Or they will spin it. The Democrats and othe Trump opponents have no power to communicate effectively outside their bubble, and Trump's team, the Republicans and the right wing know it. They can do anything and spin it successfully. It is the heart of their power.
> who outside the most delusional among us is not questioning the unfittedness of the entire Trump administration?
I once saw the fall of great civilisations as tragedies. They’re not. After a certain point, after a certain generation, they’re not just inevitable. They’re deserved.
The American model of government and society may empirically not work. Hell, universal suffrage and electoral democracy may not be the fittest way to organise humanity.
I hope not. I don’t believe so, yet. But the evidence is mounting. Since the Industrial Revolution, the tendrils of fascism have tried at democracy (an institution broader than just elections) borne from the agricultural revolution. Fascism isn’t the answer. But maybe popular will is, similarly, a bad—if predictable—governing instrument.
China is making the quiet argument America made in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. American history just doesn’t teach the consequences of O.G. Versailles.
I am convinced that I do not have enough data to be able to assess the "fittedness" of the entire Trump administration".
And that is despite (or perhaps because) I have spent way way to much time reading articles both from the Left and the Right.
If you only read one narrative, you might think you are getting the whole picture. When you read both [which is admittedly difficult - I sometimes blanch and force myself to read just to get the options open], you might find that there are hints how much is not known.
When you have a reason to be involved at some point, you realize that Gell-Mann was on to something
I'd be quite interested if you could point me to some sources who are making what you believe is a credible case that the Trump admin is executing some coherent strategy in a competent manner.
I read quite lot, everyone from anarchists an d communists to people I believe would happily describe themselves as fascists. I read self-described US liberals and conservatives. And I am having a very hard time finding folks who describe a reasoned, coherent strategy being implemented.
I have read a lot of (typically US "right wing") commentators who claim that "we just can't know", but having come of age when the same disingenuous claim was made about the US invasion of Iraq it is hard for me to take those kinds of claims seriously.
I'm not looking for an account that I can agree with, but even a simple "this is their strategy, and here is an account of why that is a coherent idea" would be a big upgrade from what I am usually hearing; my current understanding is that only God and Trump understood the big picture and that Trump is senile enough that even he has lost the plot.
Consider all the small business defense contractors who are held to the letter of the most minute security compliance requirements. They have to somehow meet everything, with very limited resources.
And then at the top of government, the most sensitive information is frequently handled without any care at all. Not to mention 19-year olds with flash drives barging into the most sensitive IT systems of the federal government.
> According to the Times, the private chat also included two senior advisers to Hegseth – Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick – who were fired last week after being accused of leaking unauthorized information.
I understand the tactics of much of what Trump and his people do, even though I often disagree. I understand why Trump has DOGE moving quickly and breaking things; I understand why they show contempt for the law, rules, and customs - they want to destroy those things.
I don't understand the utter incompetence that often appears; an earlier example was team Trump's court filings challenging the 2020 elections but there is lots more. How does that furthering the neo-fascist / conservative / Trump mission? I suppose it's disruptive but if they just showed basic competence they would probably get away with much more.
Simply put, it’s a reflection of Trump’s own incompetence, or perhaps carelessness and his utter refusal to recognize and make use of expertise in others. I’m about halfway through “Lucky Loser” (Buettner & Craig) which traces his financial history. His disdain for objective data over “intuition” has always been alarming. I suspect his hiring for cabinet positions follows a similar carelessness.
Thanks for that ref! I've always maintained T is extremely dumb, He goes towards far left on the Dumb scale on the levels which you'd have never seen before. But, at the same time, he has all the luck which no one else has. Glad, I'm not the only one to see him that way.
Its a little more than luck. Trump has the best political instincts I have ever seen. He is able to control the narrative in a way dems can only dream of.
I don't think he has very good political instincts at all. He just fell into a time when the conservative party was looking to exercise their spite and he gave them an outlet just by being the crude bigoted asshole he has always been. Doesn't matter what he does as long as he continues to be cruel and hurt the "right people". This is what conservatives have been asking for and are showing up to vote for. You can tell it's not about things like the economy as they often lie about because "the price of eggs" was one of the most important things before the election and they aren't saying shit about the faltering GDP and increasing inflation.
