American Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said to a reporter on March 24 that no one was texting war plans and that’s all I can say in relation to that while standing on a runway in Hawaii. He repeated the statement the following day.
A different story was told in the Signal group texts by the Trump administration.
Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, went into great detail about how he was unintentionally added to a group discussion on the messaging app Signal with senior Trump administration officials about a planned airstrike on Yemen on March 24.
Goldberg claimed in the opening statement that the “war plans” he had in the chat included “precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.” Because he was concerned about the publication of sensitive security information, Goldberg refused to provide detailed information about the military strikes.
The National Security Council affirmed the thread’s authenticity and said it would look into how Goldberg’s number was added to the chain.
The Atlantic published the full text thread after Hegseth, White House, and others debating whether “war plans” were being discussed. Hegseth provided information on when drones and aircraft would launch, when bombs would fall, and when targets would be moving, according to messages from March 26.
A spokesperson for the White House directed us to Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s post on X, in which it was stated that “no “war plans” were being discussed when we sought comment.
In an effort to combat the group, the US struck Houthi fighters on March 15 in a US-led assault on ships in the Red Sea since Israel’s occupation of Gaza began in October 2023.
National Security Advisor Mike Waltz wrote on X, “No locations,” after The Atlantic’s second story. No methods or sources. NO PLANS FOR WAR. There are some really shitty war plans, according to Headseth in a similar post on X, where he claimed the released messages had no names or targets. There were no war plans there, according to Marco Rubio, the secretary of state.
According to experts, the military doesn’t officially refer to “war plans.” The most in-depth military plans include details about force deployment and are lengthy (so many or even thousand pages).
However, the majority of the experts we spoke to agreed that civilians would view the Signal messages as being specific plans in general and with justification.
According to Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, “it’s about as specific as it gets” after The Atlantic published the messages in their entirety.
What Hegseth shared, and what experts think of it
Hegseth’s messages, according to Goldberg’s initial article, included “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the US would be using, and attack sequencing.”
After the publication of the story, Goldberg said in an interview with MSNBC host Jen Psaki, the White House representative under former president Joe Biden, that the messages contained “the specific time of a future attack, specific targets, including human targets meant to be killed in that attack, weapon systems, even weather reports.” He can assert that it was merely a minute-by-minute account of what was going to happen, not a war plan.
These messages from Hegseth were included in the follow-up article published on March 26 in The Atlantic:
- “TIME NOW (1144et): Weather is FAVORABLE. We are a GO for mission launch, we just CONFIRMED with CENTCOM.
- “1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)”
- “1345: “Trigger Based” F-18 First Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is@his Known Location, SHOULD BE ON TIME; see also “Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)”).
- “1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)”
- “1415: Strike Drones on Target (THE FIRST BOMBS WILL FINALLY DROP, pending earlier “Trigger Based” targets)”
- The first sea-based Tomahawks to be launched is the 1536 F-18 2nd Strike Start.
- “MORE TO FOLLOW (PER TIMES)”
- “We are currently operational security clean on OPSEC,” that is.
- Godspeed, our warriors.
The texts, according to military experts, do not represent a comprehensive plan but do provide alarmingly specific details.
Nora Bensahel, professor of practice at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and contributing editor to the website that covers national security, said that the term “war plan” frequently (but not always) refers to a more thorough planning document, which can run hundreds of pages, with details of how the US military intends to pursue a particular military objective.
These are precise operational plans for the use of military force, Bensahel said after reading the messages. Because these are clear plans for war, I don’t understand how the administration can justify making that claim.
An operation plan, also known as an OPLAN, is defined as a “complete and detailed plan containing a full description” and a “timephased force and deployment list,” according to a 2023 Defense Department guide.
Ty Seidule, a retired US Army brigadier general and visiting professor of history at Hamilton College, said, “We have OPLANs as a contingency if we have to go to war.” “Like we had for Iraq in 1990 and 2003. These contain a lot of detail and number in the thousands.
According to Seidule, the text messages were more of the “CliffsNotes” style, with “all the crucial details of a military operation” and “clearly a security breach of the first order” than the “OPLAN” version.
According to Heidi A. Urben, a Georgetown University professor of practice and former military intelligence officer, the newly revealed texts “amount to operational details from a concept of the operation (CONOP) or, in this case, colloquially, a strike package.”
Hegseth made the claim that the text exchange was not a lengthy war plan, but that “all the crucial details of a joint operation against an enemy force, which is worse,” according to Seidule.
Since the Defense Department doesn’t use the term “war plan,” Thane Clare, who served in the Navy for 25 years and retired as a captain, “technically gives Hegseth et al a completely disingenuous out.” The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent source for defense analysis, is now Claire’s senior fellow.
However, Clare asserted that “the Yemen chat is entirely operational information that reveals crucial details about upcoming operations.”
Military experts observed numerous security issues involving administration officials’ communication of plans using Signal.
