New Orleans, Las Vegas suspects latest in long line of military radicals

A pair of suspected terrorist attacks on New Year's Day were both allegedly carried out by former U.S. service members, raising questions about how those with access to sensitive intelligence and the nation's most advanced weapons get swept up in radical beliefs. 

From 1990 to 2022, 170 individuals with U.S. military backgrounds plotted 144 unique mass-casualty terrorist attacks in the United States - 25% of all individuals who plotted mass-casualty extremist crimes during this period, according to a study by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.

"Though the number of those in the military who commit prohibited extremist activities may be small, even a single incident can have an outsized impact on the Department and its mission," Defense Department spokesperson Sue Gough told Fox News Digital when asked about the recent attacks and efforts to root out radicalism. 

"The Department is committed to ensuring that extremism does not gain a foothold within the Total Force and will continue its efforts to ensure that all service members can focus on mission accomplishment without the negative and divisive influence of extremist activities."

In 2009, former Army Major Nidal Hassan killed 13 people in a mass shooting at Fort Hood Army base in Texas. The Islamic extremist and former Army psychiatrist had spoken out about the U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Retired Colonel Terry Lee, who worked with Hassan, told Fox News that the Army major would make "outlandish" statements like, "the Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor," referring to U.S. troops. 

Hassan reportedly shouted, "Allahu Akbar!" as he opened fire, killing 13 and injuring 30 others in the deadliest mass shooting on a U.S. military base. 

Now serving 14 years in prison, Bridges was caught when he began communicating online with a covert FBI agent who he believed to be an ISIS supporter in contact with ISIS fighters in the Middle East. 

He was arrested in 2020 after joining the Army in 2018 to infiltrate its ranks and gain insight for his work for O9A. After being deployed to guard a remote, sensitive foreign U.S. military base, he shared details about the site with O9A members and began to call for a deadly attack on his colleagues. 

Miller, a lifelong White supremacist, shot and killed three people, two outside a Jewish community center and one outside a Jewish retirement home, in Kansas in 2014. 

Miller had been vocal about intending to kill Jews, though all of his victims were Christians. 

He served in the Army for 20 years, serving two tours of duty in the Vietnam War and 13 years as a member of the elite Green Berets. Having led a branch of the Ku Klux Klan, Miller had a history of run-ins with the law. He served three years in prison after being convicted in 1987 of conspiring to acquire stolen military weapons and for planning robberies and an assassination. 

Miller has since died in prison. 

He was shot dead by police on the scene of the 2014 attack. 

Las Vegas authorities arrested Andrew Lynam, an Army reservist, alongside Navy veteran Stephen T. Parshall and Air Force veteran William L. Loomis - all self-identified Boogaloo Bois - on May 30, 2020, for conspiring to firebomb a U.S. Forest Service building and a power substation to sow chaos during a police protest after the killing of George Floyd. 

In total, 480 people with a military background were accused of ideologically driven extremist crimes from 2017 through 2023, some 230 of whom were arrested in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot.