The Missing Piece of the Signal Group Chat
The Trump administration's natsec leaders didn't address what should have been a fundamental aspect of the attack
This guest column originally appeared on the Substack of journalist Jonathan Larsen, a veteran of ABC, CNN, and MSNBC, who served as executive producer of Up with Chris Hayes. He shared it with us to cross-post. You can subscribe to Jonathan's Substack here.
There’s something important missing from the fully released1 Signal group chat of top national-security personnel regarding the March 15, 2025, airstrike against Houthi targets in Yemen. I assumed by now someone more schooled in military and natsec matters would flag it, but I haven’t seen that, so let’s take a crack at it.
By now, people are probably familiar with the dispute between Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg over whether the details Hegseth shared constituted a “war plan.”
Either way, it’s pretty clear the details posed a potential security threat to the pilots involved; a threat averted only because Goldberg kept those details secret. But what struck me most about the plan was the absence of an after-plan.
Okay, you drop the bombs. Then what? What was the theory under which this would achieve Pres. Donald Trump’s stated goal of reopening the waters of the Red Sea to commercial navigation?
Or was the extent of it really just what Vice Pres. JD Vance said: To send a message.
To…someone. About…something. To some end. Presumably.
If so, there’s no indication anyone got that message. Trump wrote afterward that the Houthis had waged an “unrelenting campaign” against U.S. and other ships. But the campaign had relented once Israel allowed humanitarian aid into Gaza.
And Trump called the March 15 attack “decisive.” But nothing’s changed in the two weeks since except the frequency of attacks by both sides. The attack appears to have achieved nothing but escalation. (In fairness, Pres. Joe Biden also didn’t seem to achieve much; Houthi activity has correlated pretty reliably with Israeli behavior in Gaza. But Biden didn’t mount anything of this scale.)
The Signal chat reveals no suggestion of a strategic framework — or even the concept of a plan — into which the attack clearly fit. That was true in the chat before the attack took place but also, most strikingly, afterward.
Beforehand, Vance addressed the reasons for doing it. If there were some long-term strategy at work, you’d expect to hear about it here. But according to Vance the best reason for the attack was messaging…and the attack was in conflict with their messaging:
The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message. But I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now.
Even on the strongest rationale for the attack, it wasn’t a consistent part of what they were already doing, let alone planning to do.
And after Hegseth confirmed the “success” of the initial attack, among the emojis and fist-bumping there was zero indication that now…something else was supposed to happen next. Covert messaging to the Iranians about cutting off the Houthis? Back-channel communications with the Houthis themselves about possible negotiations?
Secretary of State Marco Rubio was on the group chat, but offered nothing even hinting at a follow-up diplomatic component. To the contrary, the chat speaks to precisely the opposite.
Discussing pushing back the attack, Office of the Director of National Intelligence contact Joe Kent said, “There is nothing time sensitive driving the time line.”
Hegseth confirmed: “Waiting a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus…we can easily pause.”
The implication: There were no other, planned actions in the works that would be upended based on the timing of the strike. Hegseth just wanted to beat the Israelis to the punch.
The closest thing to any kind of strategic thought was Vance raising the prospect of trying to minimize risks to oil facilities of the Saudis (who are fighting the Houthis). Literally no one even responded.
After the attack, there’s a chorus of attaboys and well dones. No mention of anything next on the to-do list. Curtain closes. Exeunt.
The only thing achieved by the bombing, apparently, was the bombing. As New York Times Editorial Board member Farah Stockman wrote,
What feels revelatory about the Signal chat is just how unserious this national security team is. It’s not just the emojis or the accidental inclusion of a journalist or the decision to communicate on that app. It’s how focused members of the chat group were on how the attack would be perceived by Trump’s base, rather than on the potential geopolitical repercussions of their actions.
Her assessment — and the lack of an overarching plan — are consistent with what current Defense Department officials told CNN. Hegseth doesn’t do plans.
It’s not just that a number of Hegseth’s public initiatives were almost immediately scaled back due to apparent lack of planning or consideration. Pentagon officials told CNN that Hegseth simply isn’t deliberative. Like Trump, Hegseth leads the U.S. military on impulse:
“He’s a TV personality,” one of the sources said. “[A general officer] makes a recommendation, and he’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah, go do it.’ [Former Defense Secretary] Lloyd Austin would never be like, ‘Yeah, yeah, go do it.’ He’d be like, ‘We’ll take it under consideration.’”
In fact, CNN reported, earlier this month, Hegseth sent a warship — most recently intercepting Houthi attacks in the Red Sea — to the U.S. coast near the Mexican border. How come? “Optics,” a Pentagon source told CNN.
Hegseth sent 900 troops to Guantanamo Bay in February to help guard deportees. But the surge of deportees never materialized, so those troops are now expected to go home.
And the secret chat revealed a glaring flaw even in the Trump administration’s “plan” for getting Europe to pay for this. As I wrote earlier this week, one day after the attack, Hegseth appeared on Fox arguing that the attack was in America’s national interest.
But just two days earlier, in the group chat, he and the others were discussing Trump’s desire to make Europe pay for it. How would that attempt square with Hegseth claiming publicly that America benefited? Two days after plotting to get Europe to pick up the tab, Hegseth undermined the U.S. rationale for that argument on TV.
The point isn’t to pile on Hegseth. Hell, Trump himself, on the day of the attack, wrote that it was “to protect American shipping, air, and naval assets.” Also undercutting their “plan” to make Europe pay for it.
The reason for focusing on Hegseth is simply that he would have been the most likely source of discussions about followup military plans — if there were any beyond just more of the same.
But Rubio, too, might have been expected to chime in about diplomatic aspects of any Trump strategy here. The timing of the attack, for instance, would in theory have affected plans for diplomatic outreach before and after. (There was some discussion of informing allies, but no reference to pursuing anything diplomatically alongside the attack.)
And yet, there was no mention from Rubio or anyone else of any diplomacy beyond briefing allies that the strikes were happening.
The lack of security around the strikes is certainly stunning and chilling in the disregard for armed forces in harm’s way. But even that disregard pales in comparison to how cheaply U.S. military lives are valued as we start to recognize that they’re being moved around the global chessboard by a team that’s not even bothering to play chess.
with very slight redacting.
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Excellent summation. And I’ll add that, since they mentioned that the “target” was going to be at his girlfriend’s house, which was the bombing site, it was interesting that nobody said, “Are there others in the house?” Just not important, apparently.
What a bunch of egotistical clowns