How the US Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members and Criminals

Weeks after his victory in the 2024 presidential election, president-elect Donald Trump announced his choice for secretary of defense: Fox News host and army veteran Pete Hegseth. This former infantry officer, who had served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, was suddenly in line to take command of the largest and most powerful military institution in human history.

The pick won praise from Trump’s political base. Hegseth had built his brand as a patriotic warrior, an unapologetic defender of “American exceptionalism”, and a virulent critic of so-called “woke” ideology in the armed forces. But concerning facts about his extremism soon came to the fore, centring around his many tattoos. Prominently inked across Hegseth’s chest was the Jerusalem Cross: a large central cross surrounded by four smaller ones. This symbol originated during the medieval Crusades and has been co-opted by far-right Christian nationalist movements and white supremacist groups. Within those circles, the Jerusalem Cross signifies a renewed “holy war” against Islam and multiculturalism. Military counter-extremism experts had long flagged the design as a potential marker of extremism when displayed by active-duty personnel.

Another Hegseth tattoo, inscribed on his upper arm, read “Deus Vult” – Latin for “God wills it”. This served as a rallying cry for crusaders marching to reclaim the Holy Land nearly a thousand years ago. Nowadays the phrase circulates among white nationalists and other far-right extremists as a meme promoting anti-Muslim ideology and fantasies of a Christian nationalist revival. In March 2025, photographs from a training exercise at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam revealed yet another of the defense secretary’s tattoos: the Arabic word “كافر” (kafir), translating to “infidel” or “non-believer”. This sat proudly on Hegseth’s right forearm, positioned just beneath the “Deus Vult” inscription and an American flag. In Arabic-speaking cultures, the word “kafir” has historically referred to non-Muslims in the pejorative; for a high-ranking US defense official to bear it as a badge of honour signaled defiance against a perceived Muslim threat.

Hegseth’s tattoos. Photo: Pete Hegseth’s Instagram

For me, as someone who spent years investigating far-right extremism within the US military for my book Irregular Army: How the US Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members, and Criminals , these revelations felt like a story coming full circle. Tattoos had always been one of the most visible markers of political ideology. During the war on terror, I had documented countless cases where soldiers had displayed extremist symbols – Norse runes, swastikas, neo-Crusader imagery – with impunity. Regulations existed to prevent such displays, but enforcement was lax as the US military needed more troops than it could recruit or retain. Now, decades later, the man appointed to oversee the Pentagon itself, the civilian head of all US armed forces, was emblazoned with the same symbols I had seen on the arms of soldiers in Fallujah and Kandahar.

The far-right ideology that once festered on the fringes of military subculture was no longer hidden but brazenly exhibited by the military’s top official. As I predicted when my book was first published, the political extremism unleashed by the war on terror – with its dangerous blurring of religious, nationalist and militarist commitments – had been normalised and, most dangerously, institutionalised. It would be hard to put back in its box.

6 January.

The fallout from the irregular army revealed in my book – its origins in the war on terror and its ties to Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement – had already begun to surface during Trump’s first term. The 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol by far-right protesters was more than a political riot; it was an eruption of a militarised culture of grievance that had long been fueled by the war on terror. A significant portion of those charged in connection with the assault were former members of the US military. An analysis by the Program on Extremism at George Washington University (GWU) found that 12% of defendants had served in the armed forces. Veterans constitute about 7% of the national population.

The GWU report found that these individuals were not, as many might imagine, wayward young men acting out after short stints in uniform. On average they were in their forties and had served roughly nine years, many of them in leadership positions or on combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Roughly a quarter had been commissioned officers while nearly half had been deployed overseas. They represented every branch of service and embodied the professional backbone of the post-9/11 military. An NPR investigation further found that roughly one in five people charged in the first waves of prosecution had served or were currently serving in the armed forces. The pattern was clear. The question being asked was: why?

Irregular Army provides answ…