The Trump Administration’s Use of Signal Puts Service Members at Risk
’Operational security’ is about reducing the danger for those in uniform.
AS A FORMER SOLDIER, I’d ask that no American believe the Signal chat scandal wasn’t a big deal. It was a very big deal, and we shouldn’t move on without accountability. The safety of our military service members—who will certainly execute more missions like the one described in the chat—the trust of the families who wait for their loved ones to return safely, the need to safeguard intelligence, and the demands of allies who depend on us require that we conduct a valid after-action review, discipline those who violated standards, and make sure something like this never happens again. That’s because the Signal chat scandal isn’t just a one-time communications issue. It was a shocking display of hubris, arrogance, and carelessness.
Feelings of self-satisfied superiority are a perennial problem in warfare, from Goliath to Pyrrhus to Napoleon to Hitler and even to many American commanders and policymakers during the Global War on Terror. These failures—ancient and modern—share the same root: hubris mistaken for leadership, power exercised without humility in the name of expedience or ego.
What was revealed in the leaked Signal messages, first reported by Jeffrey Goldberg, was not just cynical political posturing and sophomoric military tactical reporting by the secretary of defense. It was encrypted arrogance. The Signal app, while more secure than standard civilian text messaging, is not invincible, and it should never be used to discuss sensitive government information. Most U.S. intelligence officials know that the sophisticated signals intelligence (SIGINT) services of Russia, China, Iran, and others are always focused on governmental leaders. The United States also constantly focuses on foreign leaders for the same continuous collection.
While it’s relatively easy for technologically advanced SIGINT capabilities to break encryption and collect valuable information, just the signals themselves allow for the collection of metadata, device associations, timing, and behavioral analysis—all of which is useful for America’s adversaries. It can be used to infer communication patterns, identify contacts, and map sensitive interactions. The belief that encryption found in a publicly used application (that the intelligence community has repeatedly warned against using) is a poor substitute for judgment and a proclamation of “clean OPSEC” or operational security. The belief that the disappearing nature of the messages would shield the users from accountability is wrong, dangerous, and almost certainly a violation of laws concerning government records. Don’t believe anyone that says otherwise.
The U.S. government invests heavily in secure communications infrastructure. When I was a two-star general and a division commander in combat, I knew my enemy’s ability to eavesdrop. To frustrate them, the government provided me with sensitive compartmented information facilities, secure telephones, classified video teleconference links, satellite systems, and a terrific one-soldier communication (or “commo”) team. Sgt. “Smitty” Smith dialed me into subordinate commanders and even once to the NSC itself from the middle of Iraq’s northern desert. He traveled with me everywhere I went, and when needed, he set up the satellite connection in a nanosecond. I was always assured the enemy (and other nearby nations, like Iran, Syria, and Turkey, who were closely monitoring our actions in Iraq) weren’t reading my mail or my tactical orders. None of this was for ceremony; it was because our governmental systems are battle-tested, built for the mission, and secure beyond a publicly available app.
A few years later, when I was a three-star general and commander of U.S. Army forces in Europe, those systems followed me even when I traveled to the various European nations, as I didn’t want them knowing our secrets, either. All this technology, these protocols, this complication and expense protects national secrets. They protect allied operations. And yes, they protect the lives of troops on the ground. I’m confident the senior officials in the “Houthi PC small group” chat—four of whom have military backgrounds and should have known better—had easy access to secure communications at least as advanced as what I had a decade ago. Bypassing those systems to conduct sensitive conversations on a consumer-grade app was reckless, not just with “national security” as a vague concept, but with the lives of service members.
We can’t be sure from public reporting that the information in the “Houthi PC” group chat wasn’t compromised. But luckily, it wasn’t offered to the Houthis before the attacks were carried out. The consequences if it had been range from bad to catastrophic. On the bad end of the scale, there’s the possibility that the targets might have altered their plans and the strike might have failed, requiring another attempt. Every time an F-18 heavily laden with weapons takes off, there’s some risk, so taking multiple attempts to hit the same target multiplies the risk for aviators, shipboard crews, and others of something going wrong. On the catastrophic end—well, while I’m pretty sure the Houthis would be challenged to shoot down an F/A-18, many in the intel community were also pretty sure Mohamed Aidid’s forces couldn’t shoot down Black Hawks before October 1993. There’s a direct link between information security and the physical wellbeing of service members.
The senior officials who used the Signal app to pass information are sending a message—to our adversaries, to our allies, to our own commanders in the military, and to the American people—that discipline and accountability in operational security is optional for them. And if that message gets absorbed by those in uniform, or those who serve beside them in allied capitals, we lose more than credibility. We lose cohesion. We lose trust. And we potentially fail in execution and even lose lives. For those who say “well,the mission was a success,” I would respond that forces can only get lucky and avoid detection so many times when the enemy is constantly collecting on them.
Since the initial reporting on the administration’s use of Signal, the Wall Street Journal has reported on the existence of other Signal chats for other policy areas. Signal’s disappearing message feature all but guarantees that more disturbing, more consequential conversations may have already evaporated without a trace. That’s not operational security. That’s intentional opacity. It was good that a judge blocked any further deletions from those who participated, but we don’t know what has already been deleted.
The Greek dramatists and most military historians would recognize this moment: a chorus warning of limits, a protagonist who barrels forward, blind to consequence and certain of invincibility. But this isn’t a stage. It’s a government. So far, the actors get to keep their roles despite their shocking performances.
But some of the people in the audience have family in harm’s way. They’re praying for the safety of their loved ones and trying to make sense of what this country asks of them.
Leadership isn’t about cleverness in private threads. It isn’t about proximity to power or mastery of a so-called “secure app.” It’s about responsibility—particularly when lives are on the line. And when encryption becomes a tool not for security, but for scheming, that is not innovation. That is failure.
The military has rules and laws and hierarchy and a chain of command. But undergirding it all is trust—trust that higher-ups are competent, that everyone’s doing their job, that the whole system works, and that friends are friends and enemies are enemies. And trust is gained in drops but lost in buckets.
 | A guest post by
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