When OPSEC is just a word

The Atlantic shows how Trump’s national security team blurred strategy with spectacle.

By Brian O’Neill

When Jeffrey Goldberg posted on Monday his Atlantic exposé—revealing that Donald Trump’s national security advisers had debated airstrikes over a group chat that mistakenly included Goldberg—the collective reaction felt immediate. Gasps across Washington, groans from the national security community, giggles in Beijing and Moscow, and a familiar wave of unease among NATO allies.

What should have been a secure, tightly controlled national security meeting instead played out over the encrypted group chat app Signal—casual in tone, insecure in design, and, somehow, open to a journalist who had been added by mistake. Senior Trump administration officials, including the secretary of Defense and the vice president, debated airstrikes in Yemen not in the Situation Room, not even over a secure call, but on a commercial app never approved for classified use.

I’ve been in the rooms where these decisions are supposed to happen. Vaulted, windowless, stripped of distraction. Cellphones are left outside. Every chair is accounted for. Intelligence, legal, diplomatic, and military voices are all present. No one riffs. No one forgets who might be listening. The stakes—human lives—don’t allow for anything less.

Not this time.

Anyone who’s ever faced a Gold Star family or debriefed a mission gone wrong knows what operational discipline demands. You don’t assume secrecy—you enforce it. You don’t hope you’re secure—you verify it.

This group did the opposite.

And when the breach became public, the administration responded with indifference. The National Security Council confirmed the thread’s authenticity and praised it as “deep and thoughtful policy coordination.” There was no admission of fault. No signal that anything had gone wrong.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, confronted by reporters in Hawaii, dismissed the matter and then pivoted to attack the reporter inadvertently included in the chat, calling him a “so-called journalist.” What he didn’t explain: why an active military decision of this magnitude never warranted a secure call—using the secure phones on their respective desks—or even an in-person meeting at the White House.

The reaction from Congress followed the same script. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, normally quick to denounce bureaucracy, suddenly embraced it. “I’m told they’re doing an investigation… and that should be that,” he said, brushing off concerns. This, from a House preparing to hold hearings targeting judges for fulfilling their constitutional duties.

In this administration, when courts uphold checks and balances, it’s framed as tyranny. When a journalist is mistakenly included in a war-planning thread, it’s a paperwork error.

This isn’t about partisanship. It’s about standards.

I’ve seen careers ended for less. I’ve seen junior analysts scrutinized over whether a citation required a caveat. I’ve seen senior officers reprimanded for relaying unclassified timelines over the wrong network. These weren’t overreactions—they were reflections of a culture that understood what it meant to hold lives in your hands. One that assumed adversaries were always listening and behaved accordingly.

What this episode revealed is what happens when that culture is dismantled. National security became theater.

In one of the now-public messages, Hegseth laid out the communications strategy. “I think messaging is going to be tough . . . nobody knows who the Houthis are—which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.” That wasn’t a staffer rehearsing for cable news. That was the secretary of Defense outlining the justification for war.

When military deliberations read like a Twitter draft, when the secretary of Defense speaks in hashtags, and when strikes are green lit with emojis, the strategy is no longer strategic. It’s spectacle.

And the real scandal? It’s not treated as a scandal.

No calls for a closed hearing. No push to verify whether personal phones were used. No inquiry into whether records laws were violated or the Espionage Act implicated. Just a collective shrug from officials entrusted with the most serious decisions a government can make.

We can assume that this wasn’t a one-time failure. It was a glimpse behind the curtain—a group of officials handed the levers of national power, conducting themselves like undergrads assigned to simulate a war cabinet.

And if anyone still clings to the belief that the administration’s disdain for NATO is just posturing, the Signal thread should end that illusion.

“I just hate bailing Europe out again,” Vice President JD Vance wrote. “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC,” Hegseth replied.

One official added that the administration needs “to make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return . . . If the U.S. restores freedom of navigation at great cost, there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”

Notably absent from this planned shakedown: Israel and Russia—both beneficiaries of the same Suez shipping lanes. No discussion of what they owe. No demand for “remuneration.” This wasn’t a burden-sharing framework. It was grievance politics with global consequences.

The truth is that this national security team doesn’t view U.S. leadership as a duty. They see it as a burden—something to be monetized, leveraged, or cast off entirely unless someone pays up in cash, deference, or silence.

So NATO shouldn’t be surprised. This isn’t hyperbole. It’s the Trump administration’s worldview.

And the American public shouldn’t be either. Because this wasn’t about Signal, or apps, or emojis. It was about mindset. A mindset that replaces structure with performance and treats war as just another opportunity for content.

The only question left—one Congress must ask and that the public deserves answered—is how many more decisions of this magnitude are being made just like this: without the room, without the rigor, and without anyone remembering what’s at stake.

Brian O’Neill, a retired senior executive from the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center, is an instructor on strategic intelligence at Georgia Tech.

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