KYIV, Ukraine — Poland said early Wednesday that a Russian-made missile fell in the eastern part of the country, killing two people in a blast that Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy decried as “a very significant escalation” of the war.

Serious questions about the explosion remain, including who fired the missile. Russia denied any involvement.

U.S. President Joe Biden convened an emergency meeting of the Group of Seven and NATO leaders who were in Indonesia for another summit but said it was “unlikely” that the missile was fired from Russia. It was not immediately clear whether Biden was suggesting that the missile hadn’t been fired by Russia at all.

The Polish government said it was investigating and raising its level of military preparedness. Biden pledged support for Poland’s investigation.

Zelenskyy’s comments, delivered in an evening address to the nation, came hours after a senior U.S. intelligence official told The Associated Press that Russian missiles had crossed into Polish territory and killed two people.

A second person said that apparent Russian missiles struck a site in Poland about 15 miles from the Ukrainian border.

A statement from the Polish Foreign Ministry identified the weapon as being made in Russia. President Andrzej Duda was more cautious, saying that it was “most probably” Russian-made but that its origins were still being verified.

“We are acting with calm,” Duda said. “This is a difficult situation.”

Biden’s decision to convene an emergency meeting of the G-7 and NATO leaders upended schedules for the final day of the Group of 20 meeting in Indonesia.

Biden, who was awakened overnight by staff with the news of the missile while attending the summit, called Polish President Andrzej Duda to express his condolences. On Twitter, Biden promised “full U.S support for and assistance with Poland’s investigation,” and “reaffirmed the United States’ ironclad commitment to NATO.”

Meanwhile, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg called the meeting of the alliance’s envoys in Brussels. The U.N. Security Council also planned to meet Wednesday for a previously scheduled briefing on the situation in Ukraine. The strike in Poland was certain to be raised.

Poland’s statement did not address whether the strike could have been a targeting error or if the missile could have been knocked off course by Ukrainian defenses.

In their statements, Poland and NATO used language that suggested they were not treating the missile blast as an intentional Russian attack, at least for now. A NATO statement called it a “tragic incident.”

If Russia had deliberately targeted Poland, it would risk drawing the 30-nation alliance into the conflict at a time when it is already struggling to fend off Ukrainian forces.

Polish media reported that the strike took place in an area where grain was drying in Przewodów, a village near the border with Ukraine.

The Russian Defense Ministry denied being behind “any strikes on targets near the Ukrainian-Polish border” and said in a statement that photos of purported damage “have nothing to do” with Russian weapons.

Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau summoned the Russian ambassador and “demanded immediate detailed explanations,” the government said.

The strike came to light Tuesday as Russia pounded Ukraine’s energy facilities with its biggest barrage of missiles yet, striking targets across the country and causing widespread blackouts.

The barrage also affected neighboring Moldova. It reported massive power outages after the strikes knocked out a key power line that supplies the small nation, an official said.

The missile strikes plunged much of Ukraine into darkness and drew defiance from Zelenskyy, who shook his fist and declared: “We will survive everything.”

In his nightly address, the Ukrainian leader said the strike in Poland offered proof that “terror is not limited by our state borders.”

“We need to put the terrorist in its place. The longer Russia feels impunity, the more threats there will be for everyone within the reach of Russian missiles,” Zelenskyy said.

Russia fired at least 85 missiles, most of them aimed at the country’s power facilities, and blacked out many cities, he said.

The Ukrainian energy minister said the attack was “the most massive” bombardment of power facilities in the nearly 9-month-old invasion, striking both power generation and transmission systems.

The minister, Herman Haluschenko, accused Russia of “trying to cause maximum damage to our energy system on the eve of winter.”

The aerial assault, which resulted in at least one death in a residential building in the capital, Kyiv, followed days of euphoria in Ukraine sparked by one of its biggest military successes — the retaking last week of the southern city of Kherson.

The power grid was already battered by previous attacks that destroyed an estimated 40% of the country’s energy infrastructure.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has not commented on the retreat from Kherson since his troops pulled out in the face of a Ukrainian offensive. But the stunning scale of Tuesday’s strikes spoke volumes and hinted at anger in the Kremlin.

By striking targets in the late afternoon, not long before dusk, the Russian military forced rescue workers to labor in the dark and gave repair crews scant time to assess the damage by daylight.

More than a dozen regions — among them Lviv in the west, Kharkiv in the northeast and others in between — reported strikes or efforts by their air defenses to shoot missiles down. At least a dozen regions reported power outages, affecting cities that together have millions of people. Almost half of the Kyiv region lost power, authorities said.

“Most of the hits were recorded in the center and in the north of the country. In the capital, the situation is very difficult,” said a senior official, Kyrylo Tymoshenko.

He said a total of 15 energy targets were damaged and claimed that 70 missiles were shot down. A Ukrainian Air Force spokesman said Russia used X-101 and X-555 cruise missiles.

As city after city reported attacks, Tymoshenko urged Ukrainians to “hang in there.”

With its battlefield losses mounting, Russia has increasingly resorted to targeting Ukraine’s power grid, seemingly hoping to turn the approach of winter into a weapon by leaving people in the cold and dark.

Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra took to a bomb shelter in Kyiv after meeting his Ukrainian counterpart and, from his place of safety, described the bombardment as “an enormous motivation to keep standing shoulder-to-shoulder” with Ukraine.

The strikes came as authorities were already working furiously to get Kherson back on its feet and beginning to investigate alleged Russian abuses there and in the surrounding area. The southern city is without power and water.

The retaking of Kherson dealt another stinging blow to the Kremlin. Zelenskyy likened the recapture to the Allied landings in France on D-Day in World War II, saying both were watershed events on the road to eventual victory.

But large parts of eastern and southern Ukraine remain under Russian control, and fighting continues.

In other developments, leaders of most of the world’s economic powers were drawing closer to approval of a declaration strongly denouncing Russia’s invasion.

On Tuesday, U.S. President Joe Biden and Zelenskyy pressed fellow G20 leaders at the summit in Indonesia for a robust condemnation of Russia’s nuclear threats and food embargoes. More discussion and a possible vote come Wednesday.

Associated Press writers Joanna Kozlowska in London; Jamey Keaten in Geneva; Mike Corder in The Hague, Netherlands; Hanna Arhirova in Kherson, Ukraine; Yuras Karmanau in Tallinn, Estonia; Vanessa Gera and Monika Scislowska in Warsaw, Poland; Raf Casert and Lorne Cook in Brussels; Nomaan Merchant in New York; and Adam Schreck in Nusa Dua, Indonesia contributed to this report.

A U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan this weekend killed Ayman al-Zawahri, who took over as al-Qaida leader after Osama bin Laden’s death in a U.S. raid. President Joe Biden was set to announce the killing Monday, delivering a significant counterterrorism win just 11 months after American troops left the country after a two-decade war.

The strike, carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency, was confirmed by five people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity before Biden was set to brief the American people on the details of the operation in a 7:30 p.m. EDT address to the nation.

Current and former officials began hearing Sunday afternoon that al-Zawahri had been killed in a drone strike, but the administration delayed releasing the information until his death could be confirmed, according to one person.

White House officials declined to confirm al-Zawahri was killed but noted in a statement that the United States conducted a “successful” counterterrorism operation against a significant al-Qaida target, adding that “there were no civilian casualties.”

The house Al-Zawahri was in when he was killed was owned by a top aide to senior Taliban leader Sirajuddin Haqqani, according to a senior intelligence official. The official also added that a CIA ground team and aerial reconnaissance conducted after the drone strike confirmed al-Zawahri’s death. Planning for the operation began six months ago, but intensified in the last two months, the official said.

Al-Zawahri’s loss eliminates the figure who more than anyone shaped al-Qaida, first as Osama bin Laden’s deputy since 1998, then as his successor. Together, he and bin Laden turned the jihadi movement’s guns to target the United States, carrying out the deadliest attack ever on American soil — the Sept. 11, 2001, suicide hijackings.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon made bin Laden America’s Enemy No. 1. But he likely could never have carried it out without his deputy. Bin Laden provided al-Qaida with charisma and money, but al-Zawahri brought tactics and organizational skills needed to forge militants into a network of cells in countries around the world.

Their bond was forged in the late 1980s, when al-Zawahri reportedly treated the Saudi millionaire bin Laden in the caves of Afghanistan as Soviet bombardment shook the mountains around them.

Zawahri, on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list, had a $25 million bounty on his head for any information that could be used to kill or capture him.

Biden planned to speak from the balcony off the White House Blue Room as he remains in isolation in the residence while he continues to test positive for COVID-19.

Al-Zawhiri and bin Laden plotted the 9/11 attacks that brought many ordinary Americans their first knowledge of al-Qaida.

Photos from the time often showed the glasses-wearing, mild-looking Egyptian doctor sitting by the side of bin Laden. Al-Zawahiri had merged his group of Egyptian militants with bin Laden’s al-Qaida in the 1990s.

“The strong contingent of Egyptians applied organizational know-how, financial expertise, and military experience to wage a violent jihad against leaders whom the fighters considered to be un-Islamic and their patrons, especially the United States,” Steven A. Cook wrote for the Council on Foreign Relations last year.

When the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan demolished al-Qaida’s safe haven and scattered, killed and captured its members, al-Zawahri ensured al-Qaida’s survival. He rebuilt its leadership in the Afghan-Pakistan border region and installed allies as lieutenants in key positions.

He also reshaped the organization from a centralized planner of terror attacks into the head of a franchise chain. He led the assembling of a network of autonomous branches around the region, including in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, North Africa, Somalia, Yemen and Asia. Over the next decade, al-Qaida inspired or had a direct hand in attacks in all those areas as well as Europe, Pakistan and Turkey, including the 2004 train bombings in Madrid and the 2005 transit bombings in London.

More recently, the al-Qaida affiliate in Yemen proved itself capable of plotting attacks against U.S. soil with an attempted 2009 bombing of an American passenger jet and an attempted package bomb the following year.

But even before bin Laden’s death, al-Zawahri was struggling to maintain al-Qaida’s relevance in a changing Middle East.

He tried with little success to coopt the wave of uprisings that spread across the Arab world starting in 2011, urging Islamic hard-liners to take over in the nations where leaders had fallen. But while Islamists gained prominence in many places, they have stark ideological differences with al-Qaida and reject its agenda and leadership.

Nevertheless, al-Zawahri tried to pose as the Arab Spring’s leader. America “is facing an Islamic nation that is in revolt, having risen from its lethargy to a renaissance of jihad,” he said in a video eulogy to bin Laden, wearing a white robe and turban with an assault rifle leaning on a wall behind him.

Al-Zawahri was also a more divisive figure than his predecessor. Many militants described the soft-spoken bin Laden in adoring and almost spiritual terms.

In contrast, al-Zawahri was notoriously prickly and pedantic. He picked ideological fights with critics within the jihadi camp, wagging his finger scoldingly in his videos. Even some key figures in al-Qaida’s central leadership were put off, calling him overly controlling, secretive and divisive.

Some militants whose association with bin Laden predated al-Zawahri’s always saw him as an arrogant intruder.

“I have never taken orders from al-Zawahri,” Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, one of the network’s top figures in East Africa until his 2011 death, sneered in a memoir posted on line in 2009. “We don’t take orders from anyone but our historical leadership.”

Speaking on Aug. 31, 2021, after the last U.S. troops left Afghanistan, Biden said the U.S. would not let up on its fight against terrorism in that country or elsewhere.

“We will maintain the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and other countries,” he said. “We just don’t need to fight a ground war to do it.” Previewing the strike that would occur 11 months later, Biden said at the time, “We have what’s called over-the-horizon capabilities, which means we can strike terrorists and targets without American boots on the ground — or very few, if needed.”

