What’s wrong and right with the world, heavy-sighing edition.
J.E. Dyer, a retired Naval Intelligence officer, blogs as The Optimistic Conservative, Mar 27, 2025
Update going to post. As of Wednesday this is starting to settle out a little. The entire text message chain has been released, and boy, is it a nothingburger. At the end of the original article text, I’ve appended some comments from another forum on why it’s a nothingburger. For those who want the short version, the updates at the top, and the concluding comments, may do the trick. (For perspective, I do recommend not missing the ”Key takeaway” section titled with a break in bold letters. And sorry about any redundancies. It’s either get this up as-is, or not, at this point.)
At the outset, an executive summary.
First, the question about whether things were classified and/or could have damaged operational security is poorly framed and poorly understood.
Here, though, is the clear-cut point about the situation; then we’ll touch on the classification and OPSEC issues.
The clear-cut is that this text exchange should have been in a secure forum approved for national security topics
It did NOT have to be on a government-enterprise, classified system with a log trail the size of Moby Dick. There’s more discussion in the original text below of why the NSC Principals probably used Signal.
My bottom line: there needs to be a convenient, low-overhead, formally approved option for NSC Principals chat groups to evanesce rapidly, as this one did. The White House IT folks, NSC, and DOD should make that happen. It could be done inside two weeks. It’s one sign-off away, and its nature should not be to strap the Principals down and stuff them under a comms regime “overseen” by mid-level NSC staffers, but to bring the capability to the Principals, who can decide how much if any access they want mid-level staffers to have. The Principals’ comms should be preserved as federal records, of course, and contracting that with an appropriate cloud service would be a dandy solution.
Trump can approve this. It involves letting a contract and as federal expenditures go would be vending machine snack money.
Congressional Republicans could lead the pack on growing up and out of this metastasizing temper tantrum by waving off all the nonsense and asking Wiles, Waltz, and Hegseth what their timeline is for getting that done.
As to classification and OPSEC, they’re two different things. Classification is about the enduring likelihood of national security implications from types of information. OPSEC is about the factors in specific situations.
The classification of the texts in question centers on the Hegseth text with the timeline and the Waltz texts during the strikes with (very) light particulars on one of the targets. My perspective on this comes from having been on the classifying end of exactly – and I mean exactly – this type of information, on the aircraft carrier, in the secure spaces where this information was exchanged and processed before, during, and after air strikes. I’m not going to name a classification, but it would have been marked on the material at the time it was generated, and it would have been, shall we say, greater than zero but nothing close to the nutty “TS/SCI” guesses people have been throwing around.
That said, let’s get thinking juices flowing by pointing out that the minute planes from USS Harry S Truman were off the deck and on civilian sector radar screens, the basic facts of their flight activity were no longer classifiable. Any ATC on the Red Sea could see and identify them. We can assume the Houthis can see them too. The Red Sea is a small operating space.
And as that starts to bleed over into the significance of situational OPSEC factors, the Houthi-ness of the Houthis kicks in. They’re terrorists with Iranian-made knock-off systems, not the Chinese military with vast territories to monitor, challenging us to our limits with hypersonic antiship ballistic missiles and hybrid cyber warfare.
One slice into this is that, being terrorist militants with small territory to rove over and a tight command circle, the Houthis had no need to read Mike Waltz’s text messages to figure out that sources and methods had been at work setting up the attack on one of their leaders, whose demise they would have been very quickly aware of. They would have also had a very good idea which sources and methods were involved. The Houthis, unlike pundits in the U.S., have been experiencing our strikes directly for some time. They’ve learned a lot.
Another slice is the question of whether they’d gain much from knowing what time our aircraft will take off from the carrier. (I’ll just mention here that it doesn’t matter if they’re spotted a “time on target” time-hack, because they can add, multiply, and divide as well as we can. The en route distance is short, and the concentration of target area is geographically tight. They’re going to come up with accurate predictions on their own. They probably carry rule-of-thumb numbers in their heads by now.)
