What Aaron Bushnell Did in the Military

Aaron Bushnell, the 25-year-old U.S. Air Force servicemember who immolated himself in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, was a top secret cleared worker bee in the global American intelligence machine.

But Bushnell was not a spy or an intelligence analyst scouring through the intercepts and imagery. He was not even focused on the Middle East in his work. He was a backend IT guy, one of countless young tech support people who now staff the national security community, similar to what Edward Snowden was.

Despite widespread coverage, the press hasn’t done a very good job of explaining what exactly Bushnell did in the military. He was assigned to the 531st Intelligence Support Squadron, and stationed at Joint Base San Antonio in Texas. “Freedom is What We Reap,” reads the squadron’s motto, wrapped around a Corinthian helmet that constitutes the unit patch.

Bushnell’s squadron is assigned to the 543rd ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] group, which is focused on producing intelligence covering the North America and South American “theaters” of war, as well as providing intelligence support to the drug war and the Department of Homeland Security. Contrary to much speculation online, it’s extremely unlikely that Bushnell had any involvement in the U.S.’s support to Israel amid the Gaza war. 

In fact, there’s no evidence that he was ever even deployed overseas.

Though described as a cyber defense operations specialist, Bushnell’s LinkedIn reveals that he had many of the same hardware and software skills as people in the civilian IT world. Think of the intelligence machine as something akin to a Niagara of incoming data, and knowledge creator, and a vast data center where the network plays the central role in moving information to each stage along the way (and then must act as a giant search engine to find that information). It is all essential, but like the civilian world, these essential workers are unheralded and ignored.

From the Pentagon mouthpieces, to the Air Force leadership, to the Air Force intelligence apparatus, to his numbered Air Force commander, to his Wing commander, all the way down to his Group commander, there's no evidence whatsoever that any of them knew or even knew of Bushnell. That's the case with the vast majority of junior enlisted men and women in the military. Washington, meanwhile, lives in another reality, focused on budgets and paperwork, barely connected to the peons like Bushnell who keep the system running.

I didn’t know Bushnell, but I know servicemembers whose backgrounds sound just like his. They’re the competent young people who shoulder 99% of the responsibility but have 1% of the power in the military. The power differential coupled with a torrent of ugly news once concealed by network television but now delivered to them directly via social media, moves them to action. 

Sometimes they leak stuff to people like me. 

They’re motivated by genuine disgust at an elite class disengaged and disinterested in the mess they leave behind for the rest of us to pick up after.

Yet to the elites, it is the Bushnells of the world who are the problem, as demonstrated in the Pentagon’s press briefing on Monday.

“On the Airman Bushnell, would he be considered an extremist under the Pentagon’s definition of extremism?” one reporter asked Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder.