On Military Bases, the Dangers Increasingly Come From the Inside

HOUSTON — The deadliest mass shooting at an American military base came in November 2009 at Fort Hood in Texas, where a military psychiatrist, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, killed 12 soldiers and one civilian in what he described as an attempt to protect Taliban leaders in Afghanistan.

And then, after all the soul searching and examination of the tragedy, it happened again four years later at the very same base, when an Army specialist, Ivan A. Lopez, killed three soldiers and wounded 12 others in a shooting in April 2014.

The Army’s 105-page report on the second Fort Hood attack offered a sobering analysis, hinting at the scope of the military’s problems in identifying possible assailants and preventing mass shootings on bases. It found that Specialist Lopez, 34, was struggling with a host of issues — including the death of relatives, financial troubles, a spiritual crisis and a dispute with his superiors over the handling of his request for leave. But his military service and medical history “offer no ready explanations or clear indicators of future violent behavior,” the report’s author, Lt. Gen. Joseph E. Martz, wrote, concluding that the Army could not have prevented the shooting.

Now, in the wake of two attacks — a shooting on Friday by a Saudi trainee who left three people dead at Naval Air Station Pensacola, and one on Wednesday, in which a sailor in Hawaii shot and killed two shipyard workers and wounded another at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard — military officials are again confronting just how vexing and persistent such incidents have become.

In different ways, the many shootings reflect both the complications of banning private weapons from places where military personnel train to fight the nation’s wars and the difficulties of monitoring a population whose members are often dealing with extraordinary levels of stress. To ensure that no unauthorized weapon ends up on a base, military installations would need to be outfitted with T.S.A.-style screening — a level of security and added expense that military officials are unlikely to embrace.

Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said he was monitoring developments on the two recent attacks and was “considering several steps to ensure the security of our military installations and the safety of our service members and their families.”

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