Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.
Abraham Lincoln
Oh dear, oh dear…it goes from horrifically bad to even worse for our esteemed Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth who despite his lofty title and position seems positively incapable of coming up with a credible defence to his part in the utterly appalling lack of operational security that I’ve ever seen.
Here’s the tweet plucked straight from the horse’s derrière where his head seems to be that has aged just so, so well…
And in fairness, if you look at his particular contribution to this Charlie-Foxtrot on steroids, most of his assertions in the first paragraph are true.
However, there is no delicate way to put it than his statement that there were no locations or targets or classified information disclosed is utter and complete BULLSHIT and anyone with even a modicum of understanding of the military assets available to the United States and a willingness to spend about a minute on Google can prove that there was plenty of actionable intelligence in this one tweet alone that the bad guys would have dearly loved to have ahead of the attack being described.
The location is plainly obvious in the timeline at 1144 EDT when he tells everyone that CENTCOM (the US Central Command) is GO for mission launch.
Do I even have to point out that anyone that has been paying attention for the past 42 years and change knows exactly what CENTCOM’s area of responsibility is since the command was stood up on 1 Jan 1983?
You’d have to really been asleep at the switch or living in a very isolated cave to not know where CENTCOM has had a starring role in most of the military action over these past few decades!
The targets are equally obvious when you consider the package of lethality that was deployed to really ruin the terrorists’ day.
The key bits of information are the type of aircraft (F/A-18 Super Hornets) which typically carry precision guided bombs when used in their attack role as well as the firing of Tomahawk missiles which are used against buildings and other hardened targets.
Those two bits of information tell anyone who has seen Top Gun: Maverick all they need know about who is being ordered to carry out this attack plan…the United States Navy. And if that wasn’t crystal clear to even the most thick of the participants in the chat, he flat out tells everyone that Tomahawks are sea-launched.
Duh.
F/A-18s and Tomahawk missiles in an attack from the sea…the only thing capable of pulling that off is a US Navy carrier strike group.
A casual scan of the news for the past few months tells anyone that the most likely recipients of death from above are the Houthi terrorists that have been menacing shipping and air traffic in and around the Red Sea and Yemen at the south-western end of the Arabian peninsula and if anyone was going to be getting the smackdown of all smackdowns, it was most likely them.
Hmmm…do we have any carrier strike groups in the neighbourhood?
Oh, lookee here…there’s CVN-75, USS Harry S Truman in the Red Sea who most certainly can make the buck stop with the Houthis who have been taking potshots at the carrier and its escorts as well as any shipping considered allied with Israel multiple times in recent history and had their last bit of karmic retribution back in January of 2024.
I don’t know about you but I’m thinking that if Truman was going hunting for terrorists who embody the concept of stupid is as stupid does (maybe they ought to rename themselves the Forest Gump Terrorist BrigadeTM), the Houthis are the odds-on favourites. 🙂
I’m sure their benefactors in Tehran and Moscow would have been very interested knowing their proxy terrorists in the Arabian peninsula were about to explain their misdeeds to Allah. Having a participant in the chat physically in Moscow where US nationals generally and especially government operatives can’t move five metres without being subjected to very sophisticated electronic surveillance, it’s probably just dumb luck that SVR didn’t put the pieces together in time to save their Iranian-backed bad guys in the Arabian peninsula.
Especially since we’ve found out that many of the participants in the chat are using devices, accounts, and passwords that have already been compromised and are much easier to hack when the bad guys know that kind of information. And Russian hackers are amongst the best in the world, especially those in the employ of Vladimir Putin’s government.
Even though Harry had a bit of bother with a collision in the starboard quarter, they were still more than capable of carrying out the task assigned to them with their boatload of F/A-18 E/F Super Hornets and the USS Gettysburg (CG-64) guided-missile cruiser or any of the Arleigh Burke Class tin cans (destroyers) in the strike group (USS Stout (DDG-55), USS Jason Dunham (DDG-109), and USS The Sullivans (DDG-68)) could serve up the helpings of Tomahawks required.
I don’t claim to be a military expert but as a permanent member of the US Naval Institute who was interested in the details of naval operations thanks to a stepfather who at one time harboured ideas of serving on nuclear submarines until his excessive height made the idea of him wandering round a Los Angeles-class attack boat without suffering multiple concussions per day utterly ludicrous, all of these details are not hard to put together from publicly available sources including the USNI’s website.
But it is a certainty that a detailed timeline of an (ahem) “attack plan” as opposed to what the journalist called a “war plan” would still be very sensitive whilst the operation was in progress or would be greenlit in the near future and everyone in that chat (even the journalist) knew these were things you just don’t discuss in an insecure forum much less with an extra “guest” watching the chat in real-time.
