The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces

Advanced Individual Training is the phase of instruction that follows basic training in the US Army, where soldiers learn the specific skills of their chosen military occupation. In The Fort Bragg Cartel, AIT represents the early institutional formation of soldiers who will later be absorbed into elite units. Harp uses it to underscore how even routine Army training environments feed into a larger system that eventually produces operators molded for secrecy and violence.

The Army’s Criminal Investigation Division is responsible for investigating serious crimes involving military personnel. In the book, CID functions as both detective agency and bureaucratic barrier, often mishandling or concealing evidence in cases involving Fort Bragg soldiers. Harp portrays CID as emblematic of the Army’s culture of opacity, where investigations routinely end in uncertainty or cover-up.

This acronym describes the special operations targeting cycle developed during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It outlines how elite units locate and eliminate enemy targets, then analyze those targets and disseminate information to the relevant parties. Harp invokes F3EAD to illustrate the industrialization of killing by JSOC and to show how this methodical process—designed for counterterrorism—migrates back into domestic military culture at Fort Bragg.