There have been rumors of al-Zawahri’s death on and off for several years. But a video surfaced in April of the al-Qaida leader praising a Indian Muslim woman who had defied a ban on wearing a hijab, or headscarf. That footage was the first proof in months that he was still alive.

A statement from Afghanistan’s Taliban government confirmed the airstrike, but did not mention al-Zawahri or any other casualties.

It said it “strongly condemns this attack and calls it a clear violation of international principles and the Doha Agreement,” the 2020 U.S. pact with the Taliban that led to the withdrawal of American forces.

“Such actions are a repetition of the failed experiences of the past 20 years and are against the interests of the United States of America, Afghanistan, and the region,” the statement said.

Associated Press writers Lolita C. Baldor, Ellen Knickmeyer, Zeke Miller, Aamer Madhani and Darlene Superville in Washington; Rahim Faiez in Islamabad; and Lee Keath in Cairo contributed reporting.

The stand-down came in response to the participation and the subsequent arrests of several veterans and at least one active duty service member, who along with thousands of supporters of former President Donald Trump on Jan. 6, stormed the U.S. Capitol in a melee that sent lawmakers scrambling for safety, left one person fatally shot by Capitol Police and caused millions of dollars in damages to the building largely seen as the symbol of American democracy.

Austin’s order, which also came as America as a whole was grappling with how to address systemic racism, was the latest in a series of decades-long efforts by the military to purge its ranks of extremists and white supremacists. Last week, in response to the order the military issued new rules to deal with extremism that included social media usage policy updates where liking and reposting white nationalist and extremist content could result in disciplinary action. The DoD also updated its screening of recruits and is looking at how to prepare troops who are retiring from being targeted by extremist organizations.

But an AP investigation found that despite the new rules, racism and extremism remain an ongoing concern in the military.

The investigation shows the new guidelines do not address ongoing disparities in military justice under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the legal code that governs the U.S. armed forces. Numerous studies, including a report last year from the Government Accountability Office, show Black and Hispanic service members were disproportionately investigated and court-martialed. A recent Naval Postgraduate School study found that Black Marines were convicted and punished at courts-martial at a rate five times higher than other races across the Marine Corps.

The AP investigation also shows the military’s judicial system has no explicit category for bias-motivated crimes — something the federal government, at least 46 states, and the District of Columbia have on the books — making it difficult to quantify crimes prompted by prejudice.

As a result, investigative agencies such as the Naval Criminal Investigative Service or Army Criminal Investigative Division also don’t have a specific hate crime category, which impacts how they investigate cases.

“While it’s possible hate crimes have occurred, our investigations are not titled as such,” the NCIS said in an email. “For example, an assault on a person, regardless of the reason for the assault, would still be categorized as an assault … regardless of what motivated the crime.”

The new National Defense Authorization Act signed into law by President Biden on Monday directs the Secretary of Defense to make a recommendation to Congress within 180 days if a new statute is needed to address violent extremism, but does not address hate crimes or racial disparities in military law.

The new Pentagon rules do not outright ban service members from being members of extremist organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan, Oath Keepers, or other right-wing and white nationalist groups. The regulations, like the previous ones, only prohibit “active participation,” in such groups, a murky policy that civil rights organizations have raised concerns about for years. The military describes active participation as “publicly demonstrating or rallying, fundraising, recruiting and training members,” as well as organizing or leading organizations.

Experts interviewed by the AP say there’s also ongoing concern over the military commander’s ability to enact a wide range of administrative and disciplinary actions — including administrative separation or appropriate criminal action — against military personnel who engage in prohibited activities.

Commanders essentially have total discretion to determine how to address situations as they arise, which experts say has created non-uniform, scattershot enforcement, with some commanders establishing a no-tolerance approach and others employing weak enforcement of the rules.

The AP investigation also found that while the DoD says it considers racism and extremism within the military to be a “security concern,” it does not have funding that specifically supports efforts to address extremism. Instead, military officials said the Pentagon uses personnel vetting programs, training, and education programs, and the Insider Threat Program to “positively contribute to countering extremism within the force.”

The Pentagon did not respond to questions about how much money it has spent or budgeted for efforts solely related to diversity and inclusion, and how many employees are dedicated to it. Officials also did not respond to dozens of questions from the AP on how it plans to enforce its new guidelines on extremism.

Pentagon Spokesperson Maj. César Santiago acknowledged in a statement to the AP that extremism and extremist ideology can have an outsized effect on the military force.

But he added: “The vast majority of the women and men in uniform serve their nation with honor and integrity.” He said since taking office in January, Secretary Llyod Austin, the first African American to serve as Secretary of Defense, has taken immediate action to address extremism. In addition to the new guidelines on extremism, the Defense Department appointed an interim deputy inspector general for diversity and inclusion and military insider threats in April.

Susan Corke, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, commended the DoD for taking key steps this year, including the changes announced last week, to address extremism. She said the DoD sought the expertise of civil rights organizations, academics, and others who have sounded the alarm about the dangers of extremism in the ranks for years.

But Corke said it’s too soon to definitively say whether the updated policies will purge extremism from military ranks.

“The devil will be in the details,” she said. ” I do appreciate that there is a commitment from the Defense Department to have much more consultation with outside partners and that there’s much more focus on doing additional research. So, we’re going to hold their feet to the fire.”

Corke said the SPLC is still pressing for additional reforms, including how the military’s command structure allows commanders to have virtually absolute command authority over subordinates, which might discourage members from reporting incidents or concerns of extremism.

Even some in the military agree that the armed forces need to do more. “There needs to be a change in action and behaviors — elements that can’t be so easily influenced by a change in military law, ″ said Maj. Tyrone Collier, a judge advocate in the Marine Corps Reserve, in an interview with the AP.

“Even if some legislation is passed from the highest echelons of government that says you will do this and that, will it actually get done?” Collier said.

Decades of repeated warnings

Extremism and racism in the military are hardly new. Racist attitudes and discrimination against people of color in the military were official policies before President Harry Truman, on July 26, 1948, signed Executive Order 9981, which officially desegregated the armed forces. Still, many units remained segregated until late 1954.

In the 1960s, Black soldiers in Vietnam filed numerous complaints with the Pentagon about white soldiers flying Confederate flags. Following the death of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, white U.S. service members based at the Cam Ranh Bay, South Vietnam naval base, celebrated his death by parading around the base in Ku Klux Klan-style white sheets and hoisted a Confederate flag atop the headquarters building, according to the 1997 book “Fighting on Two Fronts: African Americans and the Vietnam War.”

In the 1970s, extremism in the military gained national attention when the Ku Klux Klan was found to be operating openly at Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corps base in southern California. White Marine klansmen openly distributed racist literature on the base, pasted KKK stickers on barracks doors, and hid illegal weapons in their rooms. The hate group’s presence on the base came to light in 1976 when 14 Black Marines were charged with assault when they broke into the wrong room and attempted to break up what they thought was a party of klansmen.

In June of 1986, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Klanwatch Project issued one of the first of many warnings to the DoD about white supremacists in its ranks and urged then-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger to bar active duty service members from belonging to Ku Klux Klan factions. The center at that time alleged it had evidence, including photos, of active-duty Marines who had participated in the Confederate Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a North Carolina-based Klan faction that changed its name last year to the White Patriot Party.

“It is simply intolerable that members of the U.S. armed forces, sworn to uphold and defend the constitution of the United States, be allowed to hold membership in an organization which seeks to overthrow the federal government through violent means,” the SPLC wrote.

The military responded by saying it found no evidence to support those allegations and while it strongly discouraged membership by military personnel in organizations “which have clear racist objectives, we also realize that our military personnel do not forfeit their constitutional rights under the First Amendment upon entry into the military service. Thus DoD does not prohibit personnel from joining such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan.”

Weinberger did issue a directive instructing service members to “reject participation in white supremacy, neo-Nazi and other such groups which espouse or attempt to create overt discrimination.”

But critics say the military’s response fell short and failed to meet the moment by not instituting new, stricter policies.

In 1995, extremism in the military was thrust into the national spotlight again when three white Army paratroopers at Fort Bragg in North Carolina were arrested in the murder of a Black couple, Michael James and Jackie Burden, who they shot and killed in downtown Fayetteville. Two of the paratroopers, James Burmeister and Malcolm Wright, were sentenced to life in prison. Another 19 Fort Bragg soldiers were discharged for taking part in neo-Nazi activities.

Burmeister had made no attempts to hide his beliefs: Police found a Nazi flag over his bed and white supremacist pamphlets and instructions for making bombs in a room he rented off base. Earlier that year, Army veteran Timothy McVeigh, an anti-government extremist who earned a Bronze Star in Operation Desert Storm, parked a truck with a homemade bomb in front of a federal building in Oklahoma, killing 168 people, including 19 children.

The Pentagon, again, pledged after the slayings to address extremism within its ranks. Congressional leaders held hearings and the Army formed an extremism task force. But military leadership said the task force found minimal evidence of extremist activity in the Army.

“The SPLC has been writing to Defense Department officials about our concerns about white supremacy, white nationalism in the military since the mid-1980s,” said Margaret Huang, the president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “This has been an issue that we’ve talked about quite a number of times because it has been a significant problem in the U.S. military for many decades now.”

A 2005 Defense Department report, “Screening for Potential Terrorists in the Enlisted Military Accessions Process,” noted that the Pentagon has established numerous policies defining and restricting participation in extremist organizations. But it also found that “effectively, the military has a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy pertaining to extremism.”

“If individuals can perform satisfactorily, without making their extremist opinions overt through words or actions that violate policy, reflect poorly on the Armed Forces, or disrupt the effectiveness and order of their units, they are likely to be able to complete their contracts,” the report read. “This reality demonstrates the balance the Armed Forces have achieved between screening for extremists while respecting privacy and preserving federally protected rights to freedom of speech, religion, and association.”

In July 2009, civil rights organizations again wrote to the DoD. This time to then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates urging the Obama Administration to take appropriate measures to deal with extremists in the ranks. No sweeping action was taken.

The guidelines last week represent a major step on guidance for troops’ social media usage. Retweeting or liking extremist content will now be viewed as advocating the content. The new rules do not provide a list of extremist organizations that troops should not actively participate in.

Retired Air Force Col. Don Christensen, who served as the chief prosecutor for the Air Force between 2010 and 2014, said the new policies are “loosely defined,” and “lack guidance” in terms of what organizations service members should not interact with.

He also said that the new policies are unclear on how commanders would enforce the social media rules.

“I understand this stuff is hard, but the like button means so many different things to different people. My main takeaway is this isn’t going to be enforceable. There’s a lot of subjectivity.” Christensen said. “I also think they [the Defense Department] are naive to think it’s a small number of service members who engage in extremist activity.”

The DoD said it is commissioning a study to determine the extent of extremism in the military.

But in its report last week, the Pentagon said prohibited extremist activity among service members was rare.

“The military itself doesn’t know the extent of the problem,” said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League, who testified before Congress in February 2020 about the dangers of extremism within the military, one year before the insurrection.

Pitcavage told Congress in 2020 that the ADL had reported 72 suspected white supremacists to the various branches in a three-year span, including 38 in the Army, two in the Army National Guard, four in the Navy, 19 in the Marine Corps, two in the Air Force, and one in the Coast Guard, as well as six with an indeterminate service branch. The DoD said it found fewer than 100 military members who were involved in substantiated cases of extremist activity in the past year.

“There’s no safe number of extremists in the military,” Pitcavage said.