The answer to the second-slice question is mostly no. It’s a pretty clear-cut no, if the issue is trying to shoot down or at least shoot at our approaching manned strike aircraft. The range of their radars and antiair weapons doesn’t get any longer from earlier knowledge that a strike is to be launched. Nor does the ability of their antiair weapons to successfully engage our jet fighters. What they need to even attempt to hit an F/A-18E/F strike-fighter is a capability they either have or don’t: a relative limitation of their weapon systems that doesn’t change with earlier alertment.
This is true even with the addition of newer weapons to the Houthis’ arsenal, such as the “358” loitering antiair missile made by Iran, and known to be in the Houthi inventory since at least 2023. (Other antiair weapons the Houthis are known to have are updated versions of the former-Soviet SA-2 “Gammon” and the SA-6 “Gainful,” a shorter-range but younger – though still pretty old – and more agile missile than the SA-2.)
Interesting things have been happening with the Houthis’ antiair effort, including an attempt to hit an F-16C and an MQ-9 Reaper in February 2025. The F-16 strike-fighter was probably targeted with an SA-6 – CENTCOM hasn’t specified; the MQ-9 may have been targeted by the 358 “Saqr” missile, which already has some MQ-9 shootdowns to its credit. (The 358 is surface-launched from a rail launcher and levels out for powered flight after the initial rocket phase. It can operate up to some 30,000 feet, but it’s subsonic and easily outmaneuvered by U.S. jet fighters. Drones are the aircraft principally affected by the 358, as they also have limited maneuverability and fly without counter-air protection from fighters. Manned supporting aircraft for a strike package, including reconnaissance and refueling aircraft, would be afforded counter-air-defense protection when they’re in range of antiair threats.)
What’s important to understand about even the evolving air defense conditions in Yemen is that the U.S. forces operating in their vicinity are not passive or unalerted during their missions. Our assets “see” them take off, as they “see” us. Regardless of the length of prior warning, it’s when the weapon systems go into motion that things start to happen. But no one is ever under the impression that nothing is likely to happen. Just the opposite, in fact: everyone assumes something will happen.
The systems’ limitations are still the decisive factor, given the hard limit that, for example, the Houthis can’t track one of our moving aircraft until it starts moving. The Houthis may know an hour beforehand what time it will take off. But they have a good idea when that will be anyway, from watching our activities for months, and the tracking still can’t start, and build up to targeting-quality information, until the U.S. aircraft becomes a moving object on a Houthi screen.
But in the particular context of the combat problem – Houthis and their weapon systems and previous months of carrier air wing operations among them – the specifics in Hegseth’s pre-strike text message weren’t operational details that would make a difference to Houthi preparedness. Within its limits, it’s already high and knowledgeable.
I note that if the Houthis learned something significant from the Signal exchange by the NSC Principals, it would have been that this was to be a major series of attacks. Hegseth’s text wasn’t the bell-ringer for that, in the contents of the chat group. It was all the information put together, starting with the initial assembly of the group, its name, and who was in it. Regarding that form of alertment, there’s a limit to what the Houthis could do with such information, compared to what Russia or China could do. And President Trump told the Houthis less than an hour into the opening attack that this would be an extended series of them.
In the interest of moving on, I won’t keep going on for hours talking about the various factors in OPSEC versus standard classification of information. I know others could talk too; rest assured, I’m not ignoring or unaware of the factors I haven’t addressed here.
Pete Hegseth isn’t going to stand around holding seminars on this. What he has done is give public assurances that are basically a hybrid assessment of the factors in the OPSEC equation for the Yemen strikes, and what actually happened with the saga of Jefffrey Goldberg’s Presence in the Signal Group. The latter is, precisely, nothing. Nothing happened, as Goldberg’s adventure in lurking relates to OPSEC for the Yemen strikes.
In different circumstances, something – though frankly not much – could have happened. That’s why I say, once again, that the NSC Principals should be doing this in an approved, secure application for the purpose. Meet the standard, as Hegseth himself would say. But Hegseth is speaking accurately and in good faith to the hysteria. There were no ill effects on OPSEC.
