About that Signal Chat …

There is so much to say about the Signal group chat among Trump's top national security advisers.

A phrase I heard all too often when I served at NATO was: “Everything that needs to be said has been said—but not yet by me!” That’s how I kind of feel about the Signal chat among top national security officials discussing an impending US attack against Houthis that Jeffrey Goldberg revealed in The Atlantic. Everything has been said, but not yet by me.

That said, some aspects of this remarkable story have been misunderstood or not yet fully explored. So let me highlight five points that strike me as particularly poignant or important.

First, why use a commercial app on private phones to communicate sensitive information? Aside from the President, there is no collection of people in the entire world that have more ready access to secure communication systems than the people on this group chat. These are not low-level officials. They’re the Vice President, the Secretaries of State and Defense, the National Security Adviser, the Directors of National and Central Intelligence. All of them work in secure offices (so-called SCIFs, for secure compartmented information facilities), in which cell phones, smart watches, and all personal digital devices are prohibited. All of them have government issued phones. All have SCIFs at home, travel on government aircraft, and have mobile SCIFs wherever they are, 24 hours a day. There is no excuse for using a commercial app on personal devices for them to communicate. And, yet, they seem to have been doing just that for months.

Second, the initial purpose for the chat was to set up a sound policy process. Apart from using an unsecure platform, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz had the right idea to create a coordinating group to stay in touch in the run-up to a major military operation. The initial reason for messaging his colleagues was to indicate that he was setting up a “tiger team,” led by his deputy, and ask his colleagues to provide the best staff contact to (and this is important): “follow up from the meeting in the Sit Room this morning for action items.” Subsequent messages make clear that in this morning meeting the President decided to authorize strikes against the Houthis. It’s good practice to have NSC deputies oversee and coordinate the implementation of a presidential decision. My sense of Waltz’s message is that when he refers to a “principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis,” he is referring to this tiger team, not to the chat group itself, which by all indications had existed for some time but to which Jeff Goldberg is inadvertently added only later.

Yet, even though it is good practice to coordinate the follow-up on a major presidential decision, it’s striking that neither the chat group itself nor likely the tiger team Waltz is creating includes representatives of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Indeed, its acting chairman, Admiral Christopher W. Grady, is not part of the chat group—nor is any other senior military official. It’s simply unheard of not to include the President’s and NSC’s statutory military adviser in a principals group discussing military operations.

Third, even though the President has made a clear decision, the Vice President uses the informal chat to relitigate the decision. While Waltz started this message chain for coordinating purposes, the Vice President decides he wants to reopen the discussion: “I think we are making a mistake,” Vance writes. Interestingly, the VP’s disagreement with Trump isn’t about the policy—with which he seems to agree—but with the message. Vance claims that just 3 percent of US trade, but 40 percent of European trade runs through Suez. “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe.” Waltz tries to push back, explaining that the trade picture is a bit more complicated than the data Vance cites. “The trade figures we have is 15% global and 30% container,” presumably referencing the share of shipping through Suez. “It’s difficult to break down to the US,” he adds, because lots of shipping now goes around the Cape of Good Hope and other parts destined for Europe may end up as final products in the US. Waltz’s point: trade is global and you can’t neatly say what’s for Europe and what’s for the United States.

Waltz’s argument doesn’t seem to land with Vance, who complains later “I hate bailing Europe out again.” Yet, rather than reminding the Vice President that the issue has been decided, Waltz decides to invite Steve Miller, the deputy chief of staff and not someone who normally should be included in a meeting of principles, to join the chat. Miller, who is particularly close to Trump and has a tendency to try and speak for the President in internal meetings, does weigh in shortly after. “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light,” he writes, which ends the discussion.

Fourth, the CIA Director and National Security Adviser both share the kind of intelligence information that is normally held exceedingly close. While much of the congressional and media attention has rightly focused on the unprecedented sharing of launch times and weapons systems hours before the onset of the strikes by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, some of the other information shared in the texts is equally disturbing from a national security point of view. CIA Director John Ratcliffe testified repeatedly on Capitol Hill this week that "I didn't transfer any classified information.“ That may be strictly correct. But he did reveal, in this unclassified, commercial chat, what targets the CIA was seeking: “identify … Houthi leadership.” It’s hardly surprising that the CIA would be focused on leadership targets. But putting this in a commercial chat? Not smart.

Worse, Waltz actually reveals intelligence on the specific target, and reveals that it was provided by someone on the ground. After the first strikes have landed, Waltz writes that “the first target—the top missile guy—we had positive ID that he had walked into his girlfriend’s building and it is now collapsed.” Earlier he wrote they had “multiple positive IDs.” This information revealed (1) the identify of the target; (2) multiple different intelligence efforts to follow the target’s movements; and (3) that he was being watched most likely by a human source. All of this is extremely sensitive information—the kind that normally doesn’t get shared even with top officials, for fear of revealing sources and methods. Crucially, according to the Wall Street Journal, the source of the positive ID on the ground was an Israeli human source. Its revelation not only can put this person in danger, but may make Israel and other allies more reluctant to share intelligence with the US, thus weakening US security.

Finally, it’s not clear what the purpose of the military strikes actually was or is. Administration officials from the President on down have dismissed all criticism of the Signal chat by declaring that the strikes, as Trump put it, “have been extremely successful — beyond our wildest expectations.” But we can only know how successful the strikes were if we know what their objective was. Reading the chats, the goal isn’t actually clear. At least four different reasons are cited:

• Vance says that the “strongest reason to do this, as POTUS said, is to send a message.”

• Waltz explains the goal is to “reopen these sea lines” for commercial shipping.

• Hegseth mentions an objective to ”reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered.”

• Trump afterwards seems to add a fourth reason: The complete annihilation of the Houthis.

So when administration officials talk about tremendous success, what do they actually mean? If it’s to send a message, to whom is the message being sent? And what message are they meant to receive? Is it to the Houthis? Iran? Gulf states? Europeans (who will be asked to pay for the cost incurred by the US for the military strikes)? Whatever the message, it’s not clear anyone is receiving it.

As for reopening the sea lines, most of the commercial shipping has long ago given up on traveling through Suez and taken a longer route around Cape Horn instead. The higher cost of longer journeys is partly offsite by lower insurance costs and in any event has long been priced into the trade. Shipping executives have made clear that they’re not going to go back sailing through Suez until there is a durable end to the war. The priority, they say, is crew safety and supply chain certainty and predictability—neither of which presently exist.

Leaving aside the contention that Biden “cratered” deterrence, bombing on its own doesn’t reestablish deterrence unless it is somehow clear who the target is and what is being deterred. The Houthis clearly aren’t deterred, since they continue to shoot missiles at US warships and against Israel, the latest of which were launched last Wednesday.

Finally, while Trump claims that the Houthis are suing for peace, that’s sure to be news in Sanaa. The Houthis have been fighting for over a decade, defeating Saudi airpower and Emirate ground forces. The US military carries a much bigger punch, for sure. But it’s hard to see how airpower alone is going to bring the Houthis around. “You have to control turf to win,” James R. Holmes, the J.C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College in Rhode Island, argues. “Aircraft cannot occupy territory, however valuable a supporting capability they are for armies and Marines.” Unless I missed it, I don’t believe the US is ready to launch a ground invasion of Yemen as yet.

In any case, however much success the administration claims, the fact is that airstrikes continue to this day—two weeks after the bombing has started. It’s hard to claim success when the actual mission is still ongoing.