More changes needed

U.S. Rep. Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat, was one of the many members of Congress trapped in the House Chamber gallery on Jan. 6. as chaos erupted when a mob of insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol.

As the mob breached the outer security perimeter and began banging on the gallery doors in an attempt to break down the makeshift barricades, Crow urged other members amid the pandemonium to remove their congressional lapel pins because he worried that if the mob had broken through the door, “they were going to try to kill members.”

They were eventually rescued but Crow said a conversation from that day with a fellow Black Democratic congresswoman remains firm in his mind. He said the congresswoman thanked him for urging members to remove their pins in an effort to remain undetected by the mob but she told Crow that as a Black woman, she would have never been able to blend in, unlike her white counterparts.

“That was the first time in my life that I was on the receiving end of the violence of racism and white supremacy in our nation’s history,” Crow said in an AP interview earlier this year.

Crow, a former Army Ranger and Iraq War veteran, who is a member of Congress’ House Armed Services Committee, introduced legislation last year called the Realizing Efforts for Military Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Act. It would require and create a more rigorous diversity training program for troops, contractors, and civilian staff members at the Defense Department. The legislation was passed this month as part of the National Defense Authorization Act.

Crow said last week it’s too soon to determine whether the Pentagon’s policy updates are enough to weed out extremism, but he believes Austin is the right person to tackle the decades-long issue.

But Crow said he’s planning to have conversations with the Pentagon about its updated policies, including the fact that members are still allowed to be members of extremist organizations as long as it isn’t “active” participation.

“Membership in some of these groups does give me concern and it does potentially send the wrong message,” Crow said. “The military is all about trust. It’s all about making sure that you trust the person on your right and your left. Membership in some of these extreme organizations go right to the core of undermining that trust.”

Experts on extremism say the military’s efforts to address racism and white supremacy need to start before recruits actually join the various services. One key area: vetting recruit’s social media posts.

The Pentagon said it has a robust screening procedure, including a fingerprint check and an FBI background check. Recruits are also screened for offensive, racist, or supremacist tattoos.

But it doesn’t currently “have the capability to conduct social media screenings,” DoD officials said in a statement.

During last week’s press conference announcing the new guidelines on extremism Kirby also emphasized that the DoD does not screen service members’ social media posts for extremist content: “There’s no methodology in there. There’s no ability for the Department of Defense to monitor the personal social media accounts of every member of the armed forces.” He said when commanders are notified of problems through “various streams of reporting,” they would be expected to speak to troops to determine whether further steps were needed.

Veteran groups and experts on hate groups said the military also needs to do more to address extremism in those separating from active duty. The modern white power movement was born out of the 1970s when disillusioned Vietnam War veterans began to be recruited by white power militia groups, according to research by Kathleen Belew, an assistant professor of History at the University of Chicago.

Under the new guidelines, the DoD said it would develop programs to prepare troops who are leaving the service from being targeted by extremist organizations. Numerous studies have shown that some veterans are much more likely to be targeted for recruitment in the white extremist fringe, compared to the civilian population, and they are disproportionately involved in acts of violence.

The most recent study, an October research brief by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, found that from 1990 through the first nine months of 2021, at least 458 criminal extremists with U.S. military backgrounds committed criminal acts that were motivated by their “political, economic, social, or religious goals.”

That figure includes 118 individuals who are facing charges for their involvement in the Capitol insurrection. Of the 458 people, 83.6 percent, or 383, were no longer serving when they were arrested for committing extremist crimes.

“Overall, numerically, this is still a small but growing problem,” said William Braniff, the director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism and a University of Maryland professor, during a Brookings Institute panel on extremism in the military earlier this month.

“It’s a national security concern,” Braniff said. “So, this is really creating a soft underbelly in American society. So, it’s not just a numbers problem. I think this is a problem regarding American democracy. And it’s a problem for which we have to put a preventative ecosystem in place now before the numbers do get more concerning.”

Everyday racism

Veterans like Reuben Keith Green said it’s disheartening to see the military struggling decade after decade to deal with racism and extremism in its ranks.

Green, 64 and a retired Navy Lt. Cmdr., was part of generations of men in his family who joined the military. Both his father and grandfather served. But he grew disillusioned by the military and what he believed were broken promises that all servicemen and women were equal and would be treated the same regardless of race.

He said he endured and witnessed countless acts of racism through his time in the service from when he first enlisted on Valentine’s Day in 1975 to when he left in the mid-’90s. Some fellow service members, he said, proudly displayed Confederate flags and expressed white supremacist views, with no retribution. Green wrote a book in 2017, “Black Officer, White Navy,” that detailed his personal experiences. He’s also penned several articles, demanding military accountability.

This year, he said he served as a guest speaker for a Pentagon program that was part of Secretary Lloyd Austin’s extremism stand-down.

But Green said while the stand-down was a step in the right direction, he believes the military has yet to address the “everyday racism that is based on extremist views.”

Green said he worries the policies released last week won’t move the needle. He also questioned whether military officials will be able to uniformly enforce and establish “intent” behind a service member’s decision to like or share extremist views and posts on social media.

“If my CO [commanding officer] is a member of the KKK, am I going to report discrimination or extremist behavior to him or her?” Green said.

He also noted that none of the policies specifically address acts of discrimination or racism that are not “violent” in nature but could still have disastrous impacts on unit cohesion and service members of color.

“The military has let this white supremacist, racist issue fester for so long,” Green said. “They’ve been trying to hide the actual truth and now it’s blowing up in their faces.”

It was November 2018, and the driver, Tyler Sumlin, was uncomfortable. Clammy. The husky, bearded former U.S. Army soldier was getting a cold, and understandably tense: He was transporting a platoon’s worth of stolen rifles, enough C4 to blow up his car and those around him, a live hand grenade.

He would recall thinking, “Is it too late to turn around?”

Riding shotgun was Sumlin’s military blood brother, Sgt. 1st Class Jason Jarvis, a soldier on active-duty from Fort Bragg’s 18th Ordnance Company in North Carolina — Sumlin’s old unit.

The two men, who’d been close since they served in Afghanistan, tried to distract themselves with idle road-trip chatter. Their wives, war stories, favorite movies.

A few months earlier, Jarvis had reached out to ask if Sumlin had interest in making some money. Jarvis was looking to sell stolen military equipment from an armory at Bragg.

Sumlin said he might be able to find a buyer.

Now they were headed to El Paso, Texas, to sell the stolen weapons. The two men had heard from contacts that the customers were taking the haul into Mexico.

In a series of stories, The Associated Press has detailed how the U.S. military has a problem with missing and stolen guns and explosives, and how some weapons have been used in domestic crime.

But the inside story of how two men who’d forged a deep bond amid the violence of the battlefield attempted to sell stolen Army weapons reveals another kind of threat: an organized group of soldiers and veterans taking advantage of flaws in the military’s system to make fast money.

This story is based on extensive interviews, text messages associated with a federal criminal case, private Facebook group messages, court records and documents from military investigative proceedings.

While information about Sumlin and Jarvis has come to light before, this account offers new details about a case that left other soldiers appalled and enraged — betrayed, they believed, by two of their own.

A photograph captures a day in 2009 as Sumlin and Jarvis sat together on a rock in Kunar Province, Afghanistan. A rifle rests on Sumlin’s lap, and he wears a tactical vest, his T-shirt sleeves cut off to expose a farmer’s tan and tattoo on his left shoulder. Jarvis is off to his side, his rifle in hand.

The two young men had become brothers amid the breakneck tempo of wartime Afghanistan. Sumlin and Jarvis specialized in explosive ordnance disposal, or EOD, the kind of work — with its stifling, hulking bomb suits — given the Hollywood treatment in “The Hurt Locker.”

Their work eliminating improvised explosive devices set by the Taliban was nonstop, and gave them little time to process what they saw, heard and smelled. It was a pressure cooker of a job inside a pressure cooker, intense even in the high stakes world of the battlefield. They stashed traumatic experiences and images deep inside themselves, and their comradery helped blunt the stress.

When they returned stateside both struggled with adjusting to the slower pace of life. Like many soldiers, they found some balm in the friendship of others who’d seen what they’d seen.

Like many military subcultures, the tight-knit EOD community has its own code of conduct, ethics and language. Sumlin joined a private Facebook group where the EOD community commiserated, argued and pranked one another. They also held each other to account, debating whether a member’s conduct violated the brotherhood’s code.

Sumlin left the Army in December 2017, but deployed again to do bomb disposal with a private defense contracting company.

Meanwhile, Jarvis remained in the Army. At Fort Bragg, home to some of the Army’s most elite units, Jarvis worked in an armory. And that gave him access to a wealth of military firearms, parts and other equipment such as night vision goggles and explosives.

Inside the Fort Bragg armory, Jarvis took photographs of weaponry — and then he stole it, and set out to sell it.

His buddy, Sumlin, sent the photos and an inventory list of the pilfered weapons and explosives to an accomplice who called himself “Mr. Anderson.” Anderson, a former Army combat engineer who had served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, was one of several other soldiers or veterans connected to the scheme.

In May 2018, Sumlin and Jarvis began mining their contacts to offload the haul. They would find a promising lead with the help of a man identified as “Evan,” who they hadn’t met but who said he had connections with a willing buyer.

“Inventory: NVG-13, Aimpoint-8, ACOG-18, PEQ2A-10, DD Rail-24, DD-Barrel-15, Various Troy toys,” Anderson texted Evan, including Jarvis’ photos. The letters and numbers described a litany of arms and night vision goggles, rifle optics and lasers designed for aiming, and rifle parts.

“Wow, items are good, any idea on price if I took everything?” Evan texted back.

“I’ll let you know as soon as I hear back from him,” Anderson wrote, referring to Sumlin.

Over the next few days, the conversation continued, copies of messages show. Anderson and Evan complained about the weapons’ high prices. They sounded paranoid when they discussed dealing with amateur gun dealers like Sumlin and Jarvis, and feared they would attract attention from law enforcement.

“As soon as he named his price (for the gunsights) I thought he was joking since they’re definitely USED,” Anderson wrote. “I’m not sure if it’s his first time or not. But it’s the last time I ask around for (Sumlin).”

After a few days, Evan said he’d found a buyer who wanted it. All of it.

What Anderson didn’t know is that Evan was a longtime confidential informant working with Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security.

In his communication with Sumlin and Anderson, Evan said, he represented a buyer who claimed to be connected to narcotraffickers. (Sumlin has denied that the weapons were meant to be sold to drugrunners.)

“I didn’t know (the buyer) was south of Texas,” Anderson wrote.

“Yep he goes between Texas and Mexico all the time,” Evan wrote back.

“I wouldn’t sell anything to anyone down there,” Anderson replied.

“Lol … well he has always been a cash buyer without question and never any issues at all,” Evan responded. “It sounds like they’ve made a deal.”

“I hope so. They still have to meet and conclude,” wrote Anderson.

By mid-November 2018, Jarvis had rented a Chevy Tahoe SUV in North Carolina and drove the stolen cache south. He met Sumlin in Inverness, a small town in central Florida’s lakes region, so they could prepare the weapons for sale, according to a federal criminal complaint.

Sumlin would say he and Jarvis had initially sought $250,000 for the firearms and explosives. After some back-and-forth, they settled on a much lower price: $75,000.

It seemed a paltry amount, considering the risk, but the weapons sale may have been just one in which they were involved. According to the Army Criminal Investigation Division’s case file, Jarvis and Sumlin would later tell agents about “criminal transactions” in Colorado, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia and Texas. In the document, another soldier confessed to stealing multiple rifle optic systems and a bomb suit, which were given to Sumlin.

