Reports the leakage of loss of US military pilots chat Angeles

The violation of the intelligence was quite serious, the current and former hunting pilots said. But the refusal of the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to recognize that it should not have disclosed sensitive information on when the American hunting drivers would have attacked the sites in Yemen, they said, it was even worse.

In the aerial bases, in the vectors of aircraft “ready” and in the communities near the military bases this week, the news that the high officials of the Trump administration discussed the plans for an imminent attack on the signal, a commercial messaging app, they made angry and disconcerting men and women who aired on behalf of the United States.

The incorrect inclusion of the head of the Atlantic in the chat and the insistence of Mr. Hegseth of not having done anything wrong by revealing the secret plans overturning decades of military doctrine on operational security, a dozen aeronautics and drivers of the Marina fighters have said.

Worse still, they said, it is that in the future, they can no longer be sure that the Pentagon are focused on their safety when they flock to cockpit.

“The central point on aviation safety is that you must have humility to understand that you are imperfect, because everyone is ruined. Everyone makes mistakes,” said Lieutenant John Gadzinski, a former F-14 Marina pilot who made a fighting missions from aircraft vectors in the Persian Gulf. “But in the end, if you can’t admit when you are wrong, you will kill someone because your ego is too big.”

He and other drivers said that every day from Monday, when the Atlantic published an article on the dissemination of the chat, they had brought a new extraordinary revelation. The news came for the first time that Mr. Hegseth had put operational sequencing, or flight programs, for the f/A-18 Calabroni who aimed at the Houthi militia in Yemen on March 15 in the chat of the unre nice signal group, which included several other high officials.

“We intentionally share plans with people who do not need to know,” said a navy pilot F/A-18, which has frequently flown on a mission in the Middle East. “Do not share what time we should show on a goal. You don’t want telegraph that we are about to introduce ourselves to someone’s door; this is putting your crew at risk.” He and many other current and ex drivers spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals from the Pentagon and the allies of President Trump.

But then Mr. Hegseth’s initial response came to dissemination. He attacked Mr. Goldberg as an “so -called journalist” and sought refuge in a semantic discussion, saying that he had never revealed “war plans”.

So Wednesday, the Atlantic published the real text of what he had written, at 11:44 on the day of the attack, in the group chat: “1215et: launch of F-18 (1st strike package)”, sent a Hegseth message, about 30 minutes before it happened. “1345: the 1st Strike window begins” Based on trigger “(the Target terrorist is @the well -known position, so it should be punctual).”

This text was two hours before the strikes.

Hegseth added: “1410: more launch of F-18 (2nd strike package).” And then, “1536: the 2nd F-18 strike begins-even the first Tomahawks-based tomahawks was launched.”

That text gave almost three hours’ notice.

On Wednesday, Mr. Hegseth defined his dissemination as a “team update” to “provide real -time updates, general updates in real time” to keep Trump’s national security officials informed.

But the details of the military operations are generally kept so secret that even the members of the service that take them are “locked up”. This sometimes means that they are not authorized to speak with others who do not need to know, let alone tell the people of the plans, the combat drivers interviewed said. In “ready -made” aircraft vectors, where flight squadrons spend their time when they are not in the air, the crews burn the instructions to destroy them.

“It is important to understand the degree in which Oopsec is involved in every aspect of your life on a aircraft carrier,” said the former captain of the navy Joseph Capalbo, who commanded an aerial wing of the carrier and two f/a-18 squadrons, in reference to operational security. “The Red Sea operations are conducted in complete silence – nobody is talking on the radio. Because everything can be listened to by someone.”

An ex -Air Force fighters pilot, Magg. Anthony Bourke, added: “When operating safety is disclosed, people can be killed”. He said that “these things are not taken lightly. I have never met anyone in the army that does not know”.

Mr. Hegseth, a former Fox News Weekend conductor, was a national guard infantry.

Cmr. Parker Kuldau, a former marine pilot f/a-18, called Mr. Hegseth’s dissemination, and the subsequent response to them, “exasperating”.

“It is so beyond what I would expect from anyone in the army,” said commander Kuldau, who also flew combat missions in the Middle East. “The idea that the defense secretary, who should know better, has done so, is only stunning.”

Officials of the Senior Defense Department and military analysts say that Houthi have aerial defenses, provided by Iran, who can affect American war planes.

“The Houthi received different types of surface missiles in the Iranian air designed to be able to involve the combat jets, even at high altitudes,” said Fabian Hinz, a military analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

In fact, Houthi rebelled for the first time in surface missiles in the air against an F-16 combat jet on February 19, said a high American official. The missiles were missing the fighter. The Houthi have demolished several Air Force drones that fly more slowly.

The Trump administration insisted on the fact that none of the chat information was classified and Mr. Hegseth and other officials said that it was not a “war plan”.

Sean Parnell, the Pentagon spokesman, declared in response to an investigation by the New York Times that the chat of Signal “to which it refers from the Atlantic was not a forum for official planning and the execution of military operations, which also provided for joint staff and leading leadership of joint force”.

The chat included vice -president JD Vance; Secretary of State Marco Rubio; the national security councilor, Michael Waltz; And others, but not the President of the General General Heads of Staff, Adm. Christopher Graty, the highest rank military official.

Parnell said that “military leadership is often not included in political meetings”.

The vice adm

“Assuming that the temporal sequence and the information reported is true, the probability of anything comes to anyone who could have done something in such a short time was very low,” said Admiral Dongan. “In the end our planes were not demolished and no US service staff was injured or dead.”

But a former official of the Senior Defense Department with military experience stated that the text of Mr. Hegseth who describes the launch times and the type of strike plane were, in fact, classified information that could have jeopardized the life of the pilots if they had been released or obtained.

A former commander of the navy f/a-18 Squadron also stated that the pilots who flew combat missions would consider the content of the classified information of the text of Mr. Hegseth. Revealing the details in the text was “extremely knight,” said the former pilot.

If the Houthis had learned the precise time of the strikes and which would have been conducted by attack planes with vectors in the northern Red Sea, they could have repositioned and prepare the aerial defenses that have already demolished several American drivers piloted at a distance, said the former Navy driver.

Although Mr. Hegseth rejected the risks for the drivers of the Navy who flew those attack missions, the videos released by the Central Command of the United States tell a different story.

Some of the f/a-18 Calabrones shown by taking off from the aircraft carrier Uss Harry S. Truman in the Red Sea were armed with 500 pound bombs and 1,000 pounds that could be dropped well only within the radius of the air defenses of the Houthi.

Greg Jaffe AND John Ismail Contributed relationships.