Military Pilots Turn Against Pete Hegseth Following Signal Chat Leak

Current and former pilots from the US military are speaking out about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his reckless behavior exposed through the Signalgate scandal. These pilots say that Hegseth’s recklessness could get pilots (and other members of the military) killed, and they say that there’s no place in the military for negligence of this caliber. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Military fighter pilots, both current and former, have now turned against defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, following the ongoing fallout from Signal Gate. And what these current and former pilots had to say indicates that they're not necessarily only upset that they were discussing these classified or, you know, top secret military attack plans in a, you know, group chat. It's the response from Hegseth and by extension, this entire administration that these pilots are off about. They spoke to the New York Times and a piece published late last week, and one of them said this, the whole point about aviation safety is that you have to have the humility to understand you are imperfect because everybody screws up. Everybody makes mistakes, but ultimately, if you can't admit when you're wrong, you are going to kill somebody because your ego is too big.

That is the perfect statement for this. This entire administration from the moment this story broke a week ago has tried to pass the blame, right? Oh, somehow it's Jeffrey Goldberg's fault. Mike Waltz went out on Fox News and said maybe, maybe he got himself at, maybe he disguised his number. Mike Waltz. You added him to the group. Dude, you did that and you're already trying to say that I, I couldn't have made a mistake. This guy screwed up. You got John Ratcliffe blaming Biden, which I will talk about in a later segment. But all of these people trying to either blame the reporter for getting in there, blaming the Biden administration, blaming other people. Nobody wants to take any responsibility for this massive violation of the public's trust, of the military's trust and of our allies trust. We have foreign countries that have already said, listen, I may not share intelligence with you anymore.

This is so egregious. So yeah, this is a big issue. Another pilot said, quote, when you disclose operational security, people can get killed. I mean, it's that simple. You've got people on this group chat that should not have even been involved in it. Let you, not even talking about the reporter, but other people who didn't need to be involved in it on an app that could be hackable because again, uh, these people's passwords, their email addresses, their cell phone numbers were later found online. So yeah, that's, that seems a little dangerous. People could have hacked into this and seen what was gonna happen. Another one who's a current pilot said quote, we intentionally don't share plans with people who don't need to know you don't share what time we're supposed to show up over a target. You don't wanna

Telegraph that we're about to show up, uh, to show up on someone's doorstep that's putting your crew at risk within the military. And Hegseth should know this because he was in the military. There is this overwhelming sense of comradery, you know, of, of, of, of brotherhood, of sisterhood protecting one another. We're all in this together. Yes, we're out there protecting the United States. Yes, we put our lives on the line, but we try to protect our own as much as humanly possible. So for HEGs to act so recklessly and potentially put lives in danger, that has shaken the core of the military.