I’ll give Jeffery Goldberg massive props for having some huge cojones for publishing the relevant bits of the chat after he was slandered multiple times by administration officials who were in the chat as well as the President and his truly hilarious press secretary Tokyo Karoline…all of whom fell over themselves doubling down that there were no classified information in the chat.
Oh, really?
Our government regularly classifies inane and banal information much less important than the details of an approved military action whilst it’s occurring. But if Pete Hegseth giving the game completely away in his own timeline wasn’t enough of a breach of OPSEC, these two additional screenshots most certainly were highly sensitive and shouldn’t have been disclosed in an unsecure comms facility.
Here’s a in situ bomb damage assessment (BDA) from the National Security Advisor who was dumb enough to add Goldberg to the chat in the first place.
I’m sure our adversaries would love to know how the methods and means as to how he knew those details of the attack and are moving assets to figure that out and then the CIA director also mentions that Israel is of a mind to strike Houthi targets (hardly surprising or unknown to the rest of the world but I’m sure his contacts in the Israeli government were horrified that he’d be outing them in such a way in an insecure forum).
OK…play time is over and it’s time to have a real heart-to-heart here.
The Secretary of Defence and others are darned lucky that the journalist in this chat was responsible enough to keep his trap shut until after the bombs had fallen and our brave sailors who executed this retribution upon the Houthis were safely back aboard ship to ready themselves for the next mission.
Making that solemn trip to Dover AFB to receive flag-draped coffins is a trip no one ever wants to make and it would be orders of magnitude more hideous if it was your lack of operational security and discretion that caused their lives to be lost.
You got lucky, Mr Secretary. You and all of the others in that chat who should have known better than to ever discuss these sorts of operations outside of the Situation Room or a SCIF.
They may not be convenient but then neither is having to console the families of military personnel your carelessness or the carelessness of others (or both) got killed.
Maybe it’s time for a @SecDef who has… Led in combat. Been on patrol for days. Pulled a trigger. Heard bullets whiz by. Called in close air support. Led medevacs. Dodged IEDs.
Secretary of Defence nominee Pete Hegseth
I chose you because you’re the guy that’s gonna put the warfighters first. We haven’t had that. We need a guy that’s kicked down doors and understands the consequences of war.
Quote attributed to President-Elect Trump by Secretary of Defence nominee Pete Hegseth
I have no reason to doubt your sincerity here and I want to believe that was the mindset in which you approached the job once confirmed.
A SecDef should always put the warfighters first in that job.
A SecDef should also recognise when they need to hold themselves accountable to an even higher standard than that expected of anyone who would have disclosed the same sort of information in an insecure forum that put the lives of our fighting men and women at unnecessary risk.
Anyone who rose to the rank of Major should have the honesty and integrity to admit that had anyone else done the same exact thing, the best they could hope for was being quietly cashiered out of the service without a dishonourable discharge or court martial proceedings and strict instructions to never speak of this incident again lest they find themselves in Ft Leavenworth or Guantanamo Bay to rot for the rest of their lives.
They would lose any security clearances they had and really any hope of getting another one in the future as some “mistakes” are just too egregious to ignore.
A SecDef who has done these things and who truly believes in putting “warfighters first” to say nothing of the oaths of office that were taken would do the honourable thing and tender a resignation and not allow it to be refused.
In fairness, everyone in that chat really needs to hand in their security clearances and walk out the door. National Security Advisor Waltz should go for breathtaking stupidity in inviting the journalist to such a discussion and Gabbard and Ratcliffe need to go for an unbelievable lapse in judgment and then lying under oath about it to Congress.
The harsh reality is this seems unlikely with all of the doubling-down and finger pointing, the silence of Republicans in Congress who fear Musk buying their seat for their opponent, and a President who never served in the military and doesn’t get the honour and discipline of the service and who clearly believes himself unaccountable to anything or anyone seems inclined to just chalk it up to a “mistake” and hope that everything blows over.
This is the kind of scandal that never does blow over without heads rolling. The administration seems hell bent on blaming the journalist for receiving classified information but good luck actually winning a prosecution on that count. Trust me, no one wants this to ever end up in a court room…especially the national security apparatus and the President.
At least show you could show some dignity and realise that your position is irrevocably compromised and that no defence minister or foreign government official can ever trust you to maintain security and confidentiality in communications ever again.
Do the right thing now before our brave warfighters pay the ultimate price for the hubris of you and your colleagues in this sorry affair.