Last week, the U.S. Defense Department’s inspector general announced a probe into Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s use of a group chat on the commercial messaging app Signal, rather than secure government channels, to discuss sensitive operational plans in the runup to recent U.S. airstrikes against the Yemen-based Houthis. The probe, which was launched in response to a bipartisan request from the Senate Armed Services Committee, underscores the seriousness with which both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, if not the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, are taking the national security implications of the incident, which risked the lives of military pilots undertaking the strikes.
Of more enduring concern, however, and largely lost in the ensuing controversy is what the Signal group chat revealed in terms of the Trump administration’s operational plans themselves: a strike on a civilian apartment building that reportedly killed 53 civilians in an effort to kill a single military commander, in a conflict of arguably little genuine military or political significance to U.S. national interests.
The strike itself, the reasoning behind it and the way in which senior Trump administration officials cheered as civilians died at best damages U.S. moral standing. But according to Amnesty International, the conversations that were laid bare in the Signal group chat also suggest the strike itself and the reasoning behind it may have violated the laws of armed conflict. If so, the Pentagon’s internal watchdogs have an opportunity to do more than just discuss communications strategy in their follow-up report—and congressional leaders should ask them to do so.