It's interesting to look at opinion polls pre/post election. All through Obama's last term the conservative rallying cry was the economy was bad and migrant caravans were coming. As soon as Trump was elected, there was a 40 point swing on conservative's opinion on the economy. It's not just the economy. It's every position. When Bill Clinton has an affair, then family values are incredibly important. When Trump brags about grabbing women by the pussy without consent, it's just locker room talk.
> I don't think he has very good political instincts at all
I think the political instinct trump brought, and that you're alluding to, was his ability to never admit being wrong about anything. Yes politicians have always done this to some extent but he's taken it to a whole new level.
It's the method of saying what you want people to believe and think over and over with complete confidence until they actually do, even if it has no basis in reality or is stupid and wrong.
It's incompetence as a political platform.
And other politicians have noticed how well it works, so now they do it to (see: hegseth).
Folks that are more competent and considered are less likely to be involved in the first place. I think we can see that from Trump's first time in office. There were people politically aligned that fell by the wayside. Unfortunately incompetence appears to be the winning strategy.
When the only qualification you have for the people that you hire to advise you is absolute sycophantic loyalty, it isn't surprising when they turn out to be wildly incompetent.
Hesgeth has significant success in life and served as a captain in the Army (or Army National Guard). Those aren't sufficient qualification for Secretary of Defense, but they are for not doing stupid, self-sabotaging stuff.
Simlarly, Rudy Guliani was a lawyer and mayor, but the 2020 election court filings and arguments were idiotic. How is that possible?
I don't buy that they are idiots. I don't have an explanation, however.
That's a very narrow type of "significant success" and absolutely below the bar of qualification for Secretary of Defense, although easily clearing the bar to be considered an idiot.
You're basically guaranteed a promo to captain, after which promotion gets a lot harder and rarer.
It's the officer version of getting to E-4 before your enlistment ends -- as long as you're not a moron and get busted down you'll get there.
A Captain rank is in no way a qualification for Sec of Defense when there are literally hundreds of 4-star Generals and Admirals with well established track records of running operations during 20 years of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Having credentials doesn't make you not an idiot. It's important to understand that you can be very educated or skilled in certain things but it doesn't make you good at everything.
No this is the distraction. The buffoonery and even the buffoons committing it all dilute the news cycle.
Accounting for the damage done will be nearly impossible and that makes it all the harder to fully reverse. That's one of the focuses here. Making it stick.
I think you might want to read their comment again more carefully. Understanding and explaining someone else's terrible motivations for their terrible actions doesn't imply support.
Because they're idiots. There is no "ahahahahah, we are deliberately doing stupid stuff as part of a sinister plot". They're just doing stupid stuff naturally, because they are stupid.
Like, the hiring process is pretty much "who shows most loyalty to Dear Leader"; one would not _expect_ competence.
> I suppose it's disruptive but if they just showed basic competence they would probably get away with much more.
Yeah but if you were a competent person in a position to work for them, would you do it? I believe there are relatively few smart people willing to go down this hole precisely because they can understand the consequences.
I remember reading a book on the Columbine shooter, and on some level I imagined evil, but a coherent evil, and it really was not, it was quite nonsensical and inconsistent. It was like 4chan logic.
I think when at the surrounding facts - a group of people who talk anti-woke but don’t seem to make a distinction between Jackie Robinson and “all white people are racist”, or willing to ignore every last economist in favor of blanket tariffs, or hiring a Fox News host to run your DOD in the first place! You’re telling me there aren’t enough conservative minds to choose from, in the fucking military! the simplest solution is that there isn’t a coherent ideology.
I think this makes sense, that sort of evil isn’t rational, but we’re so used to movie villains with a coherent ideology I think it poisons the reality. Go watch “The Last King of Scotland”. Idi Amin was the whole bag of nuts.
> I don't understand the utter incompetence that often appears
Trump and company want you to think that the national government is completely incompetent so they can sell as much of it off to their Wall Street oligarch ghouls as quickly as possible. They are intentionally incompetent to further that goal.
> an earlier example was team Trump's court filings challenging the 2020 elections but there is lots more. How does that furthering the neo-fascist / conservative / Trump mission?
