iscover
As high-level talks to plan a US strike on Houthi rebels in Yemen went public in the most disastrous way this week, one question looms large – are any adults actually in charge of the United States right now?
Back in January – which seems like a century ago in the current firestorm of a news cycle – newly minted Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, announced the formation of a task force to perform a merit-based review of the United States military.
“The Department of Defense has an obligation to the American public to ensure their sons and daughters serve under the best leadership we can provide them,” Hegseth said.
“Doing so is a national security imperative. A foundational tenet of the DoD must always be that the most qualified individuals are placed in positions of responsibility in accordance with merit-based, colour-blind policies.”
Less than two months later, Hegseth and his cabal of fellow Trump cronies have been found wanting in nearly every sense, following revelations that a prominent American journalist had somehow been added to a sensitive, high-level chat group discussing the bombing of Houthi targets in Yemen.
And as if that weren’t bad enough – even now no one either knows or is admitting to knowing how it occurred – the planning session was taking place on the Signal messaging platform. Signal, as some Republicans have pointed out, was, in fact, approved by the Biden administration for messaging in 2023, but even then, a Defence Department official clearly stated that the messaging app and others like it were not to be used to share anything sensitive.
“Unmanaged ‘messaging apps’, including any app with a chat feature, regardless of the primary function, are NOT authorised to access, transmit, process non-public DoD information. This includes but is not limited to messaging, gaming, and social media apps. (i.e., iMessage, WhatsApps, Signal),” the October 2023 memo said.
Matthew Wilson, executive chairman and co-founder of Australian-owned digital security firm Penten, told Defence Connect that governments are right to place restrictions on the use of apps such as Signal.
“Governments explicitly forbid sharing classified information on consumer apps like Signal – and with good reason,” Wilson said.
“No matter how secure these consumer apps may appear, they’re not built or operated to government standards for classified information: there’s no control, no audit and no assurance.”
If Hegseth is looking to trim the meritless fat from the US military, perhaps his head should be the first to roll.
How did we get here?
In case you’ve been under a rock for the last few days, here are the broad strokes.
On 11 March, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic magazine, received a connection request on Signal from one Michael Waltz, Donald Trump’s national security adviser – Goldberg did not consider this unusual, and was expecting to talk with Waltz, possibly on background, regarding Ukraine or some other global hotspot.
Except nothing happened for two days, when Goldberg was added to a chat called “Houthi PC small group”.
What followed was a detailed discussion of military strikes against targets in Yemen, discussed by what is known as a Principles Committee – a selection of senior officials involved in the highest levels of national security. As Goldberg noted in his March 24 exposé, “I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.”
In total, there were 14 people added to the chat, including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Secretary of State Marc Rubio, and more.
Over the following days, the “committee” discussed trade policy, the timing of the strikes, how it might play to the public, and the potential OPSEC, or operational security, surrounding the committee’s deliberations.
Security that was, despite Hegseth’s claims otherwise, not at all “100 per cent”.
At first, Goldberg suspected the whole chat must be a hoax, or an attempt at disseminating disinformation to the media. So he waited and watched the news. When the bombs started dropping, it was at exactly the time that Hegseth had said they would. A flurry of congratulations and celebratory emojis followed, and Goldberg began to realise that he had been party to high-level military planning discussions that led to the deaths of 53 people.
Once the chat appeared to wind up, Goldberg left the channel and reached out to those involved for confirmation that senior Trump officials were in fact using Signal for war-planning. On 24 March, a spokesperson for the National Security Council (NSC) confirmed that is exactly what had occurred.
“This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” the spokesperson told Goldberg.
“The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security.”
‘Deep and thoughtful policy coordination’
There is a lot to unpack in that NSC confirmation, particularly the casual language about how the conversation “appears” legitimate, and the only issue with it all playing out on Signal being the fact that someone inadvertently added.
But calling the conversation “deep and thoughtful” takes the cake, as does the claim that the conversation did not present any threat.
Hegseth himself walked the chat group through detailed timings of the attacks, the target packages, and even the weapon systems that would be deployed. This is the kind of information that any actor wishing to counter the operations and endanger the lives of American servicemen and women could easily take advantage of.
Even worse, depending on how you look at it, was the gloating over what had happened during the strike. Vance – who, at least, was initially concerned that that chat was even happening in this format – eventually let that slide in favour of gloating over collateral damage.
“The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed,” Waltz said in the wake of the attack.
“Excellent,” Vance replied.
Lost in this cavalcade of damaging nonchalance for security measures and far less than “deep and thoughtful policy coordination,” is the fact that Signal may have been chosen because it can be set to disappear messages, either almost immediately or within a set amount of time. Using Signal in such a manner suggests that at least some of the parties involved wanted exactly that as an outcome.
That is, to hide their deliberations on when and how to attack another nation from outside scrutiny for all time.
And they were still too dumb to actually make it stick. These should be the smartest people in the (chat) room, the best and brightest. But instead, we end up with a National Security Coordinator who somehow added a hated journalist to his frat party combat chat, a Director of National Intelligence who didn’t even notice an outsider was observing the conversation, and a Secretary of Defense happy to share vital mission planning over a medium that even JD Vance thought was problematic.
There is so much more to talk about, from the rabid attacks against a journalist who did what any self-respecting scribe (this one included) would do, to the egregious claims that there was nothing confidential discussed, or that it could never have led to real harm if leaked to the wrong persons.
Each day, new revelations drop, and with each day, it appears more likely those involved will somehow get away with it.
But when you look at the core of the matter, the sheer hubris of those involved, one thing is clear – Hegseth and all of those involved in this farce are simply not fit for the responsibility they now hold.
If merit means anything, Hegseth knows what he should do – resign.
