Comment: Hegseth isn’t unholding standards he vowed he would

By Patricia Murphy / The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

I feel like I spend all of my time lately beating up on the Trump administration. But as they say in the military, it’s a target-rich environment.

The Trump team’s latest offense is also its most dangerous; a group chat on the encrypted, but unclassified, text messaging app Signal, finalizing the details of an attack on Houthi rebels in Yemen. Included on the text chain were the highest ranking members of the president’s national security team, from Vice President J.D. Vance to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and others.

Unnoticed by the rest of the group, Waltz also accidentally added Jeffrey Goldberg, the top editor at The Atlantic, who read the messages planning the attack in real time and then published some of what he learned Monday under the headline, “The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans.” He thought it was a joke, he wrote, until the bombs started dropping.

The most sensitive information, including the exact day and time of the attack, was shared by Hegseth, along with a text to the vice president about European “freeloading.”

“It’s PATHETIC,” Hegseth wrote.

It’s hard to detail how many parts of this story are disturbing, including the fact that nobody bothered to double check the list of people they were sharing state secrets with. I’ll start with who was not included in the group — the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff nor any senior military adviser. Only Trump’s political appointees were engaged in the Signal debate over who, where and when to strike.

Also worrisome is the fact that every member of the text chain has access to a “SCIF,” a secure information facility, that could have been used for this sensitive war planning. Instead, they texted over Signal, which is best known among its users for permanently deleting messages. Was the plan also documented offline, as the law requires? The leaders involved aren’t saying.

Worst of all, according to multiple former military officers I’ve spoken with, is the danger the leaked information could still pose to American men and women in uniform, as well as the United States itself.

Bobby Jones, a Naval Academy graduate and retired Navy commander from Fayetteville, Ga., runs Veterans for Responsible Leadership. He said veterans have their own group texts about the breach and they aren’t pretty.

“Appalled,” “shocked,” and “disbelief,” are just a few of the reactions that come up.

“I’m on texts with veterans saying, ‘Are you (expletive) kidding me?’” he said. “This kind of information could literally sink a U.S. warship. That’s how serious this is. You’re putting sailors’ lives at risk.”

Jones described using Signal to share sensitive operational details “a blatant and callous disregard for national security.”

“It’s insanity. You’re using the same app your teenagers use to get away with bad stuff,” he said. “I and any other uniformed military officer would be going to Fort Leavenworth.”

I heard broad agreement from other former officers that anyone else in the military on a Signal group chat about an upcoming attack would be relived of their duties.

“Why are people not resigning?” asked Richard Curran-Kelley, a West Point graduate and former Army intelligence officer. Beyond operational details, the Trump team chat also reveals the broader thinking and decision-making process of the highest U.S. national security officials, Curran-Kelley said.

He especially worries that similar deliberations could have happened related to military operations in Ukraine, Gaza, and other hot spots. “We have no idea what was picked up,” he said. “Because if I were going to be collecting electronics intelligence, I’d certainly be up targeting every phone number related to anybody in the administration.”

Other veterans I spoke with were worried about reprisals from the Trump administration against them or their families, so did not speak on the record. They said that Americans are less safe after Hegseth shared his opinions of European allies. Why would any NATO country share their own troop plans with this team? Without our allies sharing data, too, it puts all Americans at greater risk, they said.

Why do we care about all of this in Georgia? For starters, more than 64,000 active duty personnel are stationed in Georgia, spread across the state’s 12 military bases, along with another 15,000 members of the National Guard.

Georgia is also among the top five states for military recruiting. So if you’re raising a family here, there’s a better chance than almost anywhere that you, your children or their friends are serving, or will sign up for duty at some point. The leadership at the Pentagon matters profoundly for all of them, and as of this week, the secretary of defense has proven himself simply unfit to serve.

So far, Hegseth has spent most of his short time in office demanding a return to “high standards” in the military. At the same time he was texting on Signal, he also issued a Pentagon-wide memo on standards for fitness and personal grooming “which includes but is not limited to beards.”

He has also returned military bases to their Confederate-inspired names, including Georgia’s Fort Benning, and directed a purge of “woke” policies at the Pentagon. But he has not taken care with the information he is entrusted with.

In response to all of this, Hegseth has denied that he and other Trump advisers texted about war plans, even though the White House confirmed it, and attacked Goldberg as a rogue liberal out to get Trump.

But he has never taken responsibility for his actions. And he never apologized for his role in exposing critical operational information to someone outside of the military.

As the veterans told me, no other member of the military could get away with that. And no member of the military should. Anything less would not be up to the standards the military sets for itself every day.