USAF Strips 17 Officers of Nuclear Launch Authority 173
Freshly Exhumed writes "In an unprecedented action, a United States Air Force commander has stripped 17 of his officers of their authority to control and launch nuclear missiles. After a string of failings that the group's deputy commander said stemmed from 'rot' within the ranks, the suspensions followed a March inspection of the 91st Missile Wing at Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, that resulted in a 'D' grade for the team tested on its mastery of the Minuteman III missile launch operations system. The 17 are being assigned to intensive retraining courses of 60 to 90 days, according to Lt. Col. John Dorrian, an Air Force spokesman."
Re:Take them out of the loop (Score:4, Informative)
you idiot. Out of Slashdot NOW if you don't understand the joke.
Unprecenented? (Score:5, Informative)
Hardly. This happened more than once during the cold war under SAC. Hell, entire wings have been decertified before. You don't have to go back farther than 2007 to find something similar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_States_Air_Force_nuclear_weapons_incident).
There was an article in Air Force Magazine a couple months back about SAC history that touched on this a bit:
http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/2013/March%202013/0313SAC.aspx [airforcemag.com]
The military takes this stuff really seriously (Score:5, Informative)
When I was in ROTC our squad officer said basically everyone up the chain of command was written up (permanent records) because one security guard with a shotgun was out of position in a nuke facility.
Re:Our civilization is degrading (Score:2, Informative)
Except the problem being that some of the standards of the previous generations were so hard and difficult to achieve the way they wanted that cheating started happening. Policies have changed because we have better ones. PRP (Personal Reliability Program) is the program we follow now. It is designed to be a program where you keep track of yourself and others, and any issues that arrise you channel up the chain of command. If you get a traffic ticket, and you tell your commander, "No, I'm good. Simple mistake." or whatever it might be, then alright. You go pay it and everything is fine and done. If a family member dies, you tell someone, and you are "down" on PRP and are not allowed to work with nuclear weapons. If anything else is bothering you, you can tell someone you need to be "down". So on and so forth. And this was put into place, because people in the past were told to "suck it up and get to work" and then these sad, depressed, or angry people are working on nukes. Pretty sure we can agree that's bad.
Granted, maybe there are many more problems going on within Minot AFB that is creating this problem. At F.E. Warren, we aren't having these issues and scored exceedingly high in every area of the inspections this year.