In Florida, Jarvis and Sumlin cleaned the firearms to remove their fingerprints. They also paid to have some parts modified to fit the rifles. With the cache assembled, cleaned, packed in storage containers and loaded for delivery, the men got into the SUV for the 24-hour drive to Texas.

Arriving in El Paso, they pulled into a truck stop the morning of Nov. 14, 2018. A man they thought was the buyers’ contact, known as Andy, waited with some others. They told Sumlin and Jarvis to follow them to a nearby warehouse — and into the trap.

There, the agents confirmed that the two men were indeed carrying multiple firearms, military equipment and C4 plastic explosives. A SWAT team pounced, arrested them and secured the cache.

Homeland Security agents seized more than 30 firearms; several blocks of C4; a hand grenade; shape charges; body armor; night vision devices; binoculars; ammunition; lasers and magazines. In Mexico, where drug traffickers have fought openly, the equipment could unleash carnage.

Yet the weapons recovered did not account for all that was missing from Bragg’s armory. According to the report by Army criminal investigators, the items stolen between Sumlin, Jarvis and their accomplices between 2014 and 2018 were valued at close to $180,000. But the U.S. government only recovered roughly $26,000 worth.

The Army referred questions to Homeland Security Investigations, which initially promised to discuss the case with AP, then canceled the interview and, later, did not respond to written questions.

Jarvis and Sumlin were indicted on eight different federal charges, including conspiracy and gunrunning.

“Holy hell they had to be planning a crazy something for sure,” Evan texted a Homeland Security agent.

“Boss is extremely happy … It was a good hit,” the agent replied. “Bad guys thought we were narco traffickers from Mexico … Using their weapons against troops.”

Sumlin posted bail and returned to his Florida home to pick up the pieces. He faced a possible 70 years in prison, and struggled under the weight of PTSD.

He logged onto the EOD community’s private Facebook group page and saw a message directed at him.

“Dude is this you?” an EOD brother asked.

There on the page for everyone to see was a copy of his indictment, which had not been made public or attracted any media attention.

“Yup,” Sumlin typed.

“Mistakes were made,” a fellow EOD member responded, glibly.

“Alot of them,” Sumlin wrote.

In the months after the arrests, word had swirled in the small EOD community about fellow soldiers who’d tried to sell firearms and explosives. But the Army sent no official press release and there were no news reports. The chatter was dismissed as a rumor traded among troops.

The indictment confirmed the rumor, and some of Sumlin’s brethren were livid. Explosive ordnance disposal technicians work on the border amid Mexican drug-related violence. What if the weapons had ended up with narcos? They might have been used against the good guys.

“Bro, (obscenity) you AND your service. You’re a piece of (obscenity),” wrote one EOD group member. “You betrayed everyone you ever worked with as soon as you tried to sell weapons and explosives to a cartel.”

In response, Sumlin indicated there had been six others involved in the conspiracy. Pressed to identify them, he refused.

Why, asked another community member, was he protecting the other conspirators?

“I’d like to hope they learned from what’s going to happen to me,” Sumlin explained. He said he didn’t think any of them had been arrested, and he wanted to keep it that way. He hoped his and Jarvis’ punishment would dissuade them from future arms dealings.

For many in the EOD community, Sumlin’s mea culpa and excuses about needing money were not enough. He had crossed a line by selling items that could have killed one of their own.

Sumlin and Jarvis had faced decades in prison, but both reached deals with federal prosecutors. They pleaded guilty to attempting to smuggle goods from the United States.

The other seven counts were dropped. The maximum term was now 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

But they didn’t even get that.

Each was sentenced to five years’ probation, and Jarvis was ordered to mental health counseling and required to take prescribed medication.

Jarvis and Anderson did not return messages seeking comment. Sumlin declined to be interviewed for this story, but said in a 2019 interview that he planned to finish his probation and complete a psychology degree.

“I want to try and help veterans that have lost their way and try to help veterans transition out of the military and back into civilian life … people that have gone through the issues of losing that rush … that spark in life,” he said.

The investigators, meanwhile, were incensed. They speculated that the federal judge was moved by the defendants’ service records and claims of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I don’t mind getting my ass kicked in court fair and square … but when they take a plea agreement and admit to everything we charged him with … I just don’t know what to say,” a federal agent wrote to Evan.

“It’s like if they pulled over (Timothy) McVeigh on the way to Oklahoma City … and gave him probation because he didn’t actually blow up the building,” Evan responded.

As for Sumlin’s insistence that drug traffickers were never discussed when he was negotiating the deal with undercover agents, Evan is adamant: The veteran was lying.

“They definitely planned to steal the weapons, the C4, the blasting caps and everything and they were going to sell it to the Mexican cartel, period,” Evan told the AP.

The legal record is unclear. Sumlin told federal officials he believed the weapons were going to be exported to Mexico. But the federal complaint does not mention drug cartels.

To Evan, Sumlin and Jarvis are terrorists. If they were Muslim or Black, he said, they wouldn’t have gotten off so easily.

“It was very frustrating that so many risked their lives, so many undercover people. There were all kinds of agencies involved and this is the outcome?” Evan wrote a Homeland Security agent. “There’s other guys who got much worse for much less.”

And so, block by block, he stole 13 pounds of C4 plastic explosives from the training ranges of Camp Lejeune.

“The riots, talk about seizing guns, I saw this country moving towards a scary unknown future,” the sergeant would later write, in a seven-page statement to military investigators. “I had one thing on my mind and one thing only, I am protecting my family and my constitutional rights.”

His crime might have gone undetected, but authorities caught a lucky break in 2018 as they investigated yet another theft from Lejeune, the massive base on coastal North Carolina. In that other case, explosives ended up in the hands of some high school kids.

These are not isolated cases. Hundreds — and possibly thousands — of armor-piercing grenades, hundreds of pounds of plastic explosives, as well as land mines and rockets have been stolen from or lost by the U.S. armed forces over the past decade, according to an ongoing Associated Press investigation into the military’s failure to secure all its weapons of war. Still more explosives were reported missing and later recovered.

Troops falsified records to cover up some thefts, and in other cases didn’t report explosives as missing, investigative files show. Sometimes, they failed to safeguard explosives in the first place.

The consequences can be deadly.

In August, an artillery shell exploded at a Mississippi recycling yard. Chris Smith had been taking a work break from the heat, drinking water and chewing tobacco. Suddenly he found himself cradling a co-worker who was bleeding profusely from his legs. The man died right there.

“For no reason at all,” Smith said in an interview.

Two days later, an intact shell was found at the scrap yard. The local sheriff’s department said the round was the kind used in a howitzer, a long-range artillery weapon.

Investigating authorities suspect the shells came from Camp Shelby, an Army National Guard base about 40 miles away. Mississippi National Guard spokeswoman Lt. Col. Deidre Smith said she knows of no evidence the shell originated there.

Metal salvaging thieves have targeted Shelby before, according to federal authorities. A man was injured by an explosion at his Gulfport, Mississippi, home in 2012 when he tried to open one of 51 AT-4 anti-tank shells taken from the impact area of Shelby’s training range. Five people pleaded guilty to federal charges.

Some thefts have drawn attention locally, as happened in 2019, when training rockets were found in residences just off Fort Hood in Texas. AP uncovered others that have not been reported publicly, among them the Camp Lejeune thefts and a 2013 case in which 36 sticks of unguarded TNT were stolen during a training exercise at Clark Air Base in the Philippines.

Military officials said thieves in the ranks are a small minority of service members and that — compared to stockpiles — the overall amounts of lost or stolen explosives are minuscule.

“We want to get the number to zero, so there is no loss, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t take seriously losses that happened,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Uriah Orland said.

Explosives have been found in homes and storage units, inside military barracks and alongside roads, even at a US-Mexico border checkpoint. These were not rusty war trophies cast out of grandpa’s attic. They came from military shipments or bases. Many were taken by military insiders.

The AP’s AWOL Weapons investigation has shown that poor accountability and insider thefts have led to the loss of more than 2,000 military firearms since 2010. Some guns were used in civilian crimes, found on felons or sold to a street gang.

In response, Congress is set to require that the military give lawmakers detailed loss and theft reports every year.

One thing those reforms won’t do: Make it harder to steal explosives such as C4.

Explosives are more difficult to account for than firearms.

While troops check guns in and out of armories, explosives are distributed from ammunition supply points with the presumption they will be detonated.

Although at least two people are supposed to sign consumption reports, it’s an honor system. If explosives are not used and vanish, only the thief might know. Explosives may not have individual serial numbers for tracking, and plastic explosives are easily concealed because, like Play-Doh, they can be cut or shaped.

Poor record-keeping and oversight allowed a private stationed at Quantico, Virginia, to steal cans of explosives and detonators. That criminal investigation also revealed that a second ammunition technician took four fragmentation grenades by falsely recording that they were exploded during training, an assertion no one questioned.

AP sought detailed data from all four service branches covering explosives loss or theft from 2010 through 2020.

The Army provided a chart that totaled nearly 1,900 entries for missing explosives, about half of which it said were recovered. The majority was described as C4/TNT. Other categories included artillery, mortars, land mines, grenades, rockets and armor-piercing 40 mm grenades shot from a launcher.

The chart represented a painstaking, manual records review, Army spokesman Lt. Col. Brandon Kelley said. Even with that review, researchers couldn’t always determine amounts, so for example it was not possible to know exactly how many pounds of C4/TNT were represented in the 1,066 entries, Kelley said.

In the broad context of the Army, Kelley said, amounts of missing explosives are negligible. Over the past decade, the Army “has maintained proper accountability of 99.999984% of munitions,” he said.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the Marine Corps released data that was too unclear to calculate a precise tally. AP’s rough analysis showed that thousands of armor-piercing grenades and hundreds of pounds of plastic explosives were reported lost or stolen. “Some of it was later recovered and often these reports are attributed to human error, such as miscounts or improper documentation,” Capt. Andrew Wood said in a written statement. He wrote the Marines have “appropriate policies and procedures … to account for explosives,” though the Corps is looking into improvements.

The Air Force provided a chart that reported about 50 pounds of C4, more than 800 feet of detonating cord and several dozen 40 mm armor-piercing grenades had vanished without being recovered. Spokeswoman Sarah Fiocco said the loss rate within the service’s $25 billion explosives stockpile is a small fraction of a percent. “The Air Force does very well regarding accountability of explosives,” Fiocco wrote in response to questions.

The Navy said that only 20 hand grenades have been stolen, with all but two recovered. When the AP produced military investigative records showing an additional 24 grenades had been reported missing from a ship’s armory in 2012, Navy spokesman Lt. Lewis Aldridge said the case was “beyond the 2-year local records retention requirement.” Aldridge added: “We are committed to transparency and following proper procedures and take accountability of explosives seriously.”

Not all missing explosives need to be reported all the way up the military’s bureaucracy. These reporting gaps mean official loss and theft numbers collected by the Office of the Secretary of Defense undercount the problem’s full extent. For example, the services don’t have to tell the Pentagon about losses or thefts of less than 10 pounds of C4, although each branch can have more stringent internal regulations.

“The numbers are exceedingly small for loss of explosives,” chief Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told AP in June.

The AP also unearthed dozens of explosives investigations by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Army Criminal Investigation Command and Defense Criminal Investigative Service. In the majority of these 63 cases, the military didn’t realize any explosives were gone until someone recovered them where they shouldn’t be.

That’s what happened in 2018, when a former Marine’s father tipped off investigators about his son’s Colorado home. Authorities discovered four blocks of C4 stuffed into the son’s boots and, in his hoodie pocket, cord to detonate them. They also found eight 40 mm armor-piercing grenades, court records show.