With the usual caveats about politics, my understanding is that this is because Trump such a narcissist that he genuinely cannot process the idea of not winning, or being in the wrong.
If he really is like this, this is exceptionally dangerous. Ignore any question about intelligence for a moment, because everyone makes some mistakes: purging anyone who isn't a sycophant means that when he inevitably does make a mistake, nobody will be willing to stop it.
I remember in the one UX design class I took how they stressed the apocryphal "your grandmother is using this app" which in hindsight is sadly asking too much, apparently the bar should have been lower at "the secretary of defense is trying to start a group chat and not leak national security secrets".
> as a first-term Trump administration official and ex-CIA officer, I believe the reason these officials risk interacting in this way is to prevent their communications from being preserved as required by the Presidential Records Act, and avoid them being discoverable in litigation, or subject to a subpoena or Freedom of Information Act request.
not american, but wouldn't the victims in this case be 'every american'? i suppose it depends on whether you think PRA/FoIA et al. are important in holding governments to account or not.
Experts say it risks the lives of the pilots. Also, if Hesgeth and other officials are doing it with this particular information, we might be concerned they are doing it with other information.
Yugoslav spies residing near Italian NATO airbases informed the Yugoslav Air Defense HQ about lack of EA-6 Prowler electronic jammer and "Wild Weasel" anti-SAM aircraft launches during the late evening.
Interesting! Unfortunately, Wikipedia offers no citations for that story. (Also, I don't think it says anything about timing, only formation in the sense of what aircraft and capabilities were flying.)
I have an undergraduate understanding of this topic. I can solve for a firing solution against any target, stealth or not, with the details in these texts. Everything is vulnerable when coming into its own—jets’ aren’t at home on carrier decks. America would have been blessed to have a Hegseth in Berlin or Moscow during their falls.
> didn't shoot down the F-117 as it landed or took off, but in the air over Serbia
In Serbia they had a full mission profile. The commonality is knowing where something will be when. The difference between the situations is hitting something low, slow and above a relatively-uniform body like the ocean is a lot easier than doing so when it’s high and fast.
Perhaps you have independent knowledge of the episode but the Wikipedia articles you cite only say the Serbs knew that the flights departed in the evening and that the mission wouldn't have its jamming and suppression support aircraft.
Anyway, I think we agree that the info Hesgeth reportedly shared would be a danger to pilots and missions if the enemy has any anti-aircraft capability.
Another way of looking at it was that hubris was the threat both times.
Not sure why you're so skeptical. This was a widely reported incident, it is highly-studied in tactical circles and information on the shootdown is available online and in print. The details they are referring to is likely the flight schedule and formations of the various missions flying out of the airbase. Knowing that a stealth aircraft has no anti-radiation escort means that you can illuminate them with a high-powered radar and not expose yourself as a target. In 1999 it would not be infeasible to use EOTS for a targeting solution too, like the parent comment says all you have to do is "solve" for the constraints.
> How does that apply here?
Because jets don't materialize in midair when they're needed and disappear when their mission is over. They are logistical nightmares to plan for, and part of that chain of logistics concerns keeping your flight plans private. Otherwise, you risk pilot lives so your enemy can use 1950s tactics against you. Air combat isn't the Cold War anymore, shootdowns like the one in 1999 emphasize how important secrecy is in contested airspace.
You’re confusing two commenters, one who brought up Serbia, the other—me—speaking to the facts and circumstance relevant to this incident.
The details in Hegseth’s messages would allow an actor like the Houthis to take out our jets on takeoff and landing. We tightly guard those details because they’re highly actionable tactical intel. The fact that a drunk TV influencer didn’t get that isn’t surprising.
I think you're the confused one - I started this subthread by saying Hesgeth's leaks were dangerous, yet somehow you jump into a debate about Serbia - the Wikipedia articles you cited were about Serbia - and argue that same point about Hesgeth as if I disagreed.
You also wrote explicitly about Serbia, and implicitly if you look at the context: we were talking about Serbia and you jumped in to talk about takeoff/landing; it's reasonable to read that as addressing the same topic.
I didn't know you meant takeoff/landing for the Yemen operations until now.
The number innocent US citizens in Yemen dead due to US strikes exceeds US pilots killed. So the US dead lives calculus is complicated by the fact this is also Americans (government) killing Americans.