Update on Tuesday 25 March 2025: President Trump told NBC in a phone interview this morning that a National Security Council staffer had included The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in the Signal group where our story unfolded. Rather than expanding on that below, I will simply note that my original draft contained a passage explaining that Mike Waltz himself almost certainly had not been the user who include Goldberg in the group. An assistant authorized to use his account would have been the one to do that.
Original article begins.
Feature image: U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Felix Garza Jr. (Via Wikimedia Commons)
@ Peloni. No, I am not going to cite sources. I spent many hours reading and watching videos outside of the MAGA mental mind trap. I suggest you might do the same. It is not worth my time to retrace my steps. My sense is that nothing I present to you will get through a thick wall.
One last thought: If you really want to help Trump and conservative values, awareness of problems is better than blind loyalty.
@Madeline
You think Russia is sowing discord with the Signal Gate fiasco? To be honest, with all due respect, that sounds almost as silly as the notion that Trump was a Russian asset in the Russia Hoax.
Well, you have yet to explain one of the many ways it is a disaster.
Well, only compared to someone who thinks Russia is using Signal Gate to sow discord in America could I be considered to be a fan of Russia.
It isn’t related to the Signal Chat. Nowhere in that chat was any Israeli Humint discussed, nowhere. So you are making an assumption that the WSJ article is accurate, and then assuming it is miraculously associated with the Signal Chat without any basis for making such a conclusion. So, yes, I do believe it is an unjustified conclusion by you, unless you have something which relates it to the signal chat.
So go ahead and read outside the Republican echo chamber, but you might try to share some facts which support your thesis that it isn’t a nothingburger event. I mean, besides the conclusion that Russia is somehow sowing dissent thru the Signal Chat escapade, rather than it being the same Deep State cabal which put forth the original Russia Hoax, which was also based on non-factual based conclusions outside of the normal discord.
To be honest, you seem to be uninterested in arguing the basis for your conclusion, but I will leave it at this, unless you have something, anything actually, which supports your determined conclusion that this nothingburger is somehow a disaster.
@Peloni. You write: “it should consider the ill effect on Israel from this debacle. It was an Israeli on the ground in Yemen who gave helpful info”
and you go on to say that because it was not included in the article, it is an unjustified comment by me. Huh? I am disputing that it was a nothing burger! I am saying that it was a disaster, in many ways that the article’s author ignores.
I am interested in truth and sane public policy. That means reading outide the Republican echo chamber, as well as in it. A sycophantic presidency is not a strong one. True supporters on conservative values can help by having a broad information base and developing the ability to think independently. iMO.
@peloni. You write: “Why do you believe that Vance’s opinion being different from Trump’s is damaging to the US?”
Because various critics of the Signal mishap say that this is an area of manipulation by our enemies. Think about it. Sowing discord is one of our chief enemies tools. I’m thinking of Russia, but you may not want to look into that, since you seem to be a fan of Russia.
Playing Chess with Death but All’s well that ends well.
from Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” (1957)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_edI_guXyc
– Bill and Ted vs. Death
Parody of scene from Seventh Seal from sequel to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Journey (1989) referred to in the title of this article.
https://youtu.be/8w9YrvJ8368?si=P2sORNSPsp-WVW68
@Madeline
None of this was included in the Signal chat. So your linking this disclosure to the Signal chat is somewhat off target.
The betrayal of Israel’s operatives by sensitive and purposeful leaks from within the Obiden administrations demonstrated the need for operational silo-ing of such details from the US long ago. This, however, has not prevented the Iranians and their proxies from assuming every time a dinner plate falls to the ground that Israel is behind it. So, concerns of Israeli human assets being exposed by the US are not a new matter of concern, even if the Washington Post report turns out to be something more than it carrying water for the US Deep State as they have done for a very long time.
That, however, is not what took place here, unless the low level fellow, not Waltz, who added Goldberg to the chat was in fact a Dem operative. Notably, Dyer accurately predicted that it was not Waltz who added Goldberg to the chat, and this was later confirmed, raising the question of what is the real change you would have Trump make in the wake of the nothingburger Signal chat revelations.
Again, such intelligence issues should not be a matter of politics. If something needs fixing, it should be fixed. More concerning than the lack of revelations in the Signal chat is the continued leaks coming from the Trump administration to support the latest point of insurrection against the Trump MAGA agenda. Or so I would argue.
