Little Boys and their Big Toys
Even the vast majority of Republicans, whether politicians or ordinary citizens, think Signalgate was "infuriating," "mind-boggling," "extremely cavalier,” "egregious," and "a serious problem."
It seems that, in my desire to be fair to Trump, I went a little light on the Signal Chat Scandal yesterday, which I was going to call “Signalgate,” except that I’m tired of everything being called “___gate.” Naturally, of course, it has already gained that title across the internet.
I know I went easy on Team Trump because even their fellow Republicans are more outraged by it than I was. First off, and most important to me, military pilots were outraged by it. While I pointed out that no targeting information was provided in the Signal chat session, I’m sure the pilots would prefer no one knows they are coming in that direction at all. If the Houthis apprehended the discussion, they’d, at least, know, they are about to come under a major attack somewhere. While I’m sure they are expecting that all the time because US attacks inside of Yemen have been happening so often any attack can hardly be surprising, it’s conceivable they might have done something differently if they had accessed the messages and knew air raids were coming in their general direction within two hours.
Men and women who have taken to the air [as pilots] on behalf of the United States expressed bewilderment after the leak of attack plans. “You’re going to kill somebody,” one pilot said.
It was, however, the lack of any sense of responsibility at the top that dismayed military pilots the most:
The intelligence breach was bad enough, current and former fighter pilots said. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s refusal to acknowledge that he should not have disclosed sensitive information about when American fighter pilots would attack sites in Yemen, they said, was even worse.
On that, their view aligns with what I expressed, which was that it was not the details that were shared that were the most important facts in the story; it was the fact that any military operation was being handled on a site like Signal, instead of via secured government servers, as well as how they were trying to cover for themselves.
On air bases, in aircraft carrier “ready rooms” and in communities near military bases this week, the news that senior officials in the Trump administration discussed plans for an impending attack on Signal, a commercial messaging app, angered and bewildered men and women who have taken to the air on behalf of the United States….
Worse, they said, is that going forward, they can no longer be certain that the Pentagon is focused on their safety when they strap into cockpits.
It was almost as if the person running the show was more interested in looking big in front of his colleagues than in maintaining the tightest security.
“The whole point about aviation safety is that you have to have the humility to understand that you are imperfect, because everybody screws up. Everybody makes mistakes,” said Lt. John Gadzinski, a former Navy F-14 pilot who flew combat missions from aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf. “But ultimately, if you can’t admit when you’re wrong, you’re going to kill somebody because your ego is too big.”
As I said yesterday, those involved were acting like frat boys fist bumping each other as they watch their underclassmen get hazed—pretty juvenile in how they handled a military operation. It was not only incredibly sloppy in who got included in the conversation, but apparently even the high cabinet members who were included would not normally be included—and certainly not outside the White House Situation Room.
Details of military operations are usually kept so secret that even the service members taking part in them are “locked down.” That sometimes means they are not allowed to speak to others who do not have a need to know, let alone tell people about the plans, the fighter pilots interviewed said. In aircraft carrier “ready rooms,” where flight squadrons spend their time when they are not in the air, crews burn instructions to destroy them.
“It’s important to understand the degree that OPSEC is involved in every aspect of your life on an aircraft carriers,” said former Navy Capt. Joseph Capalbo, who commanded a carrier air wing and two F/A-18 squadrons, in a reference to operational security. “Red Sea ops are conducted in complete silence — no one is talking on the radio. Because everything can be heard by somebody.”
You can certainly blame the, as I called it, amateurish nature of all of this squarely on Trump. Some of the leaders he selected for top cabinet positions have almost no experience in the area of government they are now overseeing. They’re a bunch of kids in terms of their professional experience in the area they govern because they have almost none.
For example, the man at the center of the story: The Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, today hugely under fire by his own side, worked in defense at the level of a National Guard infantryman! That and his experience as a talking head on Fox News seem to be his main credentials. He has never worked in military command at all!
Tulsi Gabbard, as Director of National Intelligence, has zero direct experiencing in intelligence-gathering operations, not even during her time in the military. As a member of the House Armed Services Committee she did exercise intelligence oversight. So, while not running any operations, she had some familiarity with intelligence gathering.