I don't know it's zero sum, but if the drone strike on a Yemen domiciled US citizen would have been anticipated I think that citizen would not have waited around to be blown up, to the extent a child has such agency.
I would request that you think about such situations a bit more before posting a public comment like this. Military security is first and foremost about protecting our armed forces. When the Pentagon plans an attack, it is vitally important that only our military knows about the plan and no-one else, especially the enemy.
It's only a matter of time that our maximally incompetent Secretary of Defense does something that leads to the death of our own armed forces personnel. E.g. the Houthi learning about an incoming attack and shooting down the pilots, or harassing and killing our Navy sailors patrolling the area.
Would add that out of the handful of fighter pilots I know, 100% of them are seriously considering retiring from the armed forces into private industry, something 0% of them (to the chagrin of their spouses) would have countenanced even a few weeks ago.
Private aviation is getting more dangerous too. The US is up to what, a crash a week, with more FAA cuts coming? (Maybe it's been better the last few weeks, or maybe it stopped making the news. Not sure which.)
Fighter pilots aren't retiring from the military to fly private jets. They're graduating into executive roles that pay enough to buy a plane. Aside from the thrill of flying forbidden planes and patriotism, people cut out for and trained to be fighter pilots are undervaluing themselves in the military.
It kinda gets buried under the utter incompetence of these clowns but why are we even bombing Yemen? How is it acceptable to brazenly destroying other countries’ civil infrastructure? It’s a US president’s pastime activity since Obama
Obama started doing it as a concession to the Saudis for our policies in the ME. More recently Yemen has pirated ships as an immediate response to our support and funding of mass murder of civilians in Palestine. So the Yemenis are not blameless and there is some sort of valid reasoning for the attacks, but to be clear we are the instigator here.
Agreed, mine was more of a rhetorical question. The concession was that we allowed the Saudis to bomb them and further excarcerbate the civil war in Yemen. Now because they are blockading shipments in protest of the current onslaught in Gaza we are pummeling them for it. We sure do have a taste for war crimes in the region.
The other issue is that these bombing will accomplish nothing of value. These rebels have been bombed to the stone age by Saudi already. The cost of the sorties is vastly larger than anything the rebels are sending. Yes, some 'show the colors' is needed to assuage allies and merchants. It ends up being very expensive 'grass cutting'.
But real change there is going to require boots on the ground. And none of the players in the region want that. So, we just spend a $80,000 on a missile for a guy to shoot that doesn't make that in a year at a guy that doesn't make that in a lifetime.
Houthis are bombing unarmed civilian ships in the Red Sea. This makes zero sense for Yemen. But it does, politically, for the Houthis. Put another way, the extremists in one government are bombing another country because of what the extremists in that country are up to.
The Houthis are a belligerent in a civil war with multiple sides [1], none of which could stand without external backing. They're not a ragtag group of rebels. But they're also not the government of Yemen.
The concern is less about Signal, more about inviting journalists and immediate civilian family to a front row as it happens discussion about upcoming targets.
That and the deliberate lack of record keeping.
Attorneys suing the United States government over its use of vanishing Signal messages to coordinate military strikes last month in Yemen allege that new court filings by the government reveal a “calculated strategy” by Trump administration officials to evade transparency laws through the illegal destruction of government records.
The use of the private group chat—in which some messages were configured to automatically delete before they could be archived—was first revealed by The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, on March 24, after he was inadvertently added to the group by Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz. American Oversight subsequently filed Freedom of Information Act requests over the chats and then sought a temporary restraining order in a Washington, DC, federal court in an effort to compel the government to salvage any messages yet to be deleted.
Hegseth has invited his wife and brother to other official meetings in person. He seems to be including them as part of his team; inviting them to the Signal chat probably wasn't a mistake.
> That and the deliberate lack of record keeping.
That part seems like speculation. How would we even know if records were kept? If records were kept, they'd be classified.
> Attorneys suing the United States government over its use of vanishing Signal messages
That seems very much like the concern is about the use of Signal, so the fact that CISA recommends it is very relevant.
I imagine he trusts his wife and brother more than he trusts anyone else with access to that info. Having staff he trusts is the opposite of disregard for security.
