Signal Chat Leak Angers U.S. Military Pilots
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
“The whole point about aviation safety is that you have to have the humility to understand that you are imperfect, because everybody screws up. Everybody makes mistakes,” said Lt. John Gadzinski, a retired Navy F-14 pilot who flew combat missions from aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf. “But ultimately, if you can’t admit when you’re wrong, you’re going to kill somebody because your ego is too big.”
That pilot's quote sets the stage in a way that confers an almost timeless quality.
Also, a Tomcat “driver?” Is that a thing?
Air Force nerd slang.
[edit] and I guess also naval aviator slang if they use it, too.
https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/p2joju/whats_the_...
There is no military position immune to dragging.
Couldn't agree more.
>Also, a Tomcat “driver?” Is that a thing?
Yup:
https://www.quora.com/I-am-told-that-an-F-15-pilot-was-calle...
To qualify, my usage of the term was intended with nothing but respect.
It also sounds cool as hell (IMHO), in similar vein to "gunslinger".
yes. F-14s were 2-seater cockpits and there was a radar/weapons officer and a pilot.
one person drove the bus and the other honked the horn.
In fact, they made the news a couple weeks ago:
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-spy-drone-retre...
It's admittedly bizarre to have our old aircraft operated by a foreign adversary that's supposedly intercepting our newer, unmanned aircraft.
The "spy drone" is likely MQ-9, which is large, slow and somewhat clunky, and routinely shot down by the Yemeni Air Force.
This is nonsense. You should read a history of Iran or at least the wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Reza_Pahlavi
Reza played the powers against one another. At times the US dictated what happened. At times Reza had more leverage and dictated terms to the US. It certainly was not a US vassal and did plenty of things that annoyed the US. Heck, the US didn't even control the oil industry in Iran, Britain did.
MI6 and Mossad were as involved in the 1953 assassination of Mossadegh as the CIA.
Did you read it?
It’s a play on the rumours that Musk abuses his ketamine prescription. Note that I’m not advocating for the rumours. Merely explaining.
Elon's ketamine abuse is well documented. He's also boasted about taking it.
But they won't do the mass firings designed to incapacitate it.
Pilots are among our most highly-trained warfighters. They have ample opportunity in industry. And they're smart. If SecDef is guiding counterfire to your takeoffs (and then finding himself unable to apologise for it) you will reconsider whether what you're doing is the best use of your life.
The explicit aim of DOGE was demotivation. That's exactly what this debacle has done.
I’d write a witty blog article about it if I had one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Countdown_(film)
I like to think this development will inadvertently alter the course of history such a way that it manages to make HN less censored.
I wonder how they'll react when ordered to attack American citizens on American soil just because they offended Trump's fragile ego or psychotic xenophobia. Judges, journalists, protestors, "gays", anyone with brown skin? Here's hoping they'll refuse, but who really knows for sure?
Same way the Department of Justice did [1][2]. The honourable ones step down. Eventually, someone obeys.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_Massacre
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_U.S._Department_of_Justic...
"Yeee-haw america fuck yeah"
Maybe it is finally dawning on the murricans themselves that they really are the assholes the rest of the world think of them as
Playing through the story, the player will get a mission to burn a farm (for reasons I don't remember) with Sam's help. This culminates in a large explosion that sets most of the farm ablaze, with Sam Becker yelling in his thick, German accent, "Fuck yeah! America!" while the player character drives away from the scene. (This particular moment was hilarious to me, hence why I like the character.)
This administration really puts a spotlight on that character. But not in a funny way.
Hegseth’s consequence free, ego-first behavior is about what one would expect from a talking head turned secretary of defense. So much for merit.
Any enlisted person or junior officer would lose their job and face federal charges.
Said the guy who flew 15000 miles away from his home to bombe a foreign political figure and his family in his home because of a political disagreement
Put another way, Republicans are the untouchables. They always have been, and as Trump’s Third Term will show - no matter WHAT they do, “what are you going to do about it”!
Bitch and moan all you want, and downvote me to hell… and then what? And if you’re American, put you perspective in Greenland’s, Canada’s, Mexico’s point of view.
MAGA hasn’t figured it out yet:
Today Canada, tomorrow America.
Good luck America… you used to be cool, but now you’re just the high school bully who’s in his 30s still driving around his mum’s car while looking for kids to beat up for their lunch money:
“…compile the cost associated and levy them on the Europeans”
The reporter might, but no one else.
