The Conservative Cave
Current Events => General Discussion => Topic started by: Chris_ on November 11, 2014, 02:03:04 PM
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Yesterday, it was some asshole at Salon.com. Today it's Mother Jones, but don't call them unpatriotic. You might hurt their feelings.
Death Wears Bunny Slippers
Cheating is just one symptom of what Lt. Colonel Jay Folds, then the commander of the nuclear missile wing at North Dakota's Minot Air Force Base, called "rot" in the atomic force. Last November, Associated Press reporter Robert Burns obtained a RAND study commissioned by the Air Force. It concluded that the typical launch officer was exhausted, cynical, and distracted on the job. ICBM airmen also had high rates of sexual assault, suicide, and spousal and child abuse, and more than double the rates of courts-martial than Air Force personnel as a whole.
The morale problems were well known to Michael Carey, the two-star general who led the program at the time the cheating was revealed. Indeed, he pointed them out to other Americans during an official military cooperation trip to Moscow, before spending the rest of his three-day visit on a drunken bender, repeatedly insulting his Russian military hosts and partying into the wee hours with "suspect" foreign women, according to the Air Force's inspector general. He later confessed to chatting for most of a night with the hotel's cigar sales lady, who was asking questions "about physics and optics"—and thinking to himself: "Dude, this doesn't normally happen." Carey was stripped of his command in October 2013.
The embarrassments just keep coming. Last week, the Air Force fired two more nuclear commanders, including Col. Carl Jones, the No. 2 officer in the 90th Missile Wing at Wyoming's Warren Air Force Base, and disciplined a third, for a variety of leadership failures, including the maltreatment of subordinates. In one instance, two missileers were sent to the hospital after exposure to noxious fumes at a control center—they had remained on duty for fear of retaliation by their commander, Lt. Col. Jimmy "Keith" Brown. This week, the Pentagon is expected to release a comprehensive review of the nuclear program that details "serious problems that must be addressed urgently."
In June 2006, the top-secret nose cone fuse assemblies of four Minuteman III missiles were accidentally shipped from Hill Air Force Base in Utah to Taiwan, which had requested helicopter batteries; the boxes sat for nearly two years before the Air Force, prompted by Taiwanese officials, finally acknowledged its error.
The next year, six hydrogen bombs from Minot went missing for a day and a half after a crew mistakenly loaded them onto a plane and flew them across the country. "It was an incredibly serious security lapse," Schlosser says. "The fact that nobody was asked to sign for the weapons when they were removed from the bunker, the fact that nobody in the loading crew or on the airplane even knew that the plane was carrying nuclear weapons, is just remarkable." A string of investigations concluded that the nuclear corps had lost its "zero defect" culture. In response, the Air Force launched a program to "sustain, modernize, and recapitalize its nuclear capability." What that meant in practice, Aaron says, was punishing the rank and file for past mistakes while the colonels swept the bigger problems under the rug.
Mother Jones (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/11/air-force-missile-wing-minuteman-iii-nuclear-weapons-burnout)