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What do you mean? None of this was publicly available until today. It's only available now, because a journalist reported it. In my opinion, a journalist should have never been in a position to report this story or any details they did not report on. I do not find solace that the journalist either chose not to, or was unable to, report precise mission details to the public. If I was an adversarial journalist writing a story about this administration in these circumstances, then I would also not print mission details.
A contribution to the successful mission was the journalist, who should not have been there, didn't go to Twitter and scream from the rooftops that JDAMs were falling on Target 3 in Aden from 15,000 feet at 12:00PM local time. This was good for the journalist, because the journalist would be in jail most likely. I would not expect detailed flight plans or powerpoint mission briefings were shared by the Secretary of Defense in a big group chat, but it seems very reasonable to me that targets, times, weapons were shared with these individuals, and it seems reasonable to me that these are things you do not want to go public. Since journalists have a job to make things go public officials should be careful what they share with them. It does not seem like they were particularly careful in this instance.
For myself, "we probably could not have been hurt that bad from our colossal fuck up" is about as comforting as "well nothing bad happened so it's fine." Procedures are created to minimize colossal fuck ups and bad happenings. Next in line is "well the enemy is small and weak and can't harm us anyway." I think this is a stupid, dangerous mindset to humor when doing something as serious as warfare, and there are many historical examples of this mindset contributing to defeat.
But it doesn't say that. In fact, when they talk about any actually sensitive military planning type things, they explicitly refer anybody in the group to an appropriate channel:
That's how they started out. But the article later says people (including SECDEF) are posting clearly sensitive info, including the exact time of the strike. Which is a known hazard of trying to discuss unclassified parts of classified things in an unclassified environment, which is why in general that's discouraged (though political appointees in particular probably do it all the time).
Well today we had congressional testimony where they claim there was nothing secretive shared, and that signal was approved for the type of use they were doing.
So maybe everybody is lying. Certainly everybody involved here has an incentive to lie.
As others have pointed out, several of the people in the chat (including the SECDEF) are the original classification authorities for the informations shared, so in some sense if they say it isn't classified it isn't, even if it's the sort of thing that would typically be classified. But that's a technicality; it may make it legal (as far as classified information goes) but it doesn't make it not-stupid. As for using Signal, my understanding is that's a violation of the Federal Records Act (because it doesn't keep records), but I'm not familiar enough to say there isn't a loophole.
Looks like Goldberg released the chats and, yeah, what Hegseth posted was inappropriate.
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