WASHINGTON (AP) — Step into a U.S. military recreation hall at a base almost anywhere in the world and you’re bound to see it: young troops immersed in the world of online games, using government-funded gaming machines or their own consoles.

The enthusiasm military personnel have for gaming — and the risk that carries — is in the spotlight after Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman, was charged with illegally taking and posting highly classified material in a geopolitical chat room on Discord, a social media platform that started as a hangout for gamers.

State secrets can be illegally shared in countless different ways, from whispered conversations and dead drops to myriad social media platforms. But online gaming forums have long been a particular worry of the military because of their lure for young service members. And U.S. officials are limited in how closely they can monitor those forums to make sure nothing on them threatens national security.

“The social media world and gaming sites in particular have been identified as a counterintelligence concern for about a decade,” said Dan Meyer, a partner at the Tully Rinckey law firm, which specializes in military and security clearance issues.

Foreign intelligence agents could use an avatar in a gaming room to connect with “18 to 23-year-old sailors gaming from the rec center at Norfolk Naval Base, win their confidence over for months, and then, through that process, start to connect with them on other social media platforms,” Meyer said, noting that U.S. spy agencies have also created avatars to conduct surveillance in the online games World of Warcraft and Second Life.

The military doesn't have the authority to conduct surveillance of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil — that's the role of domestic law enforcement agencies like the FBI. Even when monitoring members of the armed forces, there are privacy issues, something the Defense Department ran into head-on as it tried to establish social media policies to counter extremism in the ranks.

The military does, however, have a presence in the online game community. Both the Army and the Navy have service members whose full-time job is to compete in video game tournaments as part of military esports teams. The teams are seen as an effective way to reach and potentially recruit youth who have grown up with online gaming since early childhood. But none of the services said they had any sort of similar team playing online to monitor for potential threats or leaks.

As the military adapts to new technologies like AI, augmented reality and automation, it has increasingly sought recruits with relevant technical skills. This has prompted the military to intensify its efforts to recruit teenage gamers, who’ve developed skill sets such as the ability to visualise remote operations in far away places like Afghanistan, utilize screens for 12 hours at a time, or operate peripheral devices, to fill roles like those needed for the DCGS to disseminate data ingested by drones.

According to the Washington Post, the Air Force “has arguably become the leader in fostering gaming culture.” The military is recruiting on platforms popular with gamers like Discord, or through “military sponsorships of gaming leagues” that feature violent war games. While Teixeira’s role was in technology support, “trauma experienced within this program is not isolated to pilots, techs or sensor operators,” a veteran of DCGS explained to me on condition of anonymity. This veteran said “a culture change is needed” for recruits between the ages 18 and 24, who’ve spent countless hours alone honing their war game skills, to get adequate mental health support.

One of Teixeira’s high school classmates, Kailani Reis, told the Boston Globe that Teixeira was “super quiet” and gave off “loner vibes,” while another classmate, Sarah Arnold remembered him as being quiet and keeping to himself, according to the Associated Press.

In 2019, according to the Washington Post, the Air Force sponsored a gamer tournament to find its best players among 350 contestants. The idea was to foster mental health among its young rank-and-file during the pandemic.

Capt. Oliver Parsons, the founder of Air Force Gaming, has explained that what the service needed was to create an engaging activity with a support network to help young recruits deal with the isolation brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We’re not robots. We’re normal, average people,” Parsons said, adding that if the military doesn’t make gaming culture acceptable, service members are “going to go somewhere else.”

A young noncommissioned officer has a promising career in the Army. He's a combat arms soldier who loves to run around in the woods with machine guns. He earned his Ranger tab and an Expert Infantryman Badge, has one of the highest fitness scores in his unit, and sports several achievement medals on his ribbon rack.

He is about as decorated and ready for war as a soldier can be at his rank without any combat experience.

But a near constant string of rotations and trainings, and now a year-long mission in Europe, mean he has been home for only a few months cumulatively in his short four-year career and is in the middle of marriage counseling.

"It has been a huge struggle, especially as [we're] trying to start a family," said the NCO who spoke to Military.com on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press. "I'm not sure what's going to happen with my marriage, but there is a huge chance I'm leaving the Army."

Military.com spoke to more than a dozen soldiers about a rapid cadence of missions and training schedules packed to the point of bursting. They described how the service's frantic pace to gear up for war is stretching units and pushing families to the breaking point.

"We're as high or higher with the [operations tempo]," Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston told Military.com, referring to the frequency with which soldiers are away from home compared to the peak of the Global War on Terrorism.

That time away from home made more sense to soldiers a decade ago when the Army was fighting a war on two fronts and slowly building up a presence in Africa. The burden of war is expected and sometimes welcomed with glee, especially from front-line units. But that rapid pace has gotten only more extreme. On paper, soldiers seemingly have a similar, if not higher, rate of deployment now as during the height of the Global War on Terror.

This month, the Army has some 120,000 soldiers deployed abroad, according to internal service data reviewed by Military.com.

For comparison, the entire Department of Defense, encompassing all military branches, had an all-time high of 187,900 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq when those conflicts peaked in 2008, according to congressional data. But that number was short-lived and dipped fast after the conflict in Iraq died down and again after the passing of the surge in Afghanistan.

The 2008 data also refers to a time when the Army was roughly 70,000 soldiers larger. Right now, a smaller Army is taking on a mission load loosely equivalent to the entire military in the late 2000s and early 2010s.