The items came from Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay in Georgia. The former Marine had been part of a security force guarding the nuclear-powered fleet there.

At Kings Bay, while one Marine altered paperwork to make it appear explosives had been used, others took them away after burying them near a “shoot house” on base, the records show.

That case spawned a parallel investigation into further explosive thefts from Kings Bay. According to the investigative file, 50 pounds of plastic explosives were stolen. In trained hands, much less C4 than that would be deadly if detonated close to people, and could destroy vehicles or damage bridges or buildings, military and civilian explosive experts said.

In all, six people pleaded guilty.

Former military members who take explosives don’t always face punishment.

In 2016, a Pennsylvania man who had retired from the Marines as a lieutenant colonel two decades before was found with 10 pounds of C4, detonating cord and blasting caps, in his home. A federal prosecutor declined the case, citing the statute of limitations and the apparent lack of criminal intent.

In Florida, a former Army Special Forces soldier was acquitted by a civilian jury of taking boxes of TNT, grenades and dynamite. He testified that his supervising officer allowed him to take the explosives from Fort Bragg, North Carolina — a claim the supervisor denied.

The Army didn’t know the explosives had been missing for years. At trial, an Army expert suggested a faked form said they had been exploded.

The story of the recovery of Camp Lejeune’s purloined explosives begins with teenagers breaking into a vacant house.

On a shelf in a bedroom closet, they found a black backpack, and inside was an ammunition can that contained a cornucopia of munitions. Five feet of detasheet, a thin, malleable explosive that comes in rolls like wrapping paper. Fuse cord. Blasting caps. Parts of a land mine.

A Marine sergeant named Alex Krasovec had left the backpack, according to the investigative file. As a demolition instructor at Camp Lejeune in early 2017, he grabbed the can at the end of one training exercise. The items inside should have been exploded.

Sometimes, troops will gather the leftovers from a training and blow them up, rather than turning them back in — and filling out additional forms. It’s known as a junk shot, safety shot or clean-up shot.

Instead of returning the explosives, or blowing up the can, Krasovec took it.

Krasovec, who declined an interview request from AP, would tell Naval Criminal Investigative Service agents that his idea was to go to his family home in Ohio — to have some fun, maybe blow up some tree stumps. Before he could, the teenagers who had slipped out of a sleepover in Jacksonville, North Carolina, found the stash. They took it, and kept it, until one of them was overheard talking about having military explosives at home.

A forensic lab identified Krasovec’s fingerprints on the explosives. In questioning him about a year later, NCIS agents stumbled upon a second insider, Sgt. Travis Glosser.

As a demolition trainer at Camp Lejeune, Glosser also had exceptional access to C4.

During the summer of 2016, Glosser feared Hillary Clinton would beat Donald Trump in the presidential election, and society might disintegrate. So he began accumulating leftovers until he had what he described as “a respectable amount” of C4 — 10 blocks, weighing nearly 13 pounds (6 kilograms).

“I mean, you know how crazy the world is nowadays,” Glosser told an NCIS agent in June 2018, when he surrendered. “So it’s like well, you know, I’ve also got that just in case if the world does start coming to an end or anything crazy like that, I could protect me and my family.”

After Trump won, he carefully buried the explosives just beyond the tree line in the backyard of his home off Camp Lejeune. They remained there until, more than a year later, word began circulating that Krasovec was in trouble and there would be an inventory review.

Glosser first told investigators on the Krasovec case that he didn’t know about any stolen C4.

Before sunrise the next morning, he used a military shovel to bury the explosives in nearby woods. He then went to the gym, and reported to work.

Later that day, consumed by the mistake he knew he’d made, Glosser confessed, then told bomb handlers where he had buried the munitions.

Both Krasovec and Glosser pleaded guilty to theft of military property. Each was sentenced to less than two years of confinement in military prison, and both were knocked down in rank. Krasovec was booted from the service with a bad conduct discharge; Glosser is appealing his case.

Glosser’s wife told the AP that he would not comment. Under questioning from authorities, he insisted he never planned to wreak havoc and said he had no ties to a militia.

“At no time did I ever intend or even think about selling, giving, or even showing anyone” the explosives, he wrote. “I also have never had any intent to harm anyone.”

Hall reported from Nashville, Tennessee; Pritchard reported from Los Angeles; LaPorta reported from Boca Raton, Florida. Contributing were Justin Myers in Chicago; Stacey Plaisance in Ellisville, Mississippi; Jennifer Farrar in New York and Robert Bumsted in Fort Polk, Louisiana.

The rollout on Army and Air Force bases continues even though the Defense Department itself describes putting the technology in firearms as a “significant” security risk.

The Marines have rejected radio frequency identification technology in weapons for that very reason, and the Navy said this week that it was halting its own dalliance.

RFID, as the technology is known, is infused throughout daily civilian life. Thin RFID tags help drivers zip through toll booths, hospitals locate tools and supermarkets track their stock. Tags are in some identity documents, airline baggage tags and even amusement park wristbands.

When embedded in military guns, RFID tags can trim hours off time-intensive tasks, such as weapon counts and distribution. Outside the armory, however, the same silent, invisible signals that help automate inventory checks could become an unwanted tracking beacon.

The AP scrutinized how the U.S. armed services use technology to keep closer control of their firearms as part of an investigation into stolen and missing military guns — some of which have been used in street violence. The examination included new field tests that demonstrated some of the security issues RFID presents.

The field tests showed how tags inside weapons can be quickly copied, giving would-be thieves in gun rooms and armories a new advantage.

And, more crucially, that even low-tech enemies could identify U.S. troops at distances far greater than advertised by contractors who install the systems.

Which is why a spokesman for the Department of Defense said its policymakers oppose embedding tags in firearms except in limited, very specific cases, such as guns that are used only at a firing range — not in combat or to guard bases.

“It would pose a significant operations security risk in the field, allowing an adversary to easily identify DOD personnel operating locations and potentially even their identity,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Uriah Orland told AP.

Spokespeople at the headquarters of the Air Force and Army said they did not know how many units have converted their armories.

AP found five Air Force bases that have operated at least one RFID armory, and one more that plans a retrofit. Executives at military contracting companies said many more units have sought proposals.

A Florida-based Army Green Berets unit, the 7th Special Forces Group, confirmed it uses the technology in “a few” arms rooms. Special forces soldiers can take tagged weapons into the field, said Maj. Dan Lessard, a special forces spokesman. A separate pilot project at Fort Bragg, the sprawling Army base in North Carolina, was suspended due to COVID-19.

The Navy told AP one armory on a base up the coast from Los Angeles was using RFID for inventory. Then this week, after extended questioning, spokesman Lt. Lewis Aldridge abruptly said that the technology “didn’t meet operational requirements” and wouldn’t be used across the service.

Momentum for RFID built within the Air Force after a 2018 case in which a machine gun disappeared from the 91st Security Forces Group, which guards an installation that houses nuclear-tipped missiles. Authorities recovered the weapon, but the incident reverberated across the service.

With Air Force commanders looking to bolster armory security, defense contractors offered a familiar technology — one with a military pedigree.

The origins of RFID trace to World War II and the development of radar. In the U.S. military, use grew in the 1990s, after the first Gulf War showed a need to untangle vast supply chains of shipping containers.

The U.S. military is not alone in employing RFID for firearms management: Government armories in Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere have been outfitted.

Armory conversions cost thousands of dollars, and sometimes more. Convenience is a big selling point. Instead of hand-recording firearm serial numbers on paper or scanning barcodes one-by-one like a cashier, an armorer can read tags in a rack of firearms with the wave of a handheld reader — and without having to see each weapon. The tags tucked inside don’t even need batteries.

Contractors that retrofit armories say tags can be read only within a limited range, typically a few dozen feet or less. But in field testing for AP, two prominent cybersecurity experts showed that a tag inside a rifle can be read from significantly farther, using inexpensive components that fit inside a backpack.

While the hackers who devised the experiments observed U.S. government restrictions on transmitting signals, enemies who would not be so constrained could detect tags miles away, they said.

Some within the military share the tracking concern.

The Marine Corps has, according to a spokesman, decided across the service not to tag guns.

“The use of RFID tags on individual weapons systems increases the digital signature of Marines on a battlefield, increasing the security/force protection risks,” said Capt. Andrew Wood.

A top weapons expert from the Corps said he saw how tags can be read from afar during training exercises in the Southern California desert in December 2018.

“RFID tags on tanks, weapons, magazines, you can ping them and find the disposition of where units are,” said Wesley Turner, who was a Marine chief warrant officer 5 when he spoke in a spring interview. “If I can ping it, I can find it and I can shoot you.”

The Air Force and Army did not answer detailed questions about use of the technology in firearms. In written statements, spokespeople said unit commanders can add RFID systems as a further layer of accountability, but no service-wide requirement is planned.

Policy experts within the Office of the Secretary of Defense appeared unaware that the services have been tagging firearms with RFID.

Asked why service branches can field a technology that Pentagon planners consider so risky, Defense Department spokesman Orland first said that the services told the Pentagon they are not tagging guns due to security concerns.

Informed that AP found units which acknowledge using the technology, the Pentagon revised its statement and said it allows service branches to explore innovative solutions. The Defense Department “tries to balance pre-emptive prohibitions due to current security risks with flexibility to adopt new technologies when they mature and those risks decrease,” Orland said.

HACKERS ON THE HUNT

The two hackers had locked onto their target: The rifle held by a man walking away from them under the scorching summer sun.

“Still reading, still reading, still reading,” called out one, Kristin Paget, whose prowess has landed her jobs at tech titans including Apple and Tesla — as well as the nickname “Hacker Princess.”

Here in California’s San Joaquin Valley, in a sloping field surrounded by almond orchards, Paget and her hacking partner Marc Rogers were testing the limits of an RFID system they’d cobbled together for about $500. To see how far they could detect a tag in the rifle, they were telling the man, firearms trainer Michael Palombo, to keep going.

By now more than half a football field away, the hackers had to shout or wave hands to communicate.

Because the hackers were following Federal Communications Commission regulations that limit the power of radio signals, their antenna lost the tag at 210 feet (64 meters).

That is nowhere near the farthest distance possible, according to Paget. She theorizes that a reader with enough of a power boost could detect an RFID tag on the outside of the International Space Station, 250 miles above.

What’s more, Paget said, it doesn’t take a Chinese or Russian cyber army to take advantage — a tinkerer with YouTube access could learn the needed skills.

“It’s one of those situations that in the security world we say it keeps honest people honest, or it’s secure unless there’s an attack,” said Paget.

Paget warned publicly about the vulnerabilities of RFID in 2010, during presentation at the annual DEF CON hacker convention. From a stage in Las Vegas, Paget broke down a test that read a tag 217 feet away.

Dale “Woody” Wooden, who at the time was part of naval special warfare, saw that presentation and warned fellow service members.

“If the disease is missing weapons and the cure is RFID tags, then you have a cure that is worse than the disease,” said Wooden, who after 20 years in the Navy founded Weathered Security, which teaches digital protection to the military and law enforcement. “They’re prioritizing convenience over service member lives.”

In the California field tests, Paget and Rogers were prepared to demonstrate what they see as other vulnerabilities created by putting RFID in firearms. They thought about showing how a tag could trigger a roadside bomb, but settled on something more mundane: inventory checks.

One benefit of RFID is that it can reduce daily weapon count drudgery. Instead of cataloging dozens of guns one-by-one, an armorer at the end of an aisle can read all their tags at once.

Rogers demonstrated his doubts by showing how a thief could defeat the system.

Aiming his RFID reader at a rifle inside a hard carry case, Rogers replicated the rifle’s tag with the lid still closed. Palombo then removed the firearm and Rogers put the cloned tag inside. As a clone, that tag had all the same data as the rifle’s tag — and indeed, with the case again closed, the RFID reader was fooled into thinking the original tag, and thus the rifle, was still inside.

It took Rogers less than two minutes.

“It’s the ultimate false sense of security,” said Rogers, who designed the hacks on the TV show “Mr. Robot” and is now vice president of cybersecurity at Okta. “It lists all the weapons and tells you that they’re there, but you’ve never actually seen the weapon.”

Executives at two companies that have installed RFID armories at Air Force bases agreed that a corrupt insider could trick the technology.

“RFID is not truly an anti-theft system,” said Cody Remington, president of Enasys.

The executives also said they had never heard anything like the 210 feet (64 meters) that the hackers achieved.

Remington suggested there might be ways to mitigate the risk, but said he deferred to the Pentagon. “Our expertise certainly isn’t on the battlefield,” he said, “our expertise is inside the buildings and tracking where items are.”

Another executive said he had been hearing the concern about troop tracking for years. Eric Collins, the CEO of Trackable Solutions, said it wasn’t a real life problem because a reader would need a stronger power source, and even then couldn’t exceed several dozen feet.

Collins said RFID in weapons poses “absolutely no risk at all,” especially if the guns stay on base.

He said he didn’t believe a tag could be detected from more than 100 feet (30 meters), making the Pentagon’s security concerns invalid. “The leadership needs their staff to give them better guidance,” Collins said, “because that’s not good guidance.”

THE LURE OF RFID

RFID is a relatively expensive solutions for armory management, but the payoff is enticing.

Consider normal inventories. Between physical inspections and voluminous paperwork, counting all the guns on just one base can stretch to days or even weeks. Meanwhile, time seems to stop when a weapon is lost or stolen, as the installation shuts down and search parties launch to find it.

RFID offers a simpler, more efficient system. Which is why two airmen went to an Air Force 2020 Innovation Rodeo — an ideas competition patterned after the TV show “Shark Tank” — to pitch a project to a panel of senior officers.

The airmen offered another scenario, one service members dread and that RFID promises to eliminate: A thousand troops suddenly need to deploy overseas, fast. To get the weapons they will carry, each must wait in a line that snakes around the building and barely seems to move.

“We need to get on board with the 21st century,” Staff Sgt. Nicholas Mullins said from the stage.

Though the proposal didn’t win that competition, with the support of another federal program it found a home at an armory for security forces that patrol Eglin Air Force Base in Florida’s Panhandle.

Open with “full operational capability,” the RFID armory is a success as promised, according to spokeswoman Jasmine Porterfield. The new system cuts inventory time in half, limiting the need for two armorers and creating more schedule flexibility and training opportunities.

The maximum distance tags can be read, according to experts on the base: about 8 feet (2 meters).

LaPorta reported from Hickman, California, Pritchard reported from Los Angeles, and Hall reported from Nashville, Tennessee. Also contributing were Serginho Roosblad in San Francisco and Martha Mendoza in Santa Cruz, California.

It’s a song by the Lumineers, an American folk-rock band. The lyrics and stomp reverberate throughout the kitchen and into the house. My son jumps on each verse that ends with a shout.

“So show me, family. Hey!” He jumps.

“All the blood that I will bleed. Ho!” He jumps.

“I don’t know where I belong. Hey!” He jumps.

“I don’t know where I went wrong. Ho!”

He jumps. And then, so do I.

___

This is a story about a curious boy with no name — at least, no name that I ever came to know. It was 2013, more than a decade after the 9/11 attacks. I was a Marine then, back in Afghanistan for a second time.

At the time, I was working to stop a Taliban cell that specialized in making improvised explosive devices. In that effort, a video emerged. I watched it.

I remember him. I cannot forget him. I remember watching a minute-long video showing a static video camera aimed down a narrow path between two mud hut walls, common in the small hamlets often surrounded by opium-poppy fields. On the screen, not much was moving.

I remember the wind from the east kicking up the moon-like dust to the west. The tree and its shadow moved across the ground as the branches and leaves broke up the rays of sunlight to make abstract art patterns on the desert floor.

I remember the boy, full of energy and life, running into the frame and then out of it. From left to right.

With little boys like him — with little boys like mine — the curiosities of life can be palpable. And so the curious boy with no name wandered slowly back into the frame. From right to left.

He is an Afghan and, given the province we’re in — Helmand, to be exact — he maybe speaks Pashto. His small size places him somewhere between 3 and 5 years old. Maybe he’s 6, a feat in itself; it’s said one in 10 children in Afghanistan die before they turn 5.

As his curiosity runs rampant, I know what he does not. When he ran into the frame and then out of it, he had stepped on a soft spot in the ground — a patch different from the rest of the hard-packed dirt. He wanted to know why. I did not.

Slowly he walks back to mid-frame, studying the ground closely. Like a newly discovered toy, he starts to stomp on the soft spot in the dirt. Over and over again, he stomps. I wait, knowing what I know.

___

Victim-operated improvised explosive devices, known as VOIEDs, have various switches known as pressure plates. The idea is that the bomb is detonated by an unsuspecting individual by completing the circuit when pressure is applied or removed to the switch.

A power source supplies electricity between the switch and the detonator and by completing the circuit, the main charge explodes. Gas heats up and expands rapidly under pressure sending shock waves and shrapnel outward.

In short: Step on the IED and, if you weigh enough, the bomb goes off.

None of this is known to the curious boy with no name who continues to stomp on the bomb that won’t go off — the bomb that he does not know is a bomb.

The reason for this is perhaps even more insidious than the bomb itself: He is too malnourished and does not weigh enough to set off the bomb that will surely kill him. So he continues to stomp.

I remember all of it. I remember wanting to yell at him through the computer screen to stop being a curious 5-year-old boy, to stop, to PLEASE STOP stomping on that soft spot in the ground. I remember wanting to scream. I remember standing silent and watching the screen. I remember being powerless.

The curious boy with no name jumps one last time. He disappears into a dust cloud of fire and ripped flesh.

The video ends with a simple question: “Replay?”

Inside my head, I have no control over the answer.

___

My mental replays of the video continue, year after year, as if in perfect harmony with the Afghan war itself. In many ways, the war became a monster in my life. Everything was defined by who I was before it and who I was after.

The monster took my friends in gun battles — or later, via their own hands. I could blame it for my anger and depression. My sleepless nights and unhealthy eating habits and weight gain. My failed marriage. The pills from the VA. The ringing in my ear and shortness of breath in my lungs. How long until cancer develops from toxic burn pits, I wonder.

Afghanistan is my sucking chest wound, and always will be because — despite what we’ve seen these recent weeks — wars do not end with a withdrawal or retreat or retrograde or the signing of a peace treaty.

Instead, they ebb and flow within the memories of those who were there and the ones who received an unfortunate knock on the door one day from people in uniforms. On those battlegrounds, there is a permanent shattering. It’s the real “forever war.”

The skepticism about America’s longest running war — and, now, its chaotic and bloody conclusion — is bolstered by recent history. It reminds us that President Trump said he would have the troops home by Christmas, and how that didn’t happen. Less than a year before I would watch the curious boy live through his final moments, President Obama tweeted out then-Vice President Biden’s words: “We are leaving in 2014. Period.” We did not.

After years of statements from Washington about “turning a corner” in Afghanistan, Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in December that the United States had only achieved a “modicum of success” after nearly two decades of war that have left both American and Afghan families permanently devastated.

I look around me. What do my people know of this war, of its blood spilled and treasure lost, of me?

In 2009, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, “Whatever their fond sentiments for men and women in uniform, for most Americans the wars remain an abstraction, a distant and unpleasant series of news items that do not affect them personally.”

Around me, around you, America’s newest generation of combat veterans transition to civilian life. They look for jobs, and only find them sometimes. They look for healthcare, and find they need more.

They are sometimes noticed, sometimes ignored — combatants still, this time in a deepening divide between the small slice of Americans who bore the brunt of war, and those for whom the wars are only, as Gates said, “an abstraction.”

___

I am in my house again, far from Helmand province, far from my jumbled days in Afghanistan, far from the anguish that is unfolding right now. It is years after the curious boy jumped on the soft patch of Afghan earth one final time. In my house, The Lumineers sing. My son dances.

“All the blood that I will bleed. Ho!” He jumps.

“I don’t know where I belong. Hey!” He jumps.

“I don’t know where I went wrong. Ho!”

He jumps once more. And keeps on dancing.

___

James LaPorta is a reporter on The Associated Press’ global investigations team, covering national security and military affairs. He is a former U.S. Marine infantryman and a veteran of the Afghanistan War. Follow him on Twitter @Jimlaporta.

The AP’s investigation reported how some of the missing guns have been stolen and later used in violent street crimes, while many others have vanished without a clue from the military’s enormous supply chains.

In all, AP identified at least 1,900 guns that the four armed services recorded as lost or stolen during the 2010s. Most came from the Army. Because some of the service branches provided incomplete data — or none at all — that total is a certain undercount.

“I was frankly shocked by the numbers that were in there,” Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Appropriations Committee at a hearing Thursday.

In a statement, Milley’s spokesman said the chairman would explore overhauling how the services track and secure weapons. Milley “would like to consider a systematic fix in the future where the accountability of weapons and the ability to track and query these numbers is simplified and accurate,” said Col. Dave Butler.

Later Thursday, an Army spokesman said the military branch with the most guns would also fill gaps in how it accounts for lost and stolen weapons.

“The Army staff met today to develop a way forward to fix this problem and we will provide more information as this effort evolves,” said Lt. Col. Brandon Kelley.

Col. Cathy Wilkinson, media relations chief with Army public affairs, said in a statement: “The Army takes weapons accountability very seriously. While we have stringent physical security measures, we have more work to do to ensure that our property accountability and criminal reporting systems are seamlessly linked together. The Army staff met today to develop a way forward to fix this problem and we will provide more information as this effort evolves.”

Four senators have publicly expressed concerns since AP published Tuesday.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., was the latest to question military officials during a Capitol Hill appearance. Citing a case in which automatic assault rifles were stolen from an Army base and sold to a California street gang, Feinstein asked Milley at Thursday’s hearing what the military is doing to ensure “there are no problems like this and that weapons are well secured.”

Milley responded that he had asked the leaders of each armed service to do a deep dive on their numbers. He said the initial information they have given him suggests the number of missing weapons is “significantly less” than what AP reported. The AP derived its figures from records provided by the service branches, including criminal investigations, lost property forms and data from small arms registries, as well as internal memos AP obtained.

“I need to square the balance here. I owe you a firm answer,” Milley told Feinstein.

His spokesman, Butler, elaborated: “Although we can’t yet verify the numbers reported by AP, the chairman believes this is another example of the free press shining a light on the important subjects we need to get right.”

Top officials with the Army, Marines and Secretary of Defense’s office have said missing weapons are not a widespread problem and noted that the number is a tiny fraction of the military’s stockpile.

Before publication of the AP’s investigation, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said in an interview that the armed services can account for 99.999% of their several million firearms. “Though the numbers are small, one is too many,” Kirby said.

Lawmakers’ focus so far had been a new reporting requirement, not systematic reform.

The Pentagon used to share annual updates about stolen weapons with Congress, but the requirement to do so ended years ago, apparently in fiscal year 1994. In more recent years, the Office of the Secretary of Defense has decided when to advise lawmakers of “significant” losses or thefts.

