After all, no one died...
2 Top Leaders of Air Force Pushed Out After Inquiry
By THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON — The Air Force’s senior civilian official and its highest-ranking general were ousted by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Thursday following an official inquiry into the mishandling of nuclear weapons and components, an episode that Mr. Gates called an indication of systemic problems in the Air Force.
The Air Force secretary, Michael W. Wynne, and the service’s chief of staff, Gen. T. Michael Moseley, were forced to resign after the inquiry found that the latest incident reflected “a pattern of poor performance” in securing sensitive military components, Mr. Gates said at a Pentagon briefing.
So deep and serious are the problems, Mr. Gates said, that he has asked a former defense secretary, James R. Schlesinger, to head “a senior-level task force” to recommend improvements in the safekeeping of weapons, delivery vehicles and other sensitive items.
Never before has a defense secretary ousted both a service secretary and a service chief, according to senior Pentagon officials. Since taking office 18 months ago, Mr. Gates has made accountability of theme of his tenure. He has also fired senior Army officials, after disclosures of shoddy conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the service’s premier medical facility for wounded soldiers.
“Our policy is clear,” Mr. Gates said. “We will ensure the complete physical control of nuclear weapons, and we will properly handle the associated components at all times. It is a tremendous responsibility, and one we must and will never take lightly.”
The inquiry involving the Air Force was an effort to determine how four high-tech electrical nosecone fuses for Minuteman nuclear warheads were sent to Taiwan in place of helicopter batteries. The mistake was discovered in March — a year and a half after the erroneous shipment.
Most troubling, a senior Pentagon official said in advance of the briefing, was that little had been done to improve the security of the nuclear weapons infrastructure after it was disclosed last year that the Air Force unknowingly let a B-52 bomber fly across the United States carrying six armed nuclear cruise missiles.
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"recommend improvements"?
More spin... the security measures already in place are quite adequate; the task force needs to address why those measures were willfully circumvented. People need to go to jail over this stuff.
That's jaw dropping. I don't
That's jaw dropping. I don't think relieving a service chief AND service secretary of duty has ever happened in the entire history of the U.S. Armed Forces. I don't know what happened with the nose cones, but I do know what happened with the "bent arrow" incident at Barksdale AFB prior to this latest action. The squadron commander, group commander, and wing commander were all relieved of duty, along with several senior NCOs, and the entire wing lost its nuclear weapons handling certification and had to undergo retraining. Those Airmen who loaded the wrong weapons on the B-52 are somewhere wishing they could disappear off the face of the earth right now. There won't be another one of those incidents for several hundred years.
I know that I sometimes have
I know that I sometimes have an odd sense of humor but I laughed out loud when I initially read these stories because I think they revealed not incompetence, but the inherent folly and utterly predictable screw-ups that will occur when human beings are being asked to keep track of all the myriad weapons and weapons systems our military owns. It is not for nothing that the acronym SNAFU originated with the military in World War II.
"Most troubling, a senior Pentagon official said in advance of the briefing, was that little had been done to improve the security of the nuclear weapons infrastructure after it was disclosed last year that the Air Force unknowingly let a B-52 bomber fly across the United States carrying six armed nuclear cruise missiles."
There is no fail safe method to prevent this from ever happening again. It will happen again and it will happen sooner rather than later.
You're right pt. There
You're right pt. There wasn't a problem with the infrastructure. The problem was that somebody didn't pay attention to what they were doing, and no one caught their mistake. That's a result of either poor training, poor procedure, or both. I'm pretty sure that's being remedied. But I'm also pretty sure that no one will be making that particular mistake again anytime soon.
You might be right Solar
You might be right Solar Soul but the law that governs the repetition of physically mundane tasks virtually guarantees that some variation of this screw up will occur again. Sooner or later, a few thousand Americans are going to be killed as a result of one of these mistakes.