One more point which should be made in regards to Israpundit’s advocacy on behalf of Israel, since you raised the subject. MAGA has been the most successful and most supportive pro-Israel movement in US history, with Trump as the most successful and most supportive pro-Israel president in US history. What diminishes either of these, serves to harm Israel. When such matters are leveraged without support or substance, as I judge is going on in the Signal Chat Gate, I see it as necessary to challenge it, as was the purpose of posting Dyer’s sober and even handed analysis. Providing such non-partisan analysis is hard to dispute, which is why I posted it. Of course, if you disagree with some portion of Dyer’s arguments, please explain what they might be. As I noted previously, your assertion that this is merely political cover for Trump is not accurate, and if it were, I wouldn’t have posted it.
So, what specific aspect of this article do you find fault, assuming that it is more than just the conclusion of Signal Gate being a nothingburger revelation which heralds the need for reform, as Dyer asserts.
@Madeline
Why do you believe that Vance’s opinion being different from Trump’s is damaging to the US? Vance is the VP, one of the least important positions in the entire executive branch beyond the relative significance that Trump extends to him. To be honest, while I am personally encouraged to read of Trump’s views being unaligned with that of Vance, I do not see the value which might be gained by America’s geopolitical opponents in being aware of this. As seen in what was intended to be a frank and non-public debate, Trump’s opinions are the only opinions which count. So where is the beef (pun intended) in your argument that Trump’s views differing from his VP damaged the US? I would suggest that this revelation is likely more damaging to Vance than to anyone else, but I don’t believe Americans are any less safe due to the public clarity on Vance’s nuanced positions being more closely in line with Carlson than with Trump.
As to why Dyer “goes on to explain it away”, as you suggest, her analysis of the details included in her explanation is what distinguishes honest analysis from political banter, something which you yourself seem to acknowledge is needed here. Indeed, the sober, non-political analysis as supports her conclusion, if you read it, is not only useful, it is necessary to avoid serious debacles which have led to significant disasters over the years. Notably, the use of politically leveraged opinions in place of such analysis has been the basis for such ill fated political debacles which led to the US involvement in the Ukraine coup and later Ukraine civil war, and the even later Ukraine war. It is also what led to the conclusion that the Gaza disengagement would lead to anything other than the ultimate slaughter which it did lead to. Such party-politics analyses as these are why we need the input of such well versed, non-partisan insights of those such as Dyer, whose rational intuition and familiarity with such details which out-rank the content disclosed in the Signal chit-chat are very useful in grasping the nothingburger nature of what was contained therein. Which is of course why I published her analysis on the subject.
In any event, a key takeaway from this article, beyond the nothingburger discussion, can be found in Dyer’s explanation of a very important and effective reform which this nothingburger demonstrated is very much needed. This can be found in the section of the article titled “Key Takeaway”, just above the nitty gritty discussion of the Nothingburger details in the Addenda section. Pursuing such a reform will prevent the next burger from taking place, no matter if it were to be a nothingburger or a somethingburger.
Also, I will add that since this blog supports Israel, it should consider the ill effect on Israel from this debacle. It was an Israeli on the ground in Yemen who gave helpful info and who could have been killed by the leaks, or maybe was killed. Israel is now rightfully reluctant to share more intel with the bumbling US, as are other allies.
From the Wall Street Journal: “Israel provided sensitive intelligence from a human source in Yemen on a key Houthi military operative targeted in an attack described by national security adviser Mike Waltz in an unclassified Signal chat with senior Trump administration officials, two U.S. officials said,” the Journal reported.
A nothing burger? Then why does the writer go on and on trying to explain it away? And how about the policy info leaked out, like Vance’s disagreements with Trump – tasty meat for our enemies.
I am disgusted by Republicans who put party loyalty above the safety of servicemen, the good of our country and how about honesty, integrity and “common sense”? Like owning up to failure.
I voted for Trump 3 times but that doesn’t mean I will eat crap. What are the good little boys who do getting out of it? A pat on the head for belonging to a tribe? Self destructive, party destructive,and country destructive.