Pentagon pulls decades of classified documents after report raises questions about leaks during Iran war

The Pentagon removed decades of classified military documents from an internal digital system this week, following a report that detailed deep concerns from senior military officers about the ongoing war in Iran. Per The Washington Post, three people familiar with the matter said the documents were pulled from the Secretary of Defense Orders Book, a section of the classified network known as SIPRNet that is used daily by defense officials and U.S. troops.

The move came just days after the Post reported that four senior military leaders, Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, Gen. Francis Donovan, Adm. Samuel Paparo, and Adm. Daryl Caudle, had privately warned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth about the risks of extending large scale military operations against Iran. It was a rare and significant shift in how the Defense Department manages its most sensitive internal data, and it made clear that plugging leaks had become the top priority for leadership this week.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell declined to discuss the removal directly with the Post, but he did not deny that it happened. He was considerably more vocal about the original report itself, accusing the newspaper of a crime for publishing what he called highly classified assessments from the Secretary’s orders book, and calling it a betrayal of the force.

This wasn’t just routine maintenance

The Secretary of Defense Orders Book details the location and availability of U.S. warships, military units, and weapons systems, and it’s also where top generals and admirals can formally register disagreement with orders from Trump and Hegseth through a process known as non-concurring, even while they carry those orders out anyway.

Removing decades of that material from a system troops and officials rely on daily is not a small administrative tweak. It’s a calculated response to what Pentagon leadership clearly views as a vulnerability in how sensitive information moves through its own ranks, even if it makes life harder for the analysts and officers who use that archive to do their jobs.

It remains unclear whether the removed documents are still accessible to authorized personnel through another system, or whether they’ve been moved somewhere more restricted entirely. That ambiguity is part of what’s fueling concern among people who track military planning, since losing quick access to that kind of institutional memory could complicate decision-making even for people with the clearance to see it.

The Trump administration has taken several other steps recently aimed at cutting down on leaks to the media. Whether any of the pulled SDOB material eventually finds its way back into the system remains to be seen, but for now the files are offline, and the Pentagon is the only one who knows exactly where they went.