And it’s permissible to chop off a few of them for the greater good:
Four Air Force colonels have been relieved of their commands and more than 65 lower-ranking officers and airmen have been disciplined over a series of errors that led to a B-52 flight in August from North Dakota to Louisiana with six nuclear-armed cruise missiles that no one realized were under the plane’s wing.
“This was an unacceptable error that resulted in an unprecedented string of procedural failures,” Maj. Gen. Richard Y. Newton III, assistant deputy chief of staff for operations, said yesterday in reporting on a six-week Air Force probe. “Our investigation found that there has been an erosion of adherence to weapons handling standards” at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, where the flight began, and at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, Newton said.
Of course, this sort of holding the people responsible accountable for their mistakes is exactly the sort of thing conspirators would do!
To, you know: Cover teh conspiracy!1!!
But we’re not fooled.
Cui bono, eh? Eh?
Why not Minot?
Seems to me the USAF is going overboard to prove they take Nuke weapons safety seriously.
I can understand the crew and the Squadron / Wing commander. The rest seems like dramatic overkill.
And at that the weapons never left USAF hands.
It seems to me that the only way something like this could have happened is due to an absolutely lax chain of command that routinely ignored the nuclear SOPs. And since everybody involved with handling specials is responsible for strict adherence to those standards, and reporting violations, I think some of these people got off fairly lightly. Didn’t everyone have the same reaction I did? How in God’s name do you loose track of six specials?
Judging from my recent time hanging out with guys that wear bags to work and have electric plugs for their car engine blocks, that’s about what the AF guys on the staff level expected to happen. I had hoped for a slightly different outcome with respect to one aspect of the incident.
There are structural issues to think about for Big Air Force and the joint equivalent as well. My unclassified take is that nuclear weapons haven’t been exactly “sexy” for a long time (oh how I would go on about this in a rant in the correct venue), and you get what you inspect, not what you expect.
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As for cui bono, the answer is obvious, as I said to my wife the other night:
“Sonny, mon chére.”
I worked at General Dynamics/Hughes Missile Systems in San Diego from 1983-1993 and probably built the test equipment and/or the AGM-129A Advanced Cruise Missile (ACM) listed in the USAF major error.
When building this missile the structural engineers wanted a flying I beam, The Aero engineers wanted a football shape and the Radar cross section guys wanted the RAM a foot deep!
This was considered a “Black” program and at one time had over 7 billion invested in material,production, tooling, engines and support.
The primary contractor was the Convair division of General Dynamics in San Diego with McDonnell Douglas as an alternate in Titusville (sp) Florida.
Oh, yes, here’s the presser. Note that Minot’s 5th bomber wing commander, munitions commander and maintenance group commander, Barksdale’s 2nd Ops Group commander, and four other field grade/company grade guys lost their jobs. 8th AF (a guess?) is being combed over by 12th AF’s CG. 5th Bomb Wing is decertified–it’s off line for its wartime mission.
This is just more proof the USAF is in a death spiral. There are some really great people in the USAF, however… this latest event with the nukes… The top USAF lawyer not being a certified lawyer for years. Jill Metzger getting away free when anyone else would get a court martial. Generals running combat wings when in the old days colonels could do it. This of course while everyone else is downsized we have a “No general left behind act”. Hardly any recapitalization of airframes yet we buy gold plated nonsense for the USAF like the V-22. Recapitalizing stress on expensive short range fighters like the Buick of Stealth JSF when we need longer range theater strike assets that can also loiter longer for things like CAS. We can break and kill a first team IADS …. without USAF blowing money it doesn’t have on JSF. Buying 600 JASSMs and none of them can hit a target anywhere close to established standards for a program. I.E. our gold plated weapons testing sux and we still pencil whip it as “good to go” for production. No engine upgrade for the A-10 which is actually ….ahem… is a useful platform in the AOR. Not putting enough stress on the C-5 upgrades which will give better MC rates ( C-17 is great but can’t do it all i.e. certain outsized stuff ) Fini flights for generals using C-130s in the AOR. USAF bickering over who should control the C-27 and UAVs. The tanker fiasco. Spending money we don’t have on gay uniform changes. Rehiring retired USAF as “contractors” doing some jobs a GS could do where those “contractors” get big dollars and still don’t know the job they are going into and have to be trained by a GS. This is a nice rice bowl/old boy network going on. You pay for it. PowerPoint warriors that must have sat through the same damn slide every week on manning, hire way too many junior officers into the pipeline, and then the PowerPoint leaders discover one day a few years later they goof and have to fire a bunch of company grade officers en masse. That happened not too long ago. That is a very short list. The nuke weapon event was just a long chain of not investing in the weapons systems/people that are important for national security. There are other similar events going on like the nuke event, they just don’t have the obvious immediate lethal consequences. The USAF is in fact great on some levels but like the other services, it needs cash. A lot of it. It also needs to weed out some group thinkers or it is going to ride on even harder times.
Wow! ELP sounds more like an paperwork EMI Pulse weapon over the USAF organization has gone off…Yikes!
My only question is how in the world that the aircrew didn’t know that in the world they were carrying. I have never dealt with shapes nor have I dealt with actual warshots. I have dealt with all manner of conventional weapons as part of an IWT. I can tell you that at a distance whether an AGM-88 was live rocket motor with dummy warhead; live warhead and dummy warhead. The same was true of any ordnance up on the deck while doing my own pre-flight maintenance walk around of my plane.
I would only have to make the assumption that the training for the aircrew and the USAF’s version of the aviation ordnanacemen is severely lacking with regards to recognizing a shape or a warshot.
Could that be from the fact that the US has reduced its nuclear defense triad down to just depending on the missile bases in the Midwest and the ballistic missile submarines out of Bangor and Kings Bay. So that no one knows what a gravity or air launched nuclear weapon looks like?
Hey ELP, I think we need to send you for some assertiveness training. You have to learn to stop repressing your feelings and get things off your chest. Let us know when you’re ready to tell us what you REALLY think about what’s going on in the Air Farce.
No generals?? Hmmmmm.
Hats off to ELP for his complete diagnosis of what is killing the Air Force (corruption and political correctness).
The Rx is to fire Chrome Dome, the Chief of Staff–T.Michael Moseley.
Remember the last time an AF Chief of Staff got “sac’d”? Mike Dugan for saying we would beat the crap out of Iraq in 91?? If Dugan could be fired for far less then when is Chrome Dome going to leave?