No. of Recommendations: 14
30 minutes. Partners had been notified, so the word was already out.
Two hours. Thirty minutes before the first planes took off, but two hours before the actual attack. If the Houthis had obtained that information when Hegseth posted it, they would have had two hours to prepare their response.
Uh, huh.
Of course. If you tell them at 11:45 that at 1:45, the U.S. intends to drop bombs in an effort to kill a high-value Terrorist that they anticipate will be at a known location, that gives them two hours for their high-value personnel to just....move to someplace they aren't at now and generally don't frequent. Which would probably destroy the mission, because whoever was being targeted wouldn't be anywhere we anticipated. To say nothing of whatever defensive countermeasures they could have put in place before the actual strike took place...again, two hours after the message was posted.
He's mostly going to be mad about the reporter being added, which never should have happened.
And wouldn't have happened if Hegseth hadn't dumped all that information onto Signal, rather than using a more secure means of communication. The problem isn't just that Waltz made a mistake in adding someone to the chat group - it's that using a Signal chat group makes the communications vulnerable to being accessed by outside people in a way that more secure communications platforms are not. It's not a safe platform to discuss classified information like this. There's no earthly reason for Hegseth to be putting that kind of information onto a commercial messaging app in the first place.
