White House's Nitpicking Over Terminology Obscures the Dangers a Leak Poses

US targets might have had time to escape while lives of American pilots threatened

- David E. Sanger

WASHINGTON - The White House's effort to defend Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth on March 26 leaned heavily into a semantic argument. What he posted on the now-infamous Signal chat with his national security colleagues, President Donald Trump, Mr Hegseth and other administration officials insist, was not a "war plan".

Technically, they were right. What The Atlantic published, from the chain in which its top editor Jeffrey Goldberg was inadvertently included, is more like a timeline of a pending attack.

But it is so detailed — with the time that F/A-18F Super Hornet jets were supposed to launch and the time that MQ-9 Reaper drones would fly in from land bases in the Middle East — that the answer may prove a distinction without a difference.

A full "war plan" would undoubtedly be more specific, with the routings of weaponry and coordinates for targets. But that is not likely to help the Defence Secretary as he tries to explain away why he put these details on an unclassified commercial app that, while encrypted, was far from the heavily protected, classified internal systems used by the Pentagon.

The publication of the timeline on the morning of March 26, which the administration all but encouraged by declaring so vociferously that none of the information on the chat was classified — only accelerated the calls by Democrats for Mr Hegseth to resign.

The time stamps he included in his messages, hours before the attack began, were critical: Had this information leaked out, the Houthi fighters and missile experts the United States was targeting in Yemen might have had time to escape, and American pilots and other service members could have been put at risk.

Mr Hegseth's own references in the Signal chain to "OPSEC" — or operational security — indicated he fully understood the need to keep this timing secret.