War planning by emoji

I will get around to writing about Jeffrey Goldberg’s bombshell article in the Atlantic about how he was inadvertently included in a top-secret Trump administration text group discussing the planning for the recent U.S. strike on the Houthi terrorists in Yemen, but first I would like to describe for you how similar communications were conducted during the Iraq war. 

A TOC is a Tactical Operations Center. Every unit engaged in combat from a division through a brigade down to a battalion and a company has its own TOC where plans are made for everything from defending the unit to movement of troops to engaging the enemy in combat.

Everything that happens in a TOC is secret. When I was embedded with an infantry company in a small base camp in downtown Mosul, every night there would be a convoy sent from the company to the brigade base camp to pick up the hot meal for the day.  In the TOC, soldiers would be assigned to the convoy; a route from the company base camp to the brigade dining facility would be picked, with plans made for an alternate route if something unexpected came up. The time of departure for the convoy would be chosen. All of this was necessary because even something as simple as a convoy to pick up dinner was a combat operation. Previous convoys had come under fire from Iraqi insurgents, and it was known that insurgents had laid IEDs along likely routes from the company to the brigade base camp. Soldiers had been wounded in attacks on convoys to pick up dinner in that company and others, so planning for the convoy every afternoon was a serious matter.

There was similar security and secrecy for TOCs at battalion and brigade and division levels, where larger movements of troops and combat operations to attack the enemy were planned. Everything was secret at every level. The maps were secret. The radio frequencies that would be used were secret. The plans themselves were, of course, secret. Transmission of a plan from one level of command to another was secret and carried out by a secure network using radios and satellite and microwave transmission. Everything transmitted on the network was encrypted, and no one other than commanders or people cleared with the highest level of secrecy was allowed near the secure laptops or transmission equipment.

That is how seriously an American combat military unit took the security around the transmission of something as simple as plans to go pick up a hot meal for supper.

The important word in the acronym “TOC” is operations. It's why all the care was taken to keep things secret.  You don't want anyone to know what you're planning, because if your plans are found out, the enemy can make his own plans to counter yours.

In Washington DC, at the top of the government, a TOC is the Situation Room at The White House, or the Tank at the Pentagon, or a SCIF at the CIA or the State Department, Or even built into the homes of the Cabinet officials in charge of national security. Cell phones aren't allowed in any of those places, because they are, by their nature, insecure.  Suppose a communication system must be used to transmit top-secret information. In that case, it must be one of those developed by the government using highly secure encryption developed especially for that purpose. Strategic plans, and the tactics to execute them, are the most important secrets the government has, because people's lives depend on them, and the targets of those plans are so important.

This is why Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth should be fired not later this week but right this minute.  He transmitted over the highly insecure Signal message network on his own cell phone the entire plans for the United States attack on Houthi terror installations in Yemen that was discovered by the apparent accidental inclusion of the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic in what was called the “Houthi Principals Small Group.” “Principals” in gov-speak means everyone in the Cabinet below the president.  This group of Signal chatters included Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Special Presidential Adviser Stephen Miller, CIA Director John Ratcliff, Special Middle East and Ukraine Negotiator Steve Witkoff and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles – a total of 18 high-level members of the Trump administration in all.

I should probably stop right here and note that any sort of plans for combat operations of the United States military should be “need to know” only — that is, the people who are made aware of the plans to conduct combat should be only those immediately involved in the planning and execution of the operation. Which raises the question, what were Susie Wiles and Stephen Miller doing in there? As members of the White House staff, they had nothing to do with the kind of high-level national security information being discussed in the chat group Goldberg got included in.

At least some of the subjects discussed by the group could be described as political. Vance and others were clear that they were unhappy with the United States “bailing out” Europe by clearing the shipping lanes through the Red Sea of Houthi attacks. Stephen Miller even demanded that we “make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return.” 

Inevitably, however, the discussion on Signal got down to the attack plans themselves, which according to Goldberg, Hegseth gave out in full, including “information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.” That, to be blunt, is the whole ball game. Goldberg did not reveal the plans in detail, as Hegseth did, because they “could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East.” 

Goldberg is correct about operational details, especially when it comes to the information about the targets that have been chosen for attack. After the attack had taken place, the administration bragged that they had killed several Houthi rebel leaders and commanders. Two things were dangerous about Hegseth sharing operational plans on an insecure network. First, if this Signal chat group had been hacked, the Houthi rebels could have repositioned their leaders to avoid or otherwise mitigate the attack. Second, that sort of intelligence would have been invaluable to the enemy because it would expose so-called sources and methods of how the intelligence had been gathered. The Houthis could have then tightened their security so that in the future it would not become known to U.S. intelligence.

Hegseth at least twice bragged to the group about his tight control of OPSEC, mil-speak for “operational security.”  He was bragging, of course, on an insecure network that, according to what I have read, uses “open-source privacy technology.” Signal is owned by the Signal Foundation, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization funded by donations and a loan from Brian Acton, a co-founder of WhatsApp, which was sold to Facebook, making those involved in its founding the requisite Silicon Valley fortunes.

All the speculation that goofs like Hegseth and Gabbard and Ratcliff and the rest of them were amateurs and jokes has brought us to a place where the people supposedly in charge of our national security were celebrating the attacks on the Houthis by posting “fist” and “flexed bicep” and “American flag” and “hands praying” emojis along with reassurances to each other that they had said “a prayer for victory.”

So that's where we are, folks. Down in infantry company and battalion TOCs where security is taken so seriously that even making a tiny mistake will cost you your job, these are the people back in Washington, D.C. who are in charge of our national security overall. They were chatting with each other on the Signal app as they chowed down on steaks at the Palm while Hegseth white-knuckled it through everyone else at his table quaffing their Martinis and Negronis. 

We can be certain that the Chinese and Russians and North Koreans and Iranians have entire floors of their intelligence agencies devoted to decrypting so-called “open-source” apps like Signal and WhatsApp on the off chance that Trump’s Cabinet appointees like Hegseth would be so ignorant and lazy that they would use them.

If you don't think this whole thing was watched by grim men in Moscow and Beijing rubbing their hands together with grand satisfaction about American folly, I've got a signed Trump Bible and deed to the Brooklyn Bridge to sell you for a five spot.