SignalGate 2.0 and the Casual Indifference to War

We recently learned that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shared details of impending drone strikes on Yemen in a group chat with his wife, brother and personal attorney. If this story sounds familiar, it’s because it comes just weeks after national security leaders—including Hegseth—accidentally added Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat.

The outrage is understandable. Why were military plans shared on an unsecured channel? Were U.S. personnel put at risk? Why did the president not respond strongly to this apparent breach? And of course, the attempted cover-up is making headlines, too.

Something else strikes me. Few seem angry that the government conducts offensive military operations in a country with which we are not formally at war. Headline after headline emphasizes the leaking of war plans—not the “war” itself.

I’ve studied conflict for over a decade. From terrorism and counterterrorism to the development of drone technology and how foreign intervention alters domestic institutions, I know what war does. It kills. It destroys property and devastates economies. It enables people to do the unthinkable—to rape, torture, maim children, and use them as soldiers. War destroys.

Yet, our secretary of defense tells his brother about coming strikes with the same gravity as he’d relay his grocery list.

What’s equally jarring is the public reaction. People aren’t aghast that U.S. drones are killing people in Yemen. People aren’t batting an eye over officials bypassing Congress’s war powers.

We are more concerned about the data leak than about what the data contains.

This indifference isn’t new. In my research, I’ve documented how Americans have become desensitized to war. We’ve been in some state of conflict for more than 93 percent of the calendar years between 1775 and 2018.

I’ve studied how the typical American is constantly exposed to pro-military, pro-U.S. foreign policy messaging. For example, television shows and movies are often subject to editorial review by the Department of Defense in exchange for using military hardware and personnel. We see that messaging in sports, too. In football, we have “bombs,” “blitzes” and “trenches” around the line of scrimmage. We “blow away” the opposing team. We have military homecomings on the pitcher’s mound or centerfield and celebrate without ever asking why our military personnel are deployed in the first place.

Meanwhile, modern technology allows us to easily wash our hands of misgivings.

Drone technology lets officials sell us on the supposed—and false—“surgical precision” of drone strikes, effectively sanitizing the violence. We “eliminate” or “neutralize” “high-value targets” and “combatants.” Never mind that intelligence failures are common and that many of those “combatants” were labeled as such because they happened to be “military-aged males,” or MAM. In other words, they were males aged 14-65 in a strike zone. And what of the civilians, the women and the children? Unfortunate “collateral damage.”

As a result, most of us don’t recognize America’s massive military boot print. How many Americans know the United States operates 750 military bases in more than 70 countries? How many know about the U.S. drone strikes conducted in the last five years in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and across Africa? Hundreds of civilians were killed.

For too long, we’ve failed to ask policymakers and ourselves the hard questions. We don’t need to ask about the leaks; we need to ask about the normalization of perpetual war. We need to ask about the moral costs of our government’s actions and about whether our proactive, military-forward policy is truly in our best interests.