America welcomed it into WTC and gave business, IP, training and investment to get rich.
Either America wanted to exploit China or help it get rich. Which ones true?
It’s all conjectures, I’m not American (have relatives over there though, so have to keep up with the news), and not enough skin in the game. Just sad to see, as I’ve met incredible people throughout different parts of America.
And anyone familiar with the workings of governments and politicians would tell you the use of Signal/WhatsApp is pervasive throughout most of the world.
While there are secure private messengers available for governments to license, whoever is in charge of security is generally too paranoid or incompetent to license them. Or they license some homegrown piece of crap that no one uses.
The result is everyone being worse off. Politicians use public apps that are much less secure and illegal for that purpose and regular government workers being in the stone age. Or just accept the use of public apps and allow your entire government be dependent on the good will of a foreign company that can cripple you at the push of a button.
Hold up, we're not talking about politicians sharing dirty jokes, planning campaign rallies, or messaging a staffer to pick up their dry-cleaning here.
We're talking about a whole stack of problematic circumstances, where each detail makes it much rarer:
1. Using their personal phone for official business.
2. Engaged in a conspiracy to violate government record-keeping laws by deleting records of official business.
3. Where that official business involved classified information, the kind where soldiers are put in jail for leaking it.
4. Actively leak-bragging those classified details to coworkers with zero "need to know."
5. About regarding how their government is about to bomb an entire apartment building of civilians because they think one guy went inside.
Were the chats Secret? No. There was no “serious damage” to national security. Go down the list. At most it would be controlled unclassified material. CUI.
He's more unhinged day by day. He's taking big risks. He's betting tariffs will benefit US manufacturing but it's more likely to increase inflation. He's betting crippling universities and NIH/NSF and such will fix science somehow, but in reality it's more likely to drive competent researchers out of US.
Growing up we considered US government and it's officials as examples putting county above loyalty and wanted our own country's politicians to follow suit. The tables are turned and the highest offices in the US government are following third world country politics playbook.
> [As a polarizing figure] He has no choice but to value loyalty over competency
Technically true, but importantly the kind of "polarization" has nothing to do with partisan politics, it is self-generated by his own actions, and his problems retaining competent people are wayyy older than his 2015 entry into the Republican primaries.
He values "loyalty" because he needs people who aren't going to refuse or turn him in when he wants to break the law. A fair number have been convicted of it, like his CFO Weisselberg or his personal lawyer Michael Cohen.
> He's betting tariffs will benefit US manufacturing
No, he believes a trade-deficit means the US is "losing" profit to another country which is taking the value of trade.
He's imposing new taxes onto the American people because that's a readily-available lever for him to pull, as he extorts those other countries for favors. (He was even impeached for soliciting such favors before.)
> He's betting crippling universities and NIH/NSF and such will fix science somehow
I've never heard Trump even make the claim that the quality of US science and R&D needed fixing, and none of his recent actions are consistent with that explanation.
Instead, every illegal impoundment of federal funds can be traced to things like naive keyword searches for "diversity" or "women", or trying to punish/extort universities over DEI policies and transgender-athletes. Columbia's recent "academic receivership" has nothing to do with science.
Further evidence for this non-science motivation comes from how his administration started targeting people for their political views (i.e. violation of the First Amendment) to deport both permanent residents ("green-card" holders) and foreign students on valid visas.
But the bulls part is funny. He ows money to layers he employed. So they don't want to work for him again.
If a journalist wants to keep this rolling there are other angles to take. Make a listicale with all the different parts where the law was broken or operational security wasn't followed. Make an article about the people involved and why they were in this group chat. Write about what this means for other classified information.
They really want to make this into a story of military personnel vs Trumps team so they can avoid saying this is bad.
Because they still command near universal respect, even if the law lately unfortunately doesn't.
This is a group known for spewing dioxin over civilian populations, bombing weddings and hospitals, &c in large parts of the world. They inflict enormous violence at a huge distance, and unlike infantry they aren't forced to see the consequences of their actions up close.
Huge amounts of resources have been spent to make these people and what they do seem cool rather than cowardly and atrocious.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/02/01/the-u-s-mili...
A commercial app? I've never sent a complaint to a newspaper but this seems a little much. It is a free and open-source app, not commercial.
That company is then owned by a non-profit but technically you could argue it's commercial.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360057625692-In...
You couldn’t make this up pre llm hallucinations.