Signal Failure

In what can only be described as a staggering feat of strategic incompetence, the Trump White House has managed to mistake an encrypted messaging app for a military strategy simulator – and in the process, texted top-secret Yemen war plans to a journalist. You couldn’t make it up. But then again, with this lot, you don’t need to.

Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the usual rogue’s gallery of political mediocrities were apparently coordinating airstrikes against Houthi targets in Yemen using Signal – yes, the same app people use to arrange surprise birthday drinks. Only in the fever dream of Trump’s America could national security be outsourced to a group chat.

Enter stage left: Michael Waltz, National Security Advisor and living proof that ex-Green Berets don’t necessarily make great admin assistants. In a masterstroke of digital ham-fistedness, he accidentally adds Jeffrey Goldberg – editor-in-chief of The Atlantic – to the group chat. Within minutes, the nation's classified military playbook is effectively forwarded to the press. This wasn’t a hack, mind you. This wasn’t cyberwarfare. This was someone hitting the wrong contact. The fate of Middle Eastern diplomacy, brought low by fat fingers and poor contact management.

Frankly, we should count ourselves lucky he didn’t accidentally add Putin. Though one suspects that if he had, half the chat would’ve simply read “as discussed” anyway.

Naturally, the chat thread read like something between a Tom Clancy knock-off and a sixth-form debate club. Vance wanted to delay the strikes to better align with European PR and protect the oil markets. Hegseth – apparently under the impression he was auditioning for Call of Duty: Joint Chiefs Edition – pushed for immediate action to “restore deterrence,” seemingly forgetting that deterrence tends to work better when the enemy doesn’t get a copy of your battle plan in advance.

When caught, the response from the administration was as farcical as the incident itself. Hegseth denied war plans were shared, insisting “nobody was texting war plans,” as if the chat was all emojis and cat gifs. Trump, never one to miss a chance to defend incompetence, brushed it off, praising his team’s “transparency” – which, fair play, is one way to describe leaking top-secret operations to the press.

The fallout? Predictable outrage from Democrats, who for once didn’t even need to exaggerate. Chuck Schumer called it a “spectacular intelligence failure,” though frankly, it’s hard to call something a failure when intelligence never entered the equation in the first place. And now, with the NSC scrambling to investigate itself and Signal chats presumably being rebranded as ‘Top Secret Command Centres,’ we’re left with the bitter realisation that a good number of America’s most powerful officials couldn’t organise a piss-up in a Pentagon brewery.

This is what happens when you treat government like a reality show and appoint yes-men, ideologues, and glorified YouTubers to positions of global consequence. They don’t just undermine institutions – they humiliate them. With every blunder, every autocorrected disaster, they remind the world that the adults have well and truly left the room.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are left staring into the digital abyss, wondering how long before someone forwards the nuclear codes to a group titled “Weekend BBQ?” Or maybe they already have.