Former vice admiral on the Trump cabinet’s Signal fiasco: Loose lips do, indeed, sink ships

When I was commanding an aircraft carrier battle group in the northern Arabian Sea for combat operations in Afghanistan in the early 2000s, we had numerous other supporting tasks, such as boarding commercial ships that intelligence identified as carrying terrorists and arms to the war or targeting al-Qaida leaders in countries such as Yemen.

The battle group is America’s most mobile and powerful, self-sufficient, and versatile force. It is one capable of projecting American power anywhere in the world without reliance on others for subsurface, surface, or air warfare. This includes a nuclear weapons capability in various ships, with the carrier itself powered by a nuclear reactor manned by 5,000 American sailors whose average age is about 19.

These are dangerous missions, but they don’t need to be unsafe.

In our case of an al-Qaida leader hiding in Yemen, I assigned the mission to a destroyer whose Tomahawk missiles were capable of reaching 1,000 miles inland. As it simultaneously did other tasks, the ship waited to fire until the tracking intelligence informed us the target was at a location for minimal or no innocent civilian losses.

There are many reasons “why” it is unsafe to have detailed planning of a battle group strike discussed over an unsecured communications link in Washington, D.C. — as was recently done on the Signal app by our civilian national security leaders — rather than from inside a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF).

Take the now-publicly available Signal text from Michael Waltz, national security adviser, regarding the recent carrier battle group strikes inside Yemen: “We had positive ID of him [Houthi leader] walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.”

This possibly reveals how we were tracking and targeting the Houthi leader.

In military targeting, “positive ID” (PID) means confirming with certainty that a person is the legitimate target. Doing it through drone footage alone is challenging and not always possible due to factors like image quality, distance, and moving targets. Visual recognition by a person near the target is often required — as it was with an American I knew who was tracking Saddam Hussein inside Iraq before the 2003 invasion.

In another instance I experienced, visual recognition was offered through long-range photos of Muammar Gaddafi on a sailboat off Libya covertly taken by a nearby American. If that was the kind of PID offered during the recent attack on Houthi leadership in Yemen, the unsecured communications via Signal risked putting courageous Americans — or others — in harm’s way.

I was also taken by the texts’ apparent lack of consideration of what is understood as the “rules of engagement.” While not always perfectly executed in war, there are or had been — prior to the secretary of defense’s recent dismantlement of the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence — strict rules on how and when to strike, in order to avoid civilian casualties. For example, when timing is not a consideration.

In the case of the leaked Signal texts, Joe Kent, the president’s nominee to run the National Counterterrorism Center, texted: “There is nothing time sensitive driving the time line. We’ll have the exact same options in a month.” John Ratcliffe, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and others in the chat agreed.

If it wasn’t “time sensitive” to take down the primary Houthi leader target, it means “eyes” were somehow on the target fairly continuously. Why then choose to strike and collapse a residential building the Houthi leader had just entered to meet a girlfriend who lived among other civilians — assuredly including children — if it doesn’t matter “when” and therefore where to do it?

Of added concern are recent reports that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had plans to overhaul the military’s judge advocate general’s corps as part of making our armed forces less restricted by the laws of armed conflict — but now even this has apparently been leapfrogged.

Also revealing were the Signal texts showing disdain for our European allies. Unfortunately, this comes amid reports the Trump administration is considering abandoning NATO’s agreement that an American officer must be the alliance’s supreme allied commander (SACEUR) — the one responsible for any decision to use nuclear weapons.

As a young officer, I watched Adm. William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assemble his counterparts from the then-16 NATO nations for a tabletop war game against the USSR. The war game led to a decision by the SACEUR to use nuclear weapons to stop the invading Soviet army.

Also in the room at the time was former Sen. Howard Baker, who had just left the White House as President Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, role-playing the American president in the war-game scenario.

That nuclear decision moment seemed real to everyone present, as heightened tension and discussion made it obvious these 16 military leaders felt they were actually looking into the abyss of a nuclear world war. Just before I was kicked out, I heard what a heated “American president” said to the SACEUR after he had made his nuclear decision. And while I cannot include those words in this recounting, I can tell you they prompted me to think how fortunate we are, as a nation, to have an American’s hand on the nuclear button.

The carelessness of the recent unsecured communications should not be even more grievously compounded by the ill-considered removal of an American commander strategically positioned to decide on a potential Armageddon.

Given nuclear weapon capabilities today, an independent French-United Kingdom arsenal outside America’s sphere of influence could be disastrous.

That we must discuss either or both of these instances reflects an increasingly distressing reality: that our current civilian national defense leaders are unaware of how their actions harm our nation’s security.

Joe Sestak is a former Navy vice admiral, a former U.S. representative for Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District on the House Armed Services Committee, and director for defense policy of the National Security Council staff.