And since this info was leaked to the press, there is clearly someone with access who he should not have trusted. Do you really think the security breach in this case came from his wife or brother?
I guess that's a reference to some fictional "Wilhoit's Law", right? I had to look it up. Turns out it's just a partisan Internet snipe from a classical music composer originally posted in the comments on a blog[1].
That sums up the case against Hegseth nicely. Just a partisan attack without substance, sustained only by ignorance.
Without substance? Using chats without double checking who are members of the chat group is a thing not even I do when sharing some gossip, lol. That's blatant incompetence, a person responsible for the USA defence cannot be bothered to cross the members list of a group chat before sharing extremely sensitive information.
I've just seen all this - nepotism, classified info outside government channels, the occasional mistake - often enough to recognize that people only get outraged about it when "the other side" does it.
There is a long history of people getting betrayed by spouses and siblings. He may trust his wife and brother but the rest of the US has no reason to share that trust.
> Do you really think the security breach in this case came from his wife or brother
From the original chat that got leaked, Walz had set the group chat up to auto delete messages every week, and 4 weeks in other cases. Official government communication is subject to the federal records act so that chat, which was used to communicate official government actions, was not compliant. If it was just used for lunch dates or something, Hesgeth wouldn't be in this mess.
CISA recommends Signal, but it is not an approved tool to share classified information. That's what SCIFs are for.
These are generic, and quite weak recommendations on the part of the CISA. And that was the excuse of the CIA director, while knowing very well these are for regular work not real-time battle plans.
Also those recommendations from the CISA recommend to use password managers...like Lastpass and 1Password and others, who had multiple security breaches.
If this is the type of Cybersecurity the US government applies to day to day work, its much easier to understand the field day North Korean and Chinese hackers seem to have all the time.
Your argument is that you know better than CISA? You didn't even read the linked article properly. These were not recommendations for "regular work", they were for "highly targeted individuals".
But let's assume you're right and it's bad advice. The objection in the OP isn't that there was a breach. It's just exploiting the perception that using Signal is somehow wrong, and suggesting that it is a sign that Hegseth is incompetent.
So it's rather important to know that using Signal is recommended by the government's own experts (even if those experts were wrong, hypothetically).
This is CISA telling potential target civilians (and government employees in their civilian capacity, since government employees talk to their friends too) what to do to protect themselves. The government has separate, much stricter guidelines for security compliance for cloud services used by the government.
Those guidelines are called FedRAMP, and Signal is not FedRAMP certified.
> It specifically says it is addressed to senior government officials.
Sure, because senior government officials sometimes do things outside of their official capacity. If a senior government official's communications with their therapist or their lawyer e.g. are compromised, this could leave them vulnerable to blackmail. That's bad for everyone.
Re: other post about use of Signal, I'm not commenting on that post and/or that issue. I'm not expressing an opinion either way on whether it's relevant to this issue. I just want to point out that FedRAMP exists, and Signal isn't FedRAMP certified. If you don't think that is important (and a lot of reasonable people don't), you do you.
If you keep using HN primarily for political battle, we're going to have to ban you. We've already asked you to stop, and you've continued to do a ton of it. If you want to keep posting to HN, please fix this properly.
111 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadI once saw the fall of great civilisations as tragedies. They’re not. After a certain point, after a certain generation, they’re not just inevitable. They’re deserved.
The American model of government and society may empirically not work. Hell, universal suffrage and electoral democracy may not be the fittest way to organise humanity.
I hope not. I don’t believe so, yet. But the evidence is mounting. Since the Industrial Revolution, the tendrils of fascism have tried at democracy (an institution broader than just elections) borne from the agricultural revolution. Fascism isn’t the answer. But maybe popular will is, similarly, a bad—if predictable—governing instrument.
China is making the quiet argument America made in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. American history just doesn’t teach the consequences of O.G. Versailles.
And that is despite (or perhaps because) I have spent way way to much time reading articles both from the Left and the Right.
If you only read one narrative, you might think you are getting the whole picture. When you read both [which is admittedly difficult - I sometimes blanch and force myself to read just to get the options open], you might find that there are hints how much is not known.
