An old truism says that logistics wins wars—a recognition that outcomes on the battlefield are a result of the systems that underpin the military. Similarly, the still-mushrooming fiasco of Jack Teixeira’s disclosure of national secrets is not just about a single service member or incident, but a cascading failure of systems within the armed services.

Teixeira, who was arrested in April, is accused of using his position in the Massachusetts Air National Guard to share top-secret intelligence with friends in the social-media forum Discord over the course of months—including sensitive information about the war in Ukraine and discussions with other governments.

[Kori Schake: A trivial motive for a dangerous leak]

Prosecutors’ filings as well as reporting on the case have slowly revealed the many moments when disaster could have been prevented. Given his behavior in high school, Teixeira should probably never have been able to enlist in the Air National Guard, and after he joined, he shouldn’t have been given security clearance. Once in the service, his theft of classified material should have been punished and stopped much sooner. More broadly, the circumstances that provided a 21-year-old guardsman with access to such sensitive information reflected a sloppy repurposing of Air National Guard units. The failure to detect his disclosures sooner was an intelligence problem. And Teixeira’s presence is emblematic of the broader problem of dealing with extremism within the ranks.

Teixeira was a troubled high-school student. In March 2018, he was suspended from school after “a classmate overheard him make remarks about weapons, including Molotov cocktails, guns at the school, and racial threats,” according to federal prosecutors. That led local police to deny him a gun license when he applied for one. When Teixeira sought to join the military, investigators were aware of the incident but allowed him to enlist. Then he was allowed to obtain top-secret clearance as part of his job. In short, his town police had higher standards than people charged with safeguarding national security.

Perhaps a young person’s juvenile mistakes shouldn’t be held against them, but the military excludes recruits who have smoked too much marijuana, which is legal in half the country, and denies clearance to people who owe too much on credit-card bills. (In an impressive display of chutzpah, Teixeira later used his enlistment and clearance to appeal the gun-license denial—and successfully got it overturned.)

Once he had his clearance, Teixeira began exfiltrating classified material. In at least three instances, superiors raised questions, but he doesn’t appear to have been punished or had his clearance revoked. Prosecutors say he was caught taking notes on intelligence in September and chastised. The following month, superiors observed that he asked disconcertingly detailed questions, unrelated to his job, during a meeting. In February, he was again caught viewing intelligence not related to his work. Throughout all of this, Teixeira was sharing sensitive information online, apparently not hesitating even when scolded.

“A guy like Teixeira gets a pass because … his most objectionable stuff, he was doing … in relatively protected and private spaces,” Kris Goldsmith, an Army veteran who now tracks extremism and disinformation, told me. “It’s not like his commander knows what Discord is.” But Goldsmith said the answer isn’t officers snooping into every Guard member’s social-media presence: “We don’t want to live in a country where everything we do on the internet needs to be monitored.” Rather, better screening was needed when Teixeira enlisted and applied for clearance.

[Tom Nichols: The narcissists who endanger America]

Extremism among members of the military and veterans is a serious and difficult problem—as the many active-duty and former service members charged with crimes in the January 6 insurrection illustrated. This is not to say extremism is particularly rampant in the armed services. A RAND report last week found that support for white supremacism is lower in the military than in the general population, as is belief in QAnon. Support for political violence and belief in the “Great Replacement” theory are similarly prevalent within the military as in the rest of the country. But service members’ tactical discipline and their access to national-security assets make them more dangerous than the average citizen with off-the-deep-end beliefs. Early on, the Biden administration announced a push to fight extremism in the military, but CNN recently reported that Republican criticisms of the effort’s “wokeness” scuttled its efficacy.

In Teixeira’s case, it seems possible that his mien—white, clean-cut, self-styled as a patriot and gun lover—might have allowed him to escape earlier scrutiny, even though many men of his age and interests are inclined to extremism. “It’s pretty easy to keep your head down and not get into trouble, especially if you’re in the reserves or the Guard,” Goldsmith told me. “A guy like Teixeira doesn’t have a lot of opportunities to get in trouble.”

One might ask why a low-ranking, 21-year-old Air National Guard member had access to sensitive intelligence in the first place. One answer would seem to be the Defense Department searching for ways to deal with obsolete units. In 2005, 14 Air National Guard units, including Teixeira’s, quit flying airplanes as part of a reorganization. With the military relying more heavily on drones, the unit was reassigned to handle computers and intelligence from the unmanned aircraft.

My colleague Juliette Kayyem, who for a time oversaw the Massachusetts Air National Guard, wrote in April about how ridiculous it is that someone of Teixeira’s rank was able to see what he was seeing. As The New York Times explained recently, “Airmen like Mr. Teixeira typically fix hardware and software problems and conduct routine maintenance for hours at a time in what is essentially an I.T. support shop while others collect intelligence that they can transmit to ground forces around the world.”

[Juliette Kayyem: I oversaw the Massachusetts Air National Guard. I cannot fathom how this happened.]

If it is true that Teixeira shouldn’t have been in the military or given clearance, and that his position shouldn’t have afforded him access to the material he disclosed, one more glaring question remains: How did it take so long to detect him? “The unauthorized disclosure points to broader systemic failures in the safeguarding of U.S. intelligence information,” Brianna Rosen wrote at Just Security last month, adding, “Why did it take at least a month for the unauthorized disclosure to come to the attention of U.S. authorities?”

Since then, evidence has emerged that Teixeira had been sharing classified information since February 2022. This means that something often described as the worst leak in a decade took more than a year to detect. Somehow a system that manages to violate civil liberties on a mass scale is also unable to ferret out real threats with any speed. Together, these problems add up to a system that seems broken from the narrowest level of recruiting airmen to the broadest one of safeguarding national secrets.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Over the weekend, President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed on a bill to raise the debt ceiling. If the bill passes the House Rules Committee vote today, then House Republicans will vote on it later this week. As we wait to find out the future of the legislation ahead of next week’s default deadline, we’re spending today’s newsletter thinking about how these negotiations fit into the larger cultural battles being waged across the country.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

AI is an insult now. The aspects of manifestation we shouldn’t discount The blue-strawberry problem The most compelling female character on television

A Struggle for Control

Over the past decade, America’s debt-limit negotiations have turned from an institutional formality into a polarized political debate. And in 2023, these negotiations have also taken on elements of the nation’s culture wars. As my colleague Ronald Brownstein noted last week, the budget cuts that House Republicans have argued for are focused on “the relatively small slice of the federal budget that funds most of the government’s investments in children and young adults, who are the most racially diverse generations in American history.” Programs that benefit America’s young people, such as Head Start or Pell Grants, bear the burden of House Republicans’ desired cuts, while Social Security and Medicare are exempt from budget cuts (unlike in previous GOP debt-reduction plans).

“The budget fight, in many ways, represents the fiscal equivalent to the battle over cultural issues raging through Republican-controlled states across the country,” Ron wrote. This debate is a new front, Ron argues, in “the struggle for control of the nation’s direction.” What’s ostensibly a fiscal feud is also a clash between the interests of the older, predominantly white voters who make up the GOP base and the younger, more diverse Americans who Democrats are coming to rely on.

I checked in with Ron by email this afternoon to see how the bipartisan agreement of this past weekend affected the prognosis for programs that serve America’s young people. Ron reminded me that because the deal calls for overall caps rather than cuts to individual programs, anticipating what the specific cuts might be is difficult, until Congress passes its appropriations bills for those programs later this year. And GOP lawmakers did not end up with the 10 years of spending caps they had initially called for: Instead, the agreed-upon legislation includes just two years of caps and then switches to targets that are not legally binding. But even though the country will not ultimately see the full extent of House Republicans’ initial desired cuts, the proposal itself is notable for what it says about the voters the party hopes to reach. As Ron aptly put it:

Looming over these [spending] choices is the intertwined generational and racial re-sorting of the two parties’ electoral coalitions … The GOP has become more dependent on older white people who are either eligible for the federal retirement programs or nearing eligibility.

For the Democrats’ part, Biden’s own budget proposal sought to increase taxes for top-earning Americans (who also tend to be older) in order to preserve spending that benefits young people. This proposal did not make it into the weekend’s agreement, however.

As we keep our eye on the developments of the next few days, Ron’s conclusion offers a helpful reminder of the stakes of these negotiations:

In 2024, Millennials and Gen Z may, for the first time, cast as many ballots as the Baby Boomers and older generations; by 2028, they will almost certainly surpass the older groups. In the fight over the federal budget and debt ceiling—just as in the struggles over cultural issues unfolding in the states—Republicans appear to be racing to lock into law policies that favor their older, white base before the rising generations acquire the electoral clout to force a different direction.

Related:

Why the GOP wants to rob Gen Z to pay the Boomers Why Biden caved

Today’s News

A drone attack hit Moscow, damaging residential buildings in civilian areas. Ukraine has denied “direct” involvement. Elizabeth Holmes reported to prison to begin serving her sentence of more than 11 years. Nine people were injured in a mass shooting at Florida’s Hollywood Beach Broadwalk on Memorial Day.

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Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Bettmann / Getty

Read. Cynthia Ozick’s new short story, “Late-Night-Radio Talk-Show Host Tells All,” about the seduction of radio. Then read this new Atlantic interview about her writing process.

Listen. The latest episode of our How to Talk to People podcast covers the infrastructure of community—and how the design of physical spaces can either encourage or discourage relationships.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.