgeting as if you barely exist. What looks like a tidy administrative category can decide who gets a room, a chaplain, or a call back.

Savage, a former military chaplain who now helps oversee the Unitarian Universalist Association’s endorsement of chaplains, told The Intercept her organization was not consulted before the new office was established. She did not claim to speak for the whole chaplain corps. That distinction matters. “Chaplains reject the office” is a headline; the documented fact is that identifiable former chaplains and an anonymous active-duty chaplain raised serious objections. A bureaucracy should not have to wait for a unanimous revolt before it listens.

God Sent a Prophet. The Pentagon Made a Poster.

The Office of Religious Affairs did not arrive in a religious vacuum. In August, Pentagon-linked accounts posted images bearing “SEND ME,” a reference to Isaiah 6:8. Hegseth has since described a Send Me Tour as military outreach and recruitment. The phrase sounds made for enlistment. It also comes from a passage in which Isaiah is sent to deliver a warning to his own people, a warning followed by devastation, not an easy promise of victory.

The Intercept asked the Pentagon what the earlier posts meant. At the time, a spokesperson said there was “Nothing to offer you on this.” Its later explanation calls the tour a tribute to those who volunteer to serve. We should not pretend to know every official’s private theological intent. We can read the public message and ask what happens when a state military borrows the voice of divine commissioning.

Hegseth’s own religious imagery and rhetoric add context. His tattoos include a Jerusalem cross and the Latin phrase “Deus vult,” a Crusades-associated slogan also adopted by extremists. A fellow National Guard member flagged the tattoo as a potential concern before Hegseth was removed from a 2021 inauguration security assignment. The tattoo does not itself establish what the new office will do. The secretary’s public language, personnel decisions, and written policy carry the institutional weight.

During his September 30 speech, Hegseth argued that religious support had been neglected and called the military’s battle spiritual as well as physical. Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson told The Intercept that activities are voluntary and that the department protects service members from coercion and discrimination. In the same response, she defended Hegseth by invoking America’s Christian heritage and accused “the Left” of trying to erase it. That is an awkward way to reassure a soldier whose faith isn’t Christianity.

The Shepherd Works for the Commander.

Michel Foucault was a twentieth-century French philosopher who studied how institutions exercise power over everyday life. He described “pastoral power” as a kind of guidance modeled on the shepherd tending each member of a flock: care and knowledge of the individual become ways to govern.

In other words, you do not have to order a person to think a certain way if you can define what a healthy, ready person is supposed to be and then build the systems that reward that definition.

The memo does not specify a Christian test for spiritual readiness. That matters. But it does direct an office close to the secretary to develop research, technology, and analytical tools for assessing spiritual fitness. How do you measure a soul? Does skepticism count as weakness? Does a soldier wrestling with the morality of an operation count as unready, or as someone doing the most serious moral work a soldier can do?

No conspiracy required. A performance metric can turn a difficult human question into a box someone has to tick. A budget can favor programs that fit the metric. An office can defend both choices as support rather than pressure. Bureaucracies are remarkably good at making their own assumptions look like neutral plumbing.

Chaplaincy exists partly because a soldier may need a place where the answer is not predetermined by a mission brief. A chaplain has to serve people who do not share the chaplain’s beliefs. Sometimes that means sitting with a soldier’s refusal, doubt, guilt, or fear. When the institution that commands the mission also oversees the machinery for measuring spiritual readiness, the soldier may reasonably wonder which side of that conversation the machinery is on.

Voluntary on Paper Is Not the End of the Question.

Here is the skeptical objection: militaries have always had chaplains. Supporting religious exercise is not the same thing as establishing a church, and the memorandum expressly protects nonbelievers. All true. A soldier who needs a rabbi, an imam, a pastor, or a quiet space to practice deserves actual support, not a lecture about why religion should disappear from public life.

But what counts as support when the person controlling the budget speaks about warfare in one tradition’s sacred vocabulary? The office can say every prayer service is voluntary. Nobody has to order you into a pew for you to notice which programs get contracts, which kinds of resilience get praised, and which chaplains can advise a commander without worrying about their careers.

The active-duty chaplain’s fears of retaliation and future bias are allegations about risk, not documented outcomes of this new office. The secretary’s memo is the documented machinery. We should keep those categories separate. Otherwise we give the Pentagon an easy way to wave off the central issue as speculation.

The central issue is design. Who sets the categories? Who measures fitness? Who gets funding? Who can say no when the secretary’s preferred language starts to sound like the military’s official moral vocabulary?

A Soldier Can Still Ask Whether the Order Is Wrong.

We usually talk about military readiness as equipment, training, and the ability to follow an order under pressure. There is another kind of readiness: the capacity to recognize when doing so may violate your conscience. That capacity does not make a soldier less useful as a human being. It may make the institution less comfortable.

The chaplain’s question returns here. A soldier is asked to do something violent, believes it is wrong, and hears from above that the cause has divine sanction. Who can that soldier talk to? If the answer is a chaplain whose professional world is increasingly organized by the same leadership that blessed the mission, the conversation changes before anyone says a word.

We pay for the command structure. We applaud the promise of resilience. We ask the people inside it to carry choices most of us will never face. Then we call their doubt a problem to be measured.

The soldier is asking whether the order is right. The new office may be built to ask whether the soldier is ready. Those are not the same question.

Sources

The Army Wants an AI Worm That Can Delete Itself. What Happens If It Doesn’t?

Posted on by Jaustin
Editorial collage of a self-replicating computer circuit, illustrating Army ECHOTRIBBLE AI cyber agents

On an Army Cyber Command slide, a piece of software lands on an Ubuntu laptop. It surveys the network, finds other machines, and makes copies of itself tailored for an iPad, an Apple desktop, and a Windows 11 PC. Then the network changes. The software copies itself again.[1]

The Army calls this ECHOTRIBBLE. The slide calls the copies “replicas.” The procurement documents call the proposed system an “Agentic C2 Framework Tool.”[1][2] A reasonable person might call it a worm. The distinction matters, because one of those descriptions is much easier to put in a contract.

The Laptop Was Only the Beginning

ECHOTRIBBLE is not a finished weapon whose behavior we can inspect in the wild. It is a prototype effort. The Cyber Fusion Innovation Center, working with Army Cyber Command and its technology center, solicited industry proposals for an agent that would move through digital environments, identify threats or targets, and neutralize them with “minimal human oversight.” The solicitation names contested, cloud-native, and air-gapped environments. It also asks for stealth.[2]

Those words are broad. The June presentation is less abstract. Its example starts with an Army binary placed on a laptop. During a survey, it identifies other potential targets on the same network. At the next scheduled communication window, it asks for modules to move to devices of interest, then produces device-specific replicas. The slide says the agent should be “semi-autonomous” and work on certain rule-based tasks without human oversight.[1]

The sequence is the story. One placement becomes several. A network change becomes a reason to propagate again. Humans define the mission at the beginning; the software handles the next move.

The assessment-event release asks for “safe, rule-bound propagation,” meaning movement under configured conditions or predefined triggers. It also asks for memory-resident execution, randomized activity schedules, process-name obfuscation, low-bandwidth encrypted callbacks, debugger detection, and policy-driven “Self-Destruct/Heal Logic.” The same document describes a lab mode and a field mode, and says LLM integration is optional.[2]

That last detail is easy to miss. “AI agents” makes it sound like a chatbot with a rifle. The public requirements permit rule-based decision logic, with a small language model as an option. Whatever gets built, the dangerous feature is not a machine having opinions. It is software allowed to act across machines faster than a person can review every step.

Sixty-Five Pitches. One Selected for Award.

This has already moved beyond an idle whiteboard session. According to the Cyber Fusion Innovation Center, 65 whitepapers were submitted, five participants gave virtual demonstrations in October 2026, and one company was selected for award on October 8. The center said a statement of work and contract action were still forthcoming.[3]

Selected for award is not the same thing as deployed. The public materials do not establish that an ECHOTRIBBLE agent has been fielded, how well a prototype performs, what targets would be authorized, or whether any final system can reliably clean itself up. Those are not fussy qualifications. They are the difference between a frightening design brief and a verified operational claim.[2][3]

The center describes the effort in terms of forensics, malware analysis, incident response, and defense of Army networks. The Intercept, citing documents it reviewed and a contractor Q&A, reports that the effort is “primarily focused” on offensive missions; in that account, neutralizing a target could mean disabling it or deleting a threat from it. Army Cyber Command did not answer the outlet’s questions about measures to prevent unintended damage.[3][4]

There is a real ambiguity here about mission framing. There is much less ambiguity about the mechanism the Army requested. You do not ask for cross-platform propagation, covert callbacks, optional persistence, and field-mode execution because you only need a spreadsheet to sort incident reports.[1][2]

The Self-Destruct Button Is Part of the Sales Pitch

The proposed agent can be configured to delete itself. That sounds responsible. If the mission ends, clean the machine and leave. If the rules are clear, constrain movement to authorized systems. What is the problem?