As a decorated lieutenant colonel, she had a lot more direct military leadership experience than Hegseth; so, how did he get picked above her to run the largest, most-powerful military on earth? She also would fit Trump’s campaign promise of keeping the military out of any roles not necessary for US security; whereas, Hegseth is the kind of guy who picks fights in a bar just to show off how tough he thinks he is.
In spite of having no time running intel ops, Gabbard still should have realized she shouldn’t be chatting about this kind of info on Signal, but that didn’t occur to her. We should be glad they weren’t openly discussing it on Facebook, too. Still, she is far more qualified than Hegseth.
Trump wanted loyalty, but when you put junior leaguers like Hegseth with practically zero experience in top positions, you are bound to end up with major errors.
Cmdr. Parker Kuldau, a former Navy F/A-18 pilot, called Mr. Hegseth’s disclosures, and subsequent response to them, “infuriating.”
“It’s so beyond what I would expect from anyone in the military,” said Commander Kuldau, who also flew combat missions in the Middle East. “The idea that the secretary of defense, who should know better, has done this, is just mind-boggling.”
The fact that they didn’t own their mistake but tried to play semantics games with whether or not it was really a “war plan” or an “attack plan,” as if that makes a hill of beans of difference, was even more childish, and, as stated above, it leaves people in the military wondering if they take what they did seriously enough. If not, something like it will, as Lt. John Gadzinski said, happen again, and our own soldiers will get killed.
A former Navy F/A-18 squadron commander also said that pilots flying combat missions would have considered the contents of Mr. Hegseth’s text classified information. Revealing the details in text was “extremely cavalier,” the former pilot said.
Republicans strafe Hegseth and his commandoes
Evidence that I should have been harder on this leadership team comes, not just from many in the military, but from all the friendly fire they are taking from their fellow Republican politicians, which isn’t so friendly.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is under close scrutiny as Republican lawmakers criticize his handling of sensitive military information in a group chat with other administration officials that inadvertently included a journalist….
“I think they should make sure it never happens again. I wish they’d tell us, ‘It will never happen again.’ It’s the first strike in the early stages of an administration,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “Don’t let it ever happen again.”
“I don’t know how many strikes you get. In baseball, you get three. Maybe this is worth two,” he added….
GOP senators are questioning Hegseth’s judgment in the whole affair….
They’re scratching their heads over his decision to divulge sensitive details about when attack fighter jets would launch and when strike drones would reach their targets on a commercial app, which was then accessed by at least two recipients’ private phones.
If that had been Hillary sharing emails on her personal devices, Republican voters would be going ballistic. Let’s hope they are now.
And they’re wondering about Hegseth’s response to reporters’ questions, specifically his adamant denial that “nobody’s texting war plans” after a National Security Council spokesperson had confirmed the chat group’s reported texts appeared to be “authentic.”
“The worst part of it is Hegseth saying himself, ‘This didn’t really happen.’ Why don’t you just admit it?” one Republican senator remarked.
That would be the mature military response.
Even Republican members of the press aren’t having it:
Hegseth’s defiant insistence on a tarmac in Hawaii on Monday that he didn’t text any war plans provoked eye rolls from prominent commentators such as Fox News’s Brit Hume, who reposted a video of Hegseth’s comments on the social platform X and wrote: “Oh for God’s sake….”
Hume on Wednesday criticized the administration for “making a mess” of responding to the scandal by getting “bogged down in a dispute over whether the details of Yemen bombing raids were a war plan and whether those details were, or should have been, classified.”
Republican senators said privately they couldn’t imagine Hegseth’s predecessors, such as former secretaries of Defense Robert Gates and Jim Mattis, making similar mistakes.
There is no doubt they would have never made such an amateurish error in judgment.
And while White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday sought to draw a distinction between “war plans” and “attack plans” in criticizing The Atlantic’s reporting, Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) told reporters that the information, however it might be described, should have been classified….
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said Hegseth and other senior Trump officials need to acknowledge they made a serious mistake.
“I think the important thing here is: These guys, they made a mistake. They know it. They should own it and fix it so it never happens again,” Thune told reporters Wednesday.
Mitch McConnell, the chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, argued when Hegseth’s appointment was being reviewed for confirmation by the senate that Hegseth was not ready for the “massive and solemn responsibility” of managing 3 million military civilian personnel and an annual budget of $1 trillion. Of course not. In terms of military leadership experience, it was always beyond obvious that he is a mere boy.
