I highly recommend reading the texts. One of the comments from Hegseth, ignoring Vance’s concerns about spiking oil prices, was that the strike would signal American power to the world. I mean, trump is withdrawing military power against Russia, the whole world is watching this. If he were to use American power to help Ukraine, now that would send a message, but hitting an Iranian proxy won’t make anyone say “wow!”.

The chats also undercut trump’s claims of wanting to be a president of peace. Again, if he wants to project strength, the single best place to do it is in Ukraine, where it would take less than a month to put Russia in a position where they would have to evacuate Ukraine in order to make a deal to keep Ukraine out of NATO. But trump always caves to Russia, so there’ll be nothing about the attack on the houthis that’ll project the strength he thinks it will. Heck, they even discussed that Americans don’t even know who the houthis are, for chrissakes.

I’ll cite from military.com, where two defense officials explained that trumps administration is striking a broader range of targets than Biden did, with less concern about the targets based on the civilian casualties that may result. We are talking about Yemen here, a war torn, destitute country. Who’s Hegseth thinking he’s projecting power to?

There’s no question trumps security team was discussing military plans on a chat that included two civilians, one of which was a journalist. Utterly unacceptable lapse in security protocol at best. None of our top security officials were aware there was a civilian included in the chat, which means they didn’t know who they were talking to, on an unsecured network, discussing a military strike, involving another country’s land, with some specificity. The journalist was the one with the good conscience to not report anything beforehand, still thinking this was some kind of setup, not an actual attack. These are Americans jet fighters going in with the understanding that OPSEC was clean - it was not.

Separately, and anecdotally, fighter pilots in r/military are documenting how you’d never share some of the information. My dad’s (Vietnam vet) best friend, who was NSA, is disgusted with the nonchalance of the language, not to mention allowing two civilians into the chat. The flippant, condescending attitude in the chat about Europe is highly disturbing. The denial that sensitive information was released is offensive because OPSEC was clearly compromised.

And this is just because they got caught. They were discussing these plans with a civilian invited in who had no authorization, yet all of these people had no interest in OPSEC while doing so, otherwise someone would have asked who is this guy here. Sloppy isn’t even where we start with this.

And if Ratcliff is your North Star on what’s sick, you gotta either be the most ignorant person in the room or you just don’t give a shit about the safety of our troops. No single sentence can describe the malfeasance in all this, and my comments don’t even scratch the surface.