Start with the Army’s own hypothetical. The agent sees a network, identifies a target, downloads or requests what it needs to reach that target, and makes tailored copies. Once that happens, the operator’s view is mediated by the software’s reporting. The procurement document asks for covert, low-bandwidth beaconing and “minimal remote management.” Those features can be useful against an adversary. They also make the system harder to observe when something goes wrong.[1][2]

A deletion rule is not proof that every replica has deleted itself. The public documents specify a desired capability, not an independent audit of its success. If a machine is offline, a rule fails, a copy is modified, or the agent misidentifies the edge of its authorized environment, someone still has to know where every copy went. We do not have public evidence that ECHOTRIBBLE has failed at any of this. We also do not have public evidence that it can pass those tests.

The program asks the software to be hard for the target to detect and easy for its owner to control. That is the contradiction. Stealth and control are being purchased together, as if making a thing less visible to everyone else does not complicate the job of checking on it yourself.

The product brochure practically writes its own horror movie. The less cinematic risk is a bug report nobody can reliably deliver.

Virilio Would Ask About the Shipwreck

Paul Virilio was a French thinker who studied technology, speed, and war. His argument about the accident was simple: invent a new capability and you invent a new way for it to fail. As he put it in an interview, “To invent the train is to invent derailment; to invent the ship is to invent the shipwreck.” In other words, a failure is not some alien thing that interrupts the technology. It belongs to what the technology makes possible.[5]

The invention here is not just the digital payload. Malware that spreads between machines is old news. The novelty the Army is seeking is the combination of adaptation, mission-directed behavior, stealth, and reduced human supervision in a tool meant to operate across changing networks.[1][2]

So what is its shipwreck? Not necessarily a robot uprising. That is the easy version to dismiss. The harder one is a system that does its assigned job according to its own limited picture of a network, moves through a machine that was never meant to be part of the operation, and leaves damage or an undiscovered copy behind. The Intercept quotes AI security executive Hyrum Anderson asking whether an agent might pass through a U.S. water utility on its way to an adversary’s infrastructure and disrupt that utility too. That is a hypothetical, not a reported ECHOTRIBBLE incident.[4]

The operator wants reach without friction. The defender wants a boundary the operator cannot cross. The agent encounters a world in which both sides use shared infrastructure and machines change hands, addresses, and roles. How precisely does a rule written before deployment know which machine becomes the wrong one tomorrow?

The Best Argument for Building It Is Also the Trap

The serious defense of this project is that cyber operations already happen. Human operators are slow, adversary networks change, and a modular tool could help detect threats or dismantle hostile infrastructure before it hurts anyone. The public solicitation asks for configurable limits, lab testing, tracing, and rule-bound movement. Those are attempts to manage risk, not admissions that the Army wants chaos.[2]

I buy the need to study defenses. I do not buy the idea that the word “rule-bound” settles the question of accountability. A rule can limit an action only if the system can recognize the conditions to which the rule applies. A log can explain what happened only if the agent stays observable. A cleanup routine can be trusted only if somebody can verify the cleanup on every machine it touched.

No conspiracy required. Procurement rewards a tool that can persist through changing systems, move quietly, and require fewer people in the loop. Those are precisely the qualities that make a failure harder to spot and stop. The same document can ask for “no persistent footprint” and provide an optional persistence toggle. The contradiction is right there in the specification.[2]

What would count as proof of restraint? A controlled demo is not a field deployment. A successful attack simulation is not evidence that neighboring systems are safe. And a system that reports it has erased itself presents a peculiar verification problem: the witness is the thing we were supposed to make disappear.