“Mere desire to be a ‘change agent’ is not enough to fill these shoes,” McConnell warned. “Mr. Hegseth has failed, as yet, to demonstrate that he will pass the test. But as he assumes office, the consequences of failure are as high as they have ever been….”
Collins [Republican senator from Maine], the chair of the Appropriations Committee and a senior member of the Intelligence panel, called the discussion of sensitive details on a commercial app “egregious.”
“The egregious actor here is Hegseth,” said one former senior intelligence official. “He’s in the bullseye now because he puts all this out on a Signal chat.”
Republicans also lay ground fire
Several other Republican senators are quoted in today’s story, criticizing how this was handled, but it is not just the politicians who are riled by the cavalier sloppiness, it’s also the rank-and-file Republican voters at ground level.
Three out of four Americans — including 60% of Republicans — say the Trump administration's use of a Signal group chat to discuss military strikes is a serious problem, according to the first poll out on the national security breach.
When you claim you’re going to move the government back to transparency, having everyone deny how sloppy their actions were as soon as they are caught red-handed in an error of judgment, even if not criminal and even if no harm resulted, hardly lives up to your words. Hiding behind semantics about what kind of operation it was or dodging about whether the information was classified (when perhaps NOT being classified is also part of the problem, as some leaders asked why it wasn’t) or telling congress you’re not going to answer basic questions about what the texts said even as you are telling them nothing was classified hardly looks like integrity. As I asked yesterday: If you’re saying none of this was classified, why don’t you share every word with congress, especially now that the operation is over? You can’t have it both ways.
74% of Americans say the group chat that discussed U.S. strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen was a very (53%) or somewhat (21%) serious problem, according to the YouGov online survey of 5,976 U.S. adults conducted this week….
Over a quarter (28%) of Republicans polled said it was a "very serious" problem. Just 13% of Americans say the situation was not very serious or not at all serious.
Pikers.
It looks like Trump may need to put older children in the playpen—people seasoned with years of experience to know you don’t talk on platforms that are not much less public nor much less secure than Facebook about current active military operations—people who are adult enough to own their mistakes, rather than waffle around them like school kids in the principal’s office.
“It is safe to say that anybody in uniform would be court-martialed for this,” a defense official told CNN. “My most junior analysts know not to do this.”
Current and former officials said the rocky start underscores both Hegseth’s inexperience and his freewheeling approach to leadership. Many of his orders are verbal and based on gut instinct rather than a deliberative, multi-layered process, people familiar with his methods said.
“He’s a TV personality,” one of the sources said. “[A general officer] makes a recommendation, and he’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah, go do it.’ [Former Defense Secretary] Lloyd Austin would never be like, ‘Yeah, yeah, go do it.’ He’d be like, ‘We’ll take it under consideration.’”
I think frat-boy Hegseth wanted to brag to his colleagues about what he was doing. He was so excited to share the glory of his big toys at work that he didn’t even pause to think about operational security:
Several DoD officials told CNN that Hegseth seems more preoccupied with appearances than with substance—wanting to appear more “lethal” than his predecessor and pulling resources from elsewhere in DoD to achieve that image.
He certainly likes to do a lot of chest pounding:
“Your job is to make sure that it’s lethality, lethality, lethality,” Hegseth told reporters late last year. “Everything else is gone, everything else that distracts from that shouldn’t be happening.”
As for the Signal chat, Hegseth has insisted that nothing classified was shared over text, but four people familiar with the matter told CNN that the information Hegseth disclosed on the Houthi group chat was classified, despite the administration’s claims to the contrary. One of the people said they saw documents sent within DoD about the operation, which were marked classified and included the same information Hegseth disclosed in the Signal chat about specific weapons platforms and timing.
Hegseth could have declassified the information himself, but he has not said that he did. It’s also unclear why information about an imminent or ongoing operation would be declassified before it was successfully completed.
Ah, well, what can you expect? Trump and classified documents have always had a loose relationship anyway, so the children are learning from their father. (You know, things like keeping “top secret” documents in a locked storage closet that the cleaning people have access to or stored in an unlocked bathroom. No biggie!
This is what the public gets when they excuse behavior like that—more of it.