On March 15, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared sensitive details about an imminent attack on Houthi rebels in Yemen — including timing and targets — on Signal, an unclassified commercial app. On Monday, a journalist revealed he had been accidentally added to this Signal group. In the days since, the story has snowballed into the familiar Washington blame game, with many Democrats, including Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, calling on Hegseth to resign.

But put politics aside and there’s another, far more important place we should look: to our troops. They’re the ones whose lives are endangered through such recklessness, and they should have a place in this national conversation.

From our founding, military secrecy has been key to national survival and soldiers’ safety. During the American Revolution, on Dec. 23, 1776, just before an engagement at Trenton, Gen. George Washington wrote to a subordinate on the impending surprise attack: “For heaven’s sake keep this to yourself, as the discovery of it may prove fatal to us.” To reinforce the sentiment throughout the ranks, Washington ordered“a profound silence … on pain of Death.”

Two hundred and forty-eight years later, in that Signal group chat, Hegseth echoed those concerns. “I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC,” he texted to more than a dozen administration members (and one journalist) through the Signal app on March 14. The abbreviation refers to “operational security,” the practice of keeping the mission secret so as not to jeopardize the troops involved. That same day, the Defense Department reportedly warned personnel not to use Signal because it is a target of Russian hacking.

Protecting operational details is prudent, as shown by the backlash after it became public knowledge that Hegseth, the vice president and other top Trump administration officials were so careless with military lives. A retired general from the Iraq war shared, “my father was killed in action flying night-trail interdiction over the Ho Chi Minh Trail,” and the secretary of Defense “has released information that could have directly led to the death of an American fighter pilot.”

The secretary of Defense leads what amounts to the world’s most lethal weapon, with millions of armed personnel and hundreds of thousands of civilians in support. Many millions of veterans and retirees like myself pray for the success of whoever holds that office.

To direct the Pentagon is to direct the largest organization on the planet. It is an awesome responsibility, perhaps too much for any one person. Hegseth himself once wrote a book lionizing President Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech, which includes the line: “There is no effort without error.” For a secretary of Defense, mistakes are certain. Some are fatal.

The mistake here was to choose convenience over protocol — or lawlessness over accountability — which placed additional risk on troops who face the harshest consequences.

The hopeful news is that Hegseth ought to be well positioned to learn from the episode. His most recent book, “The War on Warriors,” repeatedly valorizes “normal dudes.” He calls them his “key constituency” and asserts that “normal dudes have always fought, and won, our wars.” While some would word it otherwise — substitute “regular people” for “normal dudes” — his expressed concern for those in the ranks is spot-on.

Also, Hegseth’s been especially hard on those at the top. In the same book, he writes: “I heard it from every soldier I spoke with for this book, dozens and dozens. They don’t agree on everything. But the one thing they do agree on is that US military leadership has an integrity and accountability problem.”

That’s Hegseth’s predicament. He clearly cares about troops. He clearly made a mistake. But now he’s a part of U.S. military leadership, and the onus is on him to show the integrity and accountability he’s so recently demanded. If he does not handle his next steps well, then the leader who argued the loudest about removing double standards from the Pentagon will set a dangerous double standard.

Because everyone knows that any “normal dude” who did what Hegseth did would face immediate consequences. In fact, Hegseth’s subordinates launched an investigation on March 21 that promised if anyone is found “responsible for an unauthorized disclosure,” then the individual “will be referred to the appropriate criminal law enforcement entity for criminal prosecution.”

Hegseth himself said in 2016, discussing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server: “Any security professional — military, government or otherwise — would be fired on the spot for this type of conduct and criminally prosecuted for being so reckless with this kind of information.” Yet the attorney general said on Thursday that there is not likely to be an investigation into the administration’s breach of security protocols.

When the secretary of Defense won’t hold himself to the same standard as the colonels, captains and corporals down the chain of command, that’s a problem. Troop morale shoots straight down. While we have a measure for the nation’s consumer confidence, we don’t for our national security confidence. If we did, right now the latter might be cratering as much as the former. Without confidence, there’s no will to fight, and the will to fight may be the single most important factor in all combat.

That’s what’s at stake for Hegseth. President Trump may not relieve him, but the troops may not revere him — which is another kind of killshot at the Pentagon. In such a massive organization, the secretary can truly influence only a small span of subordinates, and the only way to really make things run well is to get full buy-in from everyone else by acting with integrity and demonstrating respect for the lives of military personnel.

It’s not just that. This scandal’s outcome must be far more than just modernizing “loose lips sink ships” to “Signal oops kill troops.” Hegseth must learn from this — and also go beyond to persuade millions of people that he has changed. There is simply no other viable option in an organization that sustains the world order and the sovereignty of our nation.

The savage logic of military service is that we trade lives for objectives. Sometimes those decisions are made and carried out in a matter of seconds. On Nov. 13, 2010, then-Lt. Gen. John Kelly (and later Trump chief of staff) gave a speech about the 2008 loss of two Marines in Iraq. The two were killed in a vehicle suicide attack while guarding their barracks. Miraculously, the detonation left intact a security camera that kept a record of the Marines’ last six seconds as the vehicle roared toward them.

While others ran, as Kelly recounted the recording showed, the two Marines “never stepped back. They never even started to step aside. They never even shifted their weight. With their feet spread shoulder width apart, they leaned into the danger, firing as fast as they could work their weapons.” Kelly continues: “The truck explodes. The camera goes blank. The two young men go to their God. Six seconds. Not enough time to think about their families, their country, their flag, or about their lives or their deaths, but more than enough time for two very brave young men to do their duty — into eternity. That is the kind of people who are on watch all over the world tonight — for you.”

Four days before he gave that speech, Kelly had lost his own son, killed in action in Afghanistan.

The one thing, the only thing, these troops ask is that those in leadership treat the sacrifices of these “regular people” with the utmost respect and never needlessly risk their lives.

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ML Cavanaugh is the author of the forthcoming book “ Best Scar Wins: How You Can Be More Than You Were Before.”@MLCavanaugh

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