No such notifications have been made since at least 2017, the Pentagon said. Among the several hundred missing firearms that AP identified during subsequent years was a stolen Army pistol that authorities linked to shootings in New York. Other cases included weapons parts that an Army insider brought to the Texas-Mexico border to sell.

On Thursday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said he planned to write a “mandatory reporting requirement” into the National Defense Authorization Act that Congress is drawing up this summer. In a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Blumenthal also asked that the Department of Defense’s Office of the Inspector General conduct “a thorough review” of policies and security procedures.

Describing themselves as very concerned by AP’s findings, Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Thom Tillis, R-N.C., have said they would be looking into questions raised by the reporting.

The AP’s investigation, which began in 2011, is the first public accounting of its kind in decades, in part because neither the Department of Defense nor the armed services are required to tell the public about AWOL weapons.

The Army, the largest of the military services and one with more than 3 million firearms, and Air Force could not readily provide data to the AP on how many weapons were lost or stolen from 2010 through 2019.

Hall reported from Nashville, Tennessee; LaPorta reported from Boca Raton, Florida; Pritchard reported from Los Angeles. Also contributing was Robert Burns in Washington.

The Army’s pattern of secrecy and suppression dates back nearly a decade, when The Associated Press began investigating weapons accountability within the military. Officials fought the release of information for years, then offered misleading answers that contradict internal records.

Military guns aren’t just disappearing. Stolen guns have been used in shootings, brandished to rob and threaten people and recovered in the hands of felons. Thieves sold assault rifles to a street gang.

Army officials cited information that suggests only a couple of hundred firearms vanished during the 2010s. Internal Army memos that AP obtained show losses many times higher.

Efforts to suppress information date to 2012, when AP filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking records from a registry where all four armed services are supposed to report firearms loss or theft.

The former Army insider who oversaw this registry described how he pulled an accounting of the Army’s lost or stolen weapons, but learned later that his superiors blocked its release.

As AP continued to press for information, including through legal challenges, the Army produced a list of missing weapons that was so clearly incomplete officials later disavowed it. They then produced a second set of records that also did not give a full count.

Secrecy surrounding a sensitive topic extends beyond the Army. The Air Force wouldn’t provide data on missing weapons, saying answers would have to await a federal records request AP filed 1.5 years ago.

The broader Department of Defense also has not released reports of weapons losses that it receives from the armed services. It would only provide approximate totals for two years of AP’s 2010 through 2019 study period.

The Pentagon stopped regularly sharing information about missing weapons with Congress years ago, apparently in the 1990s. Defense Department officials said they would still notify lawmakers if a theft or loss meets the definition of being “significant,” but no such notification has been made since at least 2017.

On Tuesday, when AP first published its investigation, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., demanded during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that the Pentagon resurrect regular reporting. In a written statement to AP, the Pentagon said it “looks forward to continuing to work with Congress to ensure appropriate oversight.”

Blumenthal also challenged Army Secretary Christine Wormuth on her branch’s release of information.

“I’d be happy to look into how we’ve handled this issue,” Wormuth replied. She described herself as “open to” a new reporting requirement and said the number of military firearms obtained by civilians is likely small.

Poor record-keeping in the military’s vast inventory systems means lost or stolen guns can be listed on property records as safe. Security breakdowns were evident all the way down to individual units, which have destroyed records, falsified inventory checks and ignored procedures.

Brig. Gen. Duane Miller, the No. 2 law enforcement official in the Army, said that when a weapon does vanish the case is thoroughly investigated. He pointed out that weapons cases are a small fraction of the more than 10,000 felony cases Army investigators open each year.

“I absolutely believe that the procedures we had in place absolutely mitigated any weapon from getting lost or stolen,” Miller said of his own experience as a commander. “But does it happen? It sure does.”

The Associated Press began investigating the loss and theft of military firearms by asking a simple question in 2011: How many guns are unaccounted for across the Army, Marines Corps, Navy and Air Force?

AP was told the answer could be found in the Department of Defense Small Arms and Light Weapons Registry. That centralized database, which the Army oversees, tracks the life cycle of rifles, pistols, shotguns, machine guns and more — from supply depots to unit armories, through deployments, until the weapon is destroyed or sold.

Getting data from the registry, however, would require a formal Freedom of Information Act request.

That request, filed in 2012, came to Charles Royal, then the longtime Army civilian employee who was in charge of the registry at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama.

Royal was accustomed to inquiries. Military and civilian law enforcement agencies would call him thousands of times each year, often because they were looking for a military weapon or had recovered one.

In response to AP’s request, Royal pulled and double-checked data on missing weapons. Royal then showed the results to his boss, the deputy commander of his department.

“After he got it, he said, ‘We can’t be letting this out like this,’” said Royal, who retired in 2014, in an interview last year.

His boss didn’t say exactly why, but Royal said the release he prepared on weapons loss was heavily scrutinized within the Army.

“The numbers that we were going to give was going to kind of freak everybody out to a certain extent,” Royal said — not just because they were firearms, but also because the military requires strict supervision of them.

AP was unable to reach Royal’s supervisor and an Army spokesman had no comment on the handling of the FOIA request.

In 2013, the Army said it would not release any records. The AP appealed that decision and, nearly four years later, Army lawyers agreed that registry records should be public.

It wasn’t until 2019 that the Army released a small batch of data. The records from the registry showed 288 firearms over six years.

Though years in the making, the response was clearly incomplete.

Standing in the stacks at the public library in Decatur, Alabama, last fall, Royal reviewed the seven printed pages of records that Army eventually provided AP.

“This is worthless,” he said.

Told that in multiple years, the Army reported just a single missing weapon, Royal was skeptical. “Out of the millions that they handled, that’s wrong,” he said in a later interview. AP has appealed the FOIA release for a second time.

The data weren’t even accurate when compared to Army criminal investigation records. Using the unique serial numbers assigned to every weapon, AP identified 19 missing firearms that were not in the registry data. This included a M240B machine gun that an Army National Guard unit reported missing in Wyoming in 2014.

The Army could not explain the discrepancy.

Reporters also filed another records act request for criminal cases opened by Army investigators.

In response, Army’s Criminal Investigation Command produced summaries of closed investigations into missing or stolen weapons, weapons parts, explosives or ammunition.

Army spokesman Lt. Col. Brandon Kelley said that the records were “the Army’s most accurate list of physical losses.” Yet again, the total from the records provided — 230 missing rifles or handguns during the 2010s — was a clear undercount.

The records did not reflect several major closed cases and excluded open cases, which typically take years to finish. That meant any weapons investigators are actively trying to track down were not part of the total.

Army’s first two answers — 288 and 230 — are contradicted by an internal analysis, one that officials initially denied they had done.

Asked in an interview whether the Army analyzes trends of missing weapons, Miller said no — there were breakdowns of murders, rapes and property crimes, but not weapons loss or theft.

“I don’t spend a lot of time tracking this data,” Miller said.

In fact, in 2019 and 2020, the Army distributed memos describing military weapons loss as having “the highest importance.” The numbers of missing “arms and arms components remain the same or increased” over the seven years covered by the memos, called ALARACTs.

A trend analysis in the document cited theft and “neglect” as the most common factors.

The memos counted 1,303 missing rifles and handguns from 2013-2019.

During the same seven years, the investigative records the Army said were authoritative showed 62 lost or stolen rifles or handguns.

Army officials said that some number they couldn’t specify were recovered among the 1,303. The data, which could include some combat losses and may include some duplications, came from criminal investigations and incident reports. The internal memos are not “an authoritative document,” and were not closely checked with public release in mind, Army spokesman Kelley said.

Members of Miller’s physical security division were tracking the data, though Miller said he wasn’t personally aware of the memos until AP brought them to his attention. He said that that if he were, he would have shared them.

“When one weapon is lost, I’m concerned. When 100 weapons are lost, I’m concerned. When 500 are lost, I’m concerned,” Miller said in a second interview.

Each armed service is supposed to inform the Office of the Secretary of Defense of losses or thefts. That office also has not released data to AP, but spokesman John Kirby gave approximate numbers of missing weapons for the past few years. The numbers were lower than AP’s totals.

“There is no effort to conceal,” Kirby said. “There is no effort to obstruct.”

Hall reported from Nashville, Tennessee; LaPorta reported from Boca Raton, Florida; Pritchard reported from Los Angeles. Also contributing were Lolita Baldor and Dan Huff in Washington; Brian Barrett in New York; and Justin Myers in Chicago.

“Don’t do it!” a pursuing officer pleaded. The young man complied, releasing the bystander and tossing the gun, which skittered across the city street and then into the hands of police.

They soon learned that the 9mm Beretta had a rap sheet. Bullet casings linked it to four shootings, all of them in Albany, New York.

And there was something else. The pistol was U.S. Army property, a weapon intended for use against America’s enemies, not on its streets.

The Army couldn’t say how its Beretta M9 got to New York’s capital. Until the June 2018 police foot chase, the Army didn’t even realize someone had stolen the gun. Inventory records checked by investigators said the M9 was 600 miles away — safe inside Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

“It’s incredibly alarming,” said Albany County District Attorney David Soares. “It raises the other question as to what else is seeping into a community that could pose a clear and present danger.”

The armed services and the Pentagon are not eager for the public to know the answer.

In the first public accounting of its kind in decades, an Associated Press investigation has found that at least 1,900 U.S. military firearms were lost or stolen during the 2010s, with some resurfacing in violent crimes. Because some armed services have suppressed the release of basic information, AP’s total is a certain undercount.

Government records covering the Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force show pistols, machine guns, shotguns and automatic assault rifles have vanished from armories, supply warehouses, Navy warships, firing ranges and other places where they were used, stored or transported. These weapons of war disappeared because of unlocked doors, sleeping troops, a surveillance system that didn’t record, break-ins and other security lapses that, until now, have not been publicly reported.

While AP’s focus was firearms, military explosives also were lost or stolen, including armor-piercing grenades that ended up in an Atlanta backyard.

Weapon theft or loss spanned the military’s global footprint, touching installations from coast to coast, as well as overseas. In Afghanistan, someone cut the padlock on an Army container and stole 65 Beretta M9s — the same type of gun recovered in Albany. The theft went undetected for at least two weeks, when empty pistol boxes were discovered in the compound. The weapons were not recovered.

Even elite units are not immune. A former member of a Marines special operations unit was busted with two stolen guns. A Navy SEAL lost his pistol during a fight in a restaurant in Lebanon.

The Pentagon used to share annual updates about stolen weapons with Congress, but the requirement to do so ended years ago and public accountability has slipped. The Army and Air Force, for example, couldn’t readily tell AP how many weapons were lost or stolen from 2010 through 2019. So the AP built its own database, using extensive federal Freedom of Information Act requests to review hundreds of military criminal case files or property loss reports, as well as internal military analysis and data from registries of small arms.

Sometimes, weapons disappear without a paper trail. Military investigators regularly close cases without finding the firearms or person responsible because shoddy records lead to dead ends.

The military’s weapons are especially vulnerable to corrupt insiders responsible for securing them. They know how to exploit weak points within armories or the military’s enormous supply chains. Often from lower ranks, they may see a chance to make a buck from a military that can afford it.

“It’s about the money, right?” said Brig. Gen. Duane Miller, who as deputy provost marshal general is the Army’s No. 2 law enforcement official.

Theft or loss happens more than the Army has publicly acknowledged. During an initial interview, Miller significantly understated the extent to which weapons disappear, citing records that report only a few hundred missing rifles and handguns. But an internal analysis AP obtained, done by the Army’s Office of the Provost Marshal General, tallied 1,303 firearms.