When you have a reason to be involved at some point, you realize that Gell-Mann was on to something
I read quite lot, everyone from anarchists an d communists to people I believe would happily describe themselves as fascists. I read self-described US liberals and conservatives. And I am having a very hard time finding folks who describe a reasoned, coherent strategy being implemented.
I have read a lot of (typically US "right wing") commentators who claim that "we just can't know", but having come of age when the same disingenuous claim was made about the US invasion of Iraq it is hard for me to take those kinds of claims seriously.
I'm not looking for an account that I can agree with, but even a simple "this is their strategy, and here is an account of why that is a coherent idea" would be a big upgrade from what I am usually hearing; my current understanding is that only God and Trump understood the big picture and that Trump is senile enough that even he has lost the plot.
And then at the top of government, the most sensitive information is frequently handled without any care at all. Not to mention 19-year olds with flash drives barging into the most sensitive IT systems of the federal government.
Slight imbalance there, I would say.
> According to the Times, the private chat also included two senior advisers to Hegseth – Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick – who were fired last week after being accused of leaking unauthorized information.
I understand the tactics of much of what Trump and his people do, even though I often disagree. I understand why Trump has DOGE moving quickly and breaking things; I understand why they show contempt for the law, rules, and customs - they want to destroy those things.
I don't understand the utter incompetence that often appears; an earlier example was team Trump's court filings challenging the 2020 elections but there is lots more. How does that furthering the neo-fascist / conservative / Trump mission? I suppose it's disruptive but if they just showed basic competence they would probably get away with much more.
Simply put, it’s a reflection of Trump’s own incompetence, or perhaps carelessness and his utter refusal to recognize and make use of expertise in others. I’m about halfway through “Lucky Loser” (Buettner & Craig) which traces his financial history. His disdain for objective data over “intuition” has always been alarming. I suspect his hiring for cabinet positions follows a similar carelessness.
Thanks for that ref! I've always maintained T is extremely dumb, He goes towards far left on the Dumb scale on the levels which you'd have never seen before. But, at the same time, he has all the luck which no one else has. Glad, I'm not the only one to see him that way.
Well, the tagline of the book is "Inheritance. Fraud. Deceit.", so "Lucky" might not be the right word.
It's interesting to look at opinion polls pre/post election. All through Obama's last term the conservative rallying cry was the economy was bad and migrant caravans were coming. As soon as Trump was elected, there was a 40 point swing on conservative's opinion on the economy. It's not just the economy. It's every position. When Bill Clinton has an affair, then family values are incredibly important. When Trump brags about grabbing women by the pussy without consent, it's just locker room talk.
I think the political instinct trump brought, and that you're alluding to, was his ability to never admit being wrong about anything. Yes politicians have always done this to some extent but he's taken it to a whole new level.
It's the method of saying what you want people to believe and think over and over with complete confidence until they actually do, even if it has no basis in reality or is stupid and wrong.
It's incompetence as a political platform.
And other politicians have noticed how well it works, so now they do it to (see: hegseth).
Simlarly, Rudy Guliani was a lawyer and mayor, but the 2020 election court filings and arguments were idiotic. How is that possible?
I don't buy that they are idiots. I don't have an explanation, however.
eg: throwing an axe and hitting a drummer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMrVdFnjEjs
That's a very narrow type of "significant success" and absolutely below the bar of qualification for Secretary of Defense, although easily clearing the bar to be considered an idiot.
It's the officer version of getting to E-4 before your enlistment ends -- as long as you're not a moron and get busted down you'll get there.
A Captain rank is in no way a qualification for Sec of Defense when there are literally hundreds of 4-star Generals and Admirals with well established track records of running operations during 20 years of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Imagine you ordered your Waymo to pretend its location, direction and velocity were what you wanted them to be, ignoring its sensors.
It's a myth that the fascists of the 1930s made the trains run on time.
Accounting for the damage done will be nearly impossible and that makes it all the harder to fully reverse. That's one of the focuses here. Making it stick.
lol.
Like, the hiring process is pretty much "who shows most loyalty to Dear Leader"; one would not _expect_ competence.
Yeah but if you were a competent person in a position to work for them, would you do it? I believe there are relatively few smart people willing to go down this hole precisely because they can understand the consequences.
