The US Defense Secretary is under pressure due to a succession of scandals

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The “Signalgate” affair, which hit the headlines nine months ago, recently resurfaced with the publication of an independent report concluding that the use of this messaging application to discuss imminent attacks in Yemen “created an operational security risk”.

The military campaign launched by Washington since September in the Caribbean and the Pacific, presented as a fight against drug trafficking – notably the attacks of September 2 which killed men who survived a first bombing – fueled opposition to Hegseth.

The controversy has sparked calls for his resignation from some Democrats, although his retention in Donald Trump’s cabinet does not appear to be in immediate danger.

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Hegseth “finds himself in a tough spot again, but appears to retain Trump’s confidence despite losing support from some Republicans. I don’t think he’s in an untenable position,” said Mark Cancian, a former U.S. Army colonel and analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Regardless, “if there is another incident, the White House may lose patience,” he predicted, calling the current situation “very embarrassing.”

The head of the Pentagon is “on the edge of the knife”, and Trump has “a Secretary of Defense who poses a lot of problems for him”, summarized Jim Townsend, senior official of the same department under the presidency of Democrat Barack Obama. If something “very irks the Republican Party” or its more pro-Trump wing, “they will probably try to impeach him,” he predicted.

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The Signal affair resurfaced last Thursday with the publication of an independent report from the Pentagon’s inspector general. According to his findings, Hegseth put his own troops at risk by revealing, during a group chat among senior U.S. officials on the app, the timing of planned airstrikes in Yemen just hours before they were carried out, as well as information about the military equipment used.

Through his actions, he “created an operational security risk that could have harmed the pilots and caused the mission to fail,” the report said.

The story exploded in late March, when The Atlantic magazine revealed that military plans had been shared within a Signal group to which the publication’s editor-in-chief had inadvertently been added.

The head of the Pentagon is also under surveillance for American attacks against suspected drug traffickers, in particular for the second stage of an operation carried out in early September against an already destroyed ship and during which the two survivors died.

American senators were able to see images of this operation last Thursday, behind closed doors.

— What I saw in that room was one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen in my entire career in public service — said Democratic Representative Jim Himes, describing “an attack by the American military on shipwrecked people.”

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Republican Rep. Tom Cotton, in turn, defended the sequence of bombings against the ship as “a completely legitimate and necessary decision.” When asked several times Saturday at an event in California if he intended to release this video, Hegseth responded:

— We are reviewing the procedure and we will see — he declared. — No matter what we decide to disclose, we must act with great responsibility.

The Secretary of Defense and the White House reiterated that the second salvo was ordered by operational command and not Hegseth.