In a second interview, Miller said he wasn’t aware of the memos, which had been distributed throughout the Army, until AP pointed them out following the first interview. “If I had the information in front of me,” Miller said, “I would share it with you.” Other Army officials said the internal analysis might overstate some losses.

The AP’s investigation began a decade ago. From the start, the Army has given conflicting information on a subject with the potential to embarrass — and that’s when it has provided information at all. A former insider described how Army officials resisted releasing details of missing guns when AP first inquired, and indeed that information was never provided.

Top officials within the Army, Marines and Secretary of Defense’s office said that weapon accountability is a high priority, and when the military knows a weapon is missing it does trigger a concerted response to recover it. The officials also said missing weapons are not a widespread problem and noted that the number is a tiny fraction of the military’s stockpile.

“We have a very large inventory of several million of these weapons,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said in an interview. “We take this very seriously and we think we do a very good job. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t losses. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t mistakes made.”

Kirby said those mistakes are few, though, and last year the military could account for 99.999% of its firearms. “Though the numbers are small, one is too many,” he said.

In the absence of a regular reporting requirement, the Pentagon is responsible for informing Congress of any “significant” incidents of missing weapons. That hasn’t happened since at least 2017. While a missing portable missile such as a Stinger would qualify for notifying lawmakers, a stolen machine gun would not, according to a senior Department of Defense official whom the Pentagon provided for an interview on condition the official not be named.

While AP’s analysis covered the 2010s, incidents persist.

In May, an Army trainee who fled Fort Jackson in South Carolina with an M4 rifle hijacked a school bus full of children, pointing his unloaded assault weapon at the driver before eventually letting everyone go.

Last October, police in San Diego were startled to find a military grenade launcher on the front seat of a car they pulled over for expired license plates. The driver and his passenger were middle-aged men with criminal records.

After publicizing the arrest, police got a call from a Marine Corps base up the Pacific coast. The Marines wanted to know if the grenade launcher was one they needed to find. They read off a serial number.

It wasn’t a match.

CRIME GUNS

Stolen military guns have been sold to street gang members, recovered on felons and used in violent crimes.

The AP identified eight instances in which five different stolen military firearms were used in a civilian shooting or other violent crime, and others in which felons were caught possessing weapons. To find these cases, AP combed investigative and court records, as well as published reports. Federal restrictions on sharing firearms information publicly mean the case total is certainly an undercount.

The military requires itself to inform civilian law enforcement when a gun is lost or stolen, and the services help in subsequent investigations. The Pentagon does not track crime guns, and spokesman Kirby said his office was unaware of any stolen firearms used in civilian crimes.

The closest AP could find to an independent tally was done by the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services. It said 22 guns issued by the U.S. military were used in a felony during the 2010s. That total could include surplus weapons the military sells to the public or loans to civilian law enforcement.

Those FBI records also appear to be undercount. They say that no military-issue gun was used in a felony in 2018, but at least one was.

Back in June 2018, Albany police were searching for 21-year-old Alvin Damon. They’d placed him at a shooting which involved the Beretta M9, a workhorse weapon for the military that is similar to a model Beretta produces for the civilian market.

Surveillance video obtained by AP shows another man firing the gun four times at a group of people off camera, taking cover behind a building between shots. Two men walking with him scattered, one dropping his hat in the street. No one was injured.

Two months later, Detective Daniel Seeber spotted Damon on a stoop near the Prince Deli corner store. Damon took off running and, not far into the chase, grabbed a bystander who had just emerged from the deli with juice and a bag of chips.

After Detective Seeber defused the standoff, officers collected the pistol. A check by New York State Police returned leads to four Albany shootings, including one just the day before in which a bullet lodged in a living room wall. In another, someone was shot in the ankle.

At the request of Albany police, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives traced the gun’s story. The ATF contacted Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, and a review of Army inventory systems showed the M9 had been listed as “in-transit” between two Fort Bragg units for two years before police recovered it.

And the Army still doesn’t know who stole the gun, or when.

The case wasn’t the first in which police recovered a stolen service pistol before troops at Fort Bragg realized it was missing. AP found a second instance, involving a pistol that was among 21 M9s stolen from an arms room.

Military police learned of the theft in 2010. By then, one of the M9s was sitting in an evidence room in the Hoke County Sheriff’s Department, picked up in a North Carolina backyard not far from Bragg. Another M9 was later seized in Durham after it was used in a parking lot shooting.

Another steady North Carolina source of weapons has been Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, where authorities often have an open missing weapons investigation. Detectives in Baltimore found a Beretta M9 stolen from a Lejeune armory during a cocaine bust. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service found in the 2011 case that inventory and security procedures were rarely followed. Three guns were stolen; no one was charged.

Deputies in South Carolina were called in 2017 after a man started wildly shooting an M9 pistol into the air during an argument with his girlfriend. The boyfriend, a convicted felon, then started shooting toward a neighbor’s house. The pistol came from a National Guard armory that a thief entered through an unlocked door, hauling off six automatic weapons, a grenade launcher and five M9s.

Meanwhile, authorities in central California are still finding AK-74 assault rifles that were among 26 stolen from Fort Irwin a decade ago. Military police officers stole the guns from the Army base, selling some to the Fresno Bulldogs street gang.

At least nine of the AKs have not been recovered.

INSIDER THREAT

The people with easiest access to military firearms are those who handle and secure them.

In the Army, they are often junior soldiers assigned to armories or arms rooms, according to Col. Kenneth Williams, director of supply under the Army’s G-4 Logistics branch.

“This is a young guy or gal,” Williams said. “This is a person normally on their first tour of duty. So you can see that we put great responsibility on our soldiers immediately when they come in.”

Armorers have access both to firearms and the spare parts kept for repairs. These upper receivers, lower receivers and trigger assemblies can be used to make new guns or enhance existing ones.

“We’ve seen issues like that in the past where an armorer might build an M16” automatic assault rifle from military parts, said Mark Ridley, a former deputy director of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. “You have to be really concerned with certain armorers and how they build small arms and small weapons.”

In 2014, NCIS began investigating the theft of weapons parts from Special Boat Team Twelve, a Navy unit based in Coronado, California. Four M4 trigger assemblies that could make a civilian AR-15 fully automatic were missing. Investigators found an armory inventory manager was manipulating electronic records by moving items or claiming they had been transferred. The parts were never recovered and the case was closed after federal prosecutors declined to file charges.

Weapons accountability is part of military routine. Armorers are supposed to check weapons when they open each day. Sight counts, a visual total of weapons on hand, are drilled into troops whether they are in the field, on patrol or in the arms room. But as long as there have been armories, people have been stealing from them.

Weapons enter the public three main ways: direct sales from thieves to buyers, through pawn shops and surplus stores, and online.

Investigators have found sensitive and restricted parts for military weapons on sites including eBay, which said in a statement it has “zero tolerance” for stolen military gear on its site.

At Fort Campbell, Kentucky, soldiers stole machine gun parts and other items that ended up with online buyers in Russia, China, Mexico and elsewhere. The civilian ringleader, who was found with a warehouse of items, was convicted. Authorities said he made hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Often though, recovering a weapon can prove hard.

When an M203 grenade launcher couldn’t be found during a 2019 inventory at a Marine Corps supply base in Albany, Georgia, investigators sought surveillance camera footage. It didn’t exist. The warehouse manager said the system couldn’t be played back at the time.

An analysis of 45 firearms-only investigations in the Navy and Marines found that in 55% of cases, no suspect could be found and weapons remained missing. In those unresolved cases, investigators found records were destroyed or falsified, armories lacked basic security and inventories weren’t completed for weeks or months.

“Gun-decking” is Navy slang for faking work. In the case of the USS Comstock, gun-decking led to the disappearance of three pistols.

Investigators found numerous security lapses in the 2012 case, including one sailor asleep in the armory. The missing pistols weren’t properly logged in the ship’s inventory when they were received several days before. Investigators couldn’t pinpoint what day they disappeared because sailors gun-decked inventory reports by not doing actual counts.

ROOM FOR DISCREPANCY

Military officials shied from discussing how many guns they have, much less how many are missing.

AP learned that the Army, the largest of the armed services, is responsible for about 3.1 million small arms. Across all four branches, the U.S. military has an estimated 4.5 million firearms, according to the nonprofit organization Small Arms Survey.

In its accounting, whenever possible AP eliminated cases in which firearms were lost in combat, during accidents such as aircraft crashes and similar incidents where a weapon’s fate was known.

Unlike the Army and Air Force, which could not answer basic questions about missing weapons, the Marines and Navy were able to produce data covering the 2010s.

The Navy data showed that 211 firearms were reported lost or stolen. In addition, 63 firearms previously considered missing were recovered.

According to AP’s analysis of data from the Marines, 204 firearms were lost or stolen, with 14 later recovered.

To account for missing weapons, the Pentagon relies on incident reports from the services, which it keeps for only three years.

Pentagon officials said that approximately 100 firearms were unaccounted for in both 2019 and 2018. A majority of those were attributable to accidents or combat losses, they said. Even though AP’s total excluded accidents and combat losses whenever known, it was higher than what the services reported to the Pentagon.

The officials said they could only discuss how many weapons were missing dating to 2018. The reason: They aren’t required to keep earlier records. Without providing documentation, the Pentagon said the number of missing weapons was down significantly in 2020, when the pandemic curtailed many military operations.

The Air Force was the only service branch not to release data. It first responded to several Freedom of Information Act requests by saying no records existed. Air Force representatives then said they would not provide details until yet another FOIA request, filed 1.5 years ago, was fully processed.

The Army sought to suppress information on missing weapons and gave misleading numbers that contradict internal memos.

The AP began asking the Army for details on missing weapons in 2011 and filed a formal request a year later for records of guns listed as missing, lost, stolen or recovered in the Department of Defense Small Arms and Light Weapons Registry. Charles Royal, the former Army civilian employee who was in charge of the registry, said that he prepared records for release that higher ups eventually blocked in 2013.

“You’re dealing with millions of weapons,” Royal said in a recent interview. “But we’re supposed to have 100% recon, right. OK, we’re not allowed a discrepancy on that. But there’s so much room for discrepancy.”

Army spokesman Lt. Col. Brandon Kelley said the service’s property inventory systems don’t readily track how many weapons have been lost or stolen. Army officials said the most accurate count could be found in criminal investigative summaries released under yet another federal records request.

AP’s reading of these investigative records showed 230 lost or stolen rifles or handguns between 2010 and 2019 — a clear undercount. Internal documents show just how much Army officials were downplaying the problem.

The AP obtained two memos covering 2013 through 2019 in which the Army tallied 1,303 stolen or lost rifles and handguns, with theft the primary reason for losses. That number, which Army officials said is imperfect because it includes some combat losses and recoveries, and may include some duplications, was based on criminal investigations and incident reports.

The internal memos are not “an authoritative document,” Kelley said, and were not closely checked with public release in mind. As such, he said, the 1,303 total could be inaccurate.

The investigative records Kelley cited show 62 lost or stolen rifles or handguns from 2013 through 2019. Some of those, like the Beretta M9 used in four shootings in Albany, New York, were recovered.

“One gun creates a ton of devastation,” Albany County District Attorney Soares said. “And then it puts it on local officials, local law enforcement, to have to work extra hard to try to remove those guns from the community.”

Hall reported from Nashville, Tennessee; LaPorta reported from Boca Raton, Florida; Pritchard reported from Los Angeles; Myers reported from Chicago. Also contributing were Jeannie Ohm in Arlington, Virginia; Brian Barrett, Randy Herschaft and Jennifer Farrar in New York; Michael Hill in Albany, New York; and Pia Deshpande in Chicago.