Military members rage over Trump team's handling of war plans

Members of the armed forces are expressing outrage about the Trump administration’s handling of the leak of war plans on the Signal chat app.

The administration has spent the last few days trying to get past the controversy after a reporter for The Atlantic was added to a chat with senior administration officials, most notably Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, discussing the details of a military strike on the Houthi militia.

“We intentionally don’t share plans with people who don’t need to know,” a current Navy F/A-18 pilot told The New York Times in a Friday story. Hegseth posted the flight schedule for F/A-18 jets in the chat room.

The pilot, who was granted anonymity, told the outlet, “You don’t share what time we’re supposed to show up over a target. You don’t want to telegraph that we’re about to show up on someone’s doorstep; that’s putting your crew at risk.”

Maj. Anthony Bourke, a former Air Force fighter pilot, told the Times, “When you disclose operational security, people can get killed.”

Some officials are now revealing that the chat may have also damaged the ability of the U.S. military to gather intelligence on the Houthis, a terrorist organization that has been a key player in Yemen’s civil war.

In the chat, CIA Director John Ratcliffe revealed that his agency is involved in work to “identify better starting points for coverage on Houthi leadership.”

According to current and former intelligence officials that CNN spoke to, Ratcliffe’s post using the terminology “starting points” has now informed the Houthi that the CIA is using techniques like overhead spy surveillance against them. As a result, the group may change their pattern of behavior—making it more difficult to disrupt their operations.

One official noted that while the Signal app is more secure than standard messaging apps, it is not sanctioned for use with sensitive data, as the Trump team did.

“There are ways to effectively use Signal for alignment, but you just can’t cross that line of classified data for obvious reasons,” a current official told CNN.

At the same time that the Trump team has been downplaying the seriousness of adding Goldberg to the chat and the security violations affiliated with the decision, they are punishing a federal worker for doing the same thing.

NBC News reports that a federal worker at the Department of Homeland Security was put on administrative leave after she sent classified details of an upcoming Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation to a journalist. The punishment raises new questions of a double standard.

Rank and file military officers are usually punished for the sort of behavior that Hegseth and company engaged in.

“If I were a sergeant or a captain and I called up the Washington Post and I worked in the Pentagon in the J2  [intelligence branch] or the J3 [operations branch] and I said ‘hey I got a hot tip for you, we’re gonna attack the Houthis,’ Oh, I’d be court-martialed for that,” said Josh Kastenburg, a former Air Force lawyer and judge told Task and Purpose.

Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Rachel VanLandingham told the outlet, “If this was someone on active duty, their career would be completely over and they would be facing jail time most likely just because of the nature of this, of using the inappropriate system, never mind the fact that it demonstrates recklessness.”

The episode has validated the concerns of millions of Americans who voted against Trump becoming president in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

In an op-ed published in The New York Times on Friday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who came under enormous fire from the right and the mainstream media for a private email server, characterized Hegseth and company as “dumb” for what they did.

“It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity,” Clinton wrote. “What’s much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.”