I think when at the surrounding facts - a group of people who talk anti-woke but don’t seem to make a distinction between Jackie Robinson and “all white people are racist”, or willing to ignore every last economist in favor of blanket tariffs, or hiring a Fox News host to run your DOD in the first place! You’re telling me there aren’t enough conservative minds to choose from, in the fucking military! the simplest solution is that there isn’t a coherent ideology.
I think this makes sense, that sort of evil isn’t rational, but we’re so used to movie villains with a coherent ideology I think it poisons the reality. Go watch “The Last King of Scotland”. Idi Amin was the whole bag of nuts.
Trump and company want you to think that the national government is completely incompetent so they can sell as much of it off to their Wall Street oligarch ghouls as quickly as possible. They are intentionally incompetent to further that goal.
With the usual caveats about politics, my understanding is that this is because Trump such a narcissist that he genuinely cannot process the idea of not winning, or being in the wrong.
If he really is like this, this is exceptionally dangerous. Ignore any question about intelligence for a moment, because everyone makes some mistakes: purging anyone who isn't a sycophant means that when he inevitably does make a mistake, nobody will be willing to stop it.
is it though?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/05/why-tr...
> as a first-term Trump administration official and ex-CIA officer, I believe the reason these officials risk interacting in this way is to prevent their communications from being preserved as required by the Presidential Records Act, and avoid them being discoverable in litigation, or subject to a subpoena or Freedom of Information Act request.
not american, but wouldn't the victims in this case be 'every american'? i suppose it depends on whether you think PRA/FoIA et al. are important in holding governments to account or not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_F-117A_shootdown
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zolt%C3%A1n_Dani
By texts you mean the Wikipedia articles? Which details? I don't see much.
> Everything is vulnerable when coming into its own—jets’ aren’t at home on carrier decks.
How does that apply here? They didn't shoot down the F-117 as it landed or took off, but in the air over Serbia.
Takeoff times and ships.
> didn't shoot down the F-117 as it landed or took off, but in the air over Serbia
In Serbia they had a full mission profile. The commonality is knowing where something will be when. The difference between the situations is hitting something low, slow and above a relatively-uniform body like the ocean is a lot easier than doing so when it’s high and fast.
Perhaps you have independent knowledge of the episode but the Wikipedia articles you cite only say the Serbs knew that the flights departed in the evening and that the mission wouldn't have its jamming and suppression support aircraft.
Anyway, I think we agree that the info Hesgeth reportedly shared would be a danger to pilots and missions if the enemy has any anti-aircraft capability.
Another way of looking at it was that hubris was the threat both times.
The Houthis have these [1].
[1] https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/irans-su...
> How does that apply here?
Because jets don't materialize in midair when they're needed and disappear when their mission is over. They are logistical nightmares to plan for, and part of that chain of logistics concerns keeping your flight plans private. Otherwise, you risk pilot lives so your enemy can use 1950s tactics against you. Air combat isn't the Cold War anymore, shootdowns like the one in 1999 emphasize how important secrecy is in contested airspace.
Instead of guessing (wrongly), just read the Wikipedia articles.
> Because jets don't materialize in midair when they're needed and disappear when their mission is over. They are logistical nightmares
Yes, but the GGP says they are vulnerable during takeoff and landing, which is irrelevant to this event.
> This was a widely reported incident, it is highly-studied in tactical circles and information on the shootdown is available online and in print.
I think neither of you read the Wikipedia articles and that's why you don't understand the conversation. If you have something to add, please do.
The details in Hegseth’s messages would allow an actor like the Houthis to take out our jets on takeoff and landing. We tightly guard those details because they’re highly actionable tactical intel. The fact that a drunk TV influencer didn’t get that isn’t surprising.
You also wrote explicitly about Serbia, and implicitly if you look at the context: we were talking about Serbia and you jumped in to talk about takeoff/landing; it's reasonable to read that as addressing the same topic.
I didn't know you meant takeoff/landing for the Yemen operations until now.
It's reasonable to be critical of both details, but not to hold them in any sort of balance.
It's only a matter of time that our maximally incompetent Secretary of Defense does something that leads to the death of our own armed forces personnel. E.g. the Houthi learning about an incoming attack and shooting down the pilots, or harassing and killing our Navy sailors patrolling the area.
I highly recommend reading Secretary Gate's memoir about being the Secretary of Defense for Bush Jr. and Obama. There is so much at stake that very few people ever talk about. https://bookshop.org/p/books/duty-memoirs-of-a-secretary-at-...
Fighter pilots aren't retiring from the military to fly private jets. They're graduating into executive roles that pay enough to buy a plane. Aside from the thrill of flying forbidden planes and patriotism, people cut out for and trained to be fighter pilots are undervaluing themselves in the military.
But real change there is going to require boots on the ground. And none of the players in the region want that. So, we just spend a $80,000 on a missile for a guy to shoot that doesn't make that in a year at a guy that doesn't make that in a lifetime.
Or bombing their sponsors. I’m not an advocate of war with Iran. But it makes more sense than blowing up desert mountains.
Houthis are bombing unarmed civilian ships in the Red Sea. This makes zero sense for Yemen. But it does, politically, for the Houthis. Put another way, the extremists in one government are bombing another country because of what the extremists in that country are up to.
The Houthis are a belligerent in a civil war with multiple sides [1], none of which could stand without external backing. They're not a ragtag group of rebels. But they're also not the government of Yemen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemeni_civil_war_(2014%E2%80%9...
> Apply these best practices to your devices and online accounts.
> 1. Use only end-to-end encrypted communications.
> Adopt a free messaging application for secure communications that guarantees end-to-end encryption, such as Signal or similar apps.
https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/guidance-mo...
That and the deliberate lack of record keeping.
~ https://www.wired.com/story/heres-what-happened-to-those-sig...> That and the deliberate lack of record keeping.
That part seems like speculation. How would we even know if records were kept? If records were kept, they'd be classified.
> Attorneys suing the United States government over its use of vanishing Signal messages
That seems very much like the concern is about the use of Signal, so the fact that CISA recommends it is very relevant.
And since this info was leaked to the press, there is clearly someone with access who he should not have trusted. Do you really think the security breach in this case came from his wife or brother?
I guess that's a reference to some fictional "Wilhoit's Law", right? I had to look it up. Turns out it's just a partisan Internet snipe from a classical music composer originally posted in the comments on a blog[1].
That sums up the case against Hegseth nicely. Just a partisan attack without substance, sustained only by ignorance.
1: https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservative...
And now he's adding his family into the mix?
> Do you really think the security breach in this case came from his wife or brother
I don't think it's out of the question.
CISA recommends Signal, but it is not an approved tool to share classified information. That's what SCIFs are for.
Also those recommendations from the CISA recommend to use password managers...like Lastpass and 1Password and others, who had multiple security breaches.
If this is the type of Cybersecurity the US government applies to day to day work, its much easier to understand the field day North Korean and Chinese hackers seem to have all the time.
https://www.upguard.com/blog/lastpass-vulnerability-and-futu...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2024/08/07/critical...
But let's assume you're right and it's bad advice. The objection in the OP isn't that there was a breach. It's just exploiting the perception that using Signal is somehow wrong, and suggesting that it is a sign that Hegseth is incompetent.
So it's rather important to know that using Signal is recommended by the government's own experts (even if those experts were wrong, hypothetically).
Those guidelines are called FedRAMP, and Signal is not FedRAMP certified.
Also, I don't know for sure, but there was a link and discussion here not long ago saying that Signal is pre-installed and widely used at the CIA.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43478091
Sure, because senior government officials sometimes do things outside of their official capacity. If a senior government official's communications with their therapist or their lawyer e.g. are compromised, this could leave them vulnerable to blackmail. That's bad for everyone.
Re: other post about use of Signal, I'm not commenting on that post and/or that issue. I'm not expressing an opinion either way on whether it's relevant to this issue. I just want to point out that FedRAMP exists, and Signal isn't FedRAMP certified. If you don't think that is important (and a lot of reasonable people don't), you do you.
Also, please stop posting snarky and/or unsubstantive comments (like this one).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please clarify what you mean by this. Are you saying some HN users should abstain to comment on some threads?
"Exclusive: The White House is looking to replace Pete Hegseth as defense secretary"
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/21/nx-s1-5371312/trump-white-hou...