The Network on That Slide Looks Like Ours

In the Army’s slide, the iPad and desktops are targets inside a tidy diagram. Outside the diagram, networks are owned by people. A small business may share a service with a defense contractor. A hospital may buy software from the same provider as a military office. That is why the route an agent takes can matter as much as the target it reaches. This is a risk scenario, not a claim that ECHOTRIBBLE has entered any civilian network.[1][4]

We have become accustomed to calling infrastructure “the cloud” as though it floats above the places where people live. But the cloud is machines. A cyber weapon moves through machines. The decision to let software select its next step transfers some of the judgment about those machines out of the operator’s hands.

Virilio’s shipwreck is not a prediction that this particular prototype will escape. It is a demand that we count the failure while the system is still being specified. The Army has publicly asked industry to make a tool that can copy itself, hide, act with little supervision, and delete itself afterward. Its partner has selected a proposed solution for award. The public still has no demonstration that every copy can be accounted for.[1][2][3]

We want the protection of a tool that can go anywhere. We also want the reassurance that it will never go where it should not. Who gets to check that second promise after the first one works?

Sources

Investigating the Fort Bragg Cartel

Posted on by Jaustin

109 Soldiers Dead. Only Four of Them Overseas.

Between 2020 and 2021, 109 soldiers assigned to Fort Bragg died. Only four of those deaths occurred in overseas combat. All the rest took place stateside. Rolling Stone Murders. Overdoses. Suicides. The military filed them under “non-combat deaths” and moved on.

America’s largest military base was killing its own soldiers faster than any enemy could.

This isn’t a story about bad apples. It’s a story about a factory. One that takes in patriotic young people, trains them in violence, deploys them repeatedly, prescribes them opioids, teaches them the drug trade, then abandons them to die. Investigative journalist Seth Harp spent five years documenting this story. What he found was the Fort Bragg Cartel.

From Patriot to Dealer: The System That Built Freddie Huff

The clearest window into how this system works isn’t William Lavigne, the Delta Force operator found executed on a Fort Bragg training range in December 2020. It’s the man investigators immediately suspected in his death: Freddie Wayne Huff II.

Former cop. Former DEA agent. By 2020, one of the largest cocaine traffickers on the East Coast.

Huff’s career trajectory is not an anomaly. It’s a logical outcome. Over 13 years in law enforcement he reportedly seized over $9 million in drug money, and when he joined the DEA’s El Paso Intelligence Center he learned everything about the drug trade: the routes, the players, the smuggling methods, every hole in the system. Then his dying mentor told him the quiet part out loud. “What you think you’re doing is noble. But they want it here. You’re a pawn. Everything you’re doing is in vain.”

Not long after, Huff was fired for pulling over a drunk driver who happened to be a major donor to the North Carolina governor. The official pretext was selling an old pair of state-issued boots on eBay for $0.99. The most successful cop on the East Coast, fired for a $0.99 eBay listing. If you search police boots on eBay right now you’ll find hundreds of pairs sold by active and former officers nationwide.

The government took his job, his pension, his identity. So Huff applied his training to the other side. He already knew where every hole in the system was because he’d spent 13 years plugging them. By 2016 he was trafficking 50 to 100 kilos of cocaine across the border every seven days through a partnership with Las Zetas, Mexico’s most militarily sophisticated cartel. Over a million dollars a week.

His distribution network? Fort Bragg soldiers. Special operators with firsthand knowledge of drug networks from protecting poppy fields in Afghanistan, unparalleled access to military vehicles and security clearances, and the tactical training to sell drugs in situations that would kill an average civilian.

[INTERNAL LINK OPPORTUNITY: link to the Hell’s Angels philosophy essay when discussing how systems produce criminals through the same logic they claim to fight]

The Machine That Made Them

To understand why Fort Bragg soldiers were lining up to work for a cartel, you have to understand what Fort Bragg did to them first.

By 2007, Afghanistan was producing 93% of the world’s non-pharmaceutical opiates. Wikipedia That number didn’t exist before the US invasion. The Taliban had nearly eradicated poppy cultivation by 2001 through religious conviction and a desire for international legitimacy. Then American soldiers arrived, needed the warlords who controlled the poppy trade to fight the insurgency, and the fields came back. Fort Bragg special operators found themselves in an impossible position: fighting a counterinsurgency while protecting the very drug networks fueling the global heroin trade.

They came home broken by that contradiction. PTSD. Traumatic brain injuries. Chronic pain. And opioid prescriptions. Between 2001 and 2009, opioid prescriptions in the military quadrupled, with service members prescribed at rates significantly higher than civilians. The department responsible for overseeing all of this was, per a 2024 GAO report, understaffed by 30%, with no accurate data collection standards and incomplete personnel information. Nobody was tracking how many prescriptions each soldier was receiving from different providers. Nobody was watching the totals add up.

When the prescriptions weren’t enough, soldiers reached out to their networks. The same military colleagues selling drugs could hook them up with a path to sell themselves. A single Freddie Huff cocaine run could net a soldier’s entire annual salary. These are people who survived IEDs and Taliban ambushes. Selling to their Fort Bragg colleagues wasn’t even the most dangerous thing they’d done that week.

Hannah Arendt watched Adolf Eichmann’s trial and was struck not by his monstrousness but by his sheer mediocrity. He was a bureaucrat who never stopped to ask whether his job was good for the human condition. He was just following orders. Lavigne, Huff, the 13 other Fort Bragg soldiers later confirmed as part of Huff’s distribution network, they’re all Eichmann. Ordinary people processed through a system that normalized atrocity, never given the tools to think beyond it. Prosecuting individuals ensures the cycle repeats. The machine keeps running.

This Is What Foucault Warned Us About

Michel Foucault argued that modern state power doesn’t announce itself like a king ordering an execution. It operates through optimization and management. The state decides who lives and who dies based on their value to the system.

Fort Bragg is a perfect case study. The military protected William Lavigne through failed drug tests, a bar fight, a domestic violence case, and a murder, because indicting a Delta Force operator meant admitting Fort Bragg had a problem. It was only when Lavigne became a liability too large to contain that he ended up executed alongside Timothy Dumas on a training range, and the military wasted no time framing both deaths as an isolated incident committed by a 20-year-old civilian named Kenneth Quick. All court documents remain sealed. No one is asking who benefited.

The dead soldiers’ families have had their life insurance policies revoked. Rolling Stone The wives insist their husbands had no drug habits until they were stationed in Fayetteville. The system made them. The system broke them. The system is still running.

The war on terror and the opioid crisis aren’t two separate problems. They’re one system with two faces. Both enrich the powerful while destroying the vulnerable. Both run on lies. And both are designed to continue indefinitely.

If Seth Harp hadn’t spent five years on this story, the Fort Bragg Cartel would have stayed exactly where Fort Bragg intended: buried.

Sources

Books

Harp, Seth. The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces. PublicAffairs, 2024.

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press, 1963.

Journalism

Harp, Seth. “These Kids Are Dying: Inside the Overdose Crisis Sweeping Fort Bragg.” Rolling Stone, 2022. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/inside-the-overdose-crisis-sweeping-fort-bragg-1396298/

Harp, Seth. “Exclusive: Army Files Charges in Mysterious Fort Bragg Beheading Case.” Rolling Stone, 2022. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/ftbragg-army-beheading-charges-filed-1283450/

Harp, Seth. “Mission Impossible.” Harper’s Magazine, October 2025. https://harpers.org/archive/2025/10/mission-impossible-seth-harp-trump-military-parade/

Scott, Peter. “Pipe Hitters.” The Baffler. https://thebaffler.com/latest/pipe-hitters-scott

Lutz, Catherine. Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century. Beacon Press, 2002.

“The Rot at Fort Bragg.” The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/rot-fort-bragg/

WRAL Investigates. “From 2020 to 2021, Suicides and Drugs Killed Fort Bragg Soldiers at Higher Rate Than Combat.” https://www.wral.com/story/from-2020-2021-suicides-drugs-kill-fort-bragg-soldiers-at-higher-rate-than-combat-training-and-training-deaths/20510635/

Academic and Government Sources

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Afghanistan Opium Survey 2007. UNODC, 2007.

Wikipedia. “Opium Production in Afghanistan.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanistan

U.S. Government Accountability Office. Special Operations Forces: Observations on Oversight Staffing. GAO Report, 2024.

Book Reviews and Additional Sources

Washington Independent Review of Books. “The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces.” https://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/

Kirkus Reviews. “The Fort Bragg Cartel.” https://www.kirkusreviews.com/

The Literary Compass. “The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces.” https://theliterarycompass.com/

Academic Theory

Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975 to 1976. Picador, 2003.