AP Exclusive: Air Force sidelines 17 nuke officers

Maybe they put some people in place who have a bigger tendency to go rouge and press buttons willy nilly?

kinda strange that it's even a concern still

reply to post by Maxmars


More than even the most hardened of us Conspiracy Theorists could imagine. Look at Benghazi for instance.
It's like they lie just to lie.
If they would just be honest to begin with it is no big deal.
But they are INCAPABLE of being honest...about anything.

The amount of information they sit on would make our heads spin.

The reason this happened was because Minot AFB recently went through a Conslidated Unit Inspection (CUI) in March. This is the most intense and rigorous inspecton conducted at missile wings. They conduct written testing which requires at least a 90% to pass, and they conduct evaluations in the Missile Procedures Trainer (MPT) which is the simulator of a Launch Control Center (LCC). They also look at records and documents and inspect crews out in the missile field.

The missile crews at Minot had a failure rate of 1/3 for the written testing. I'm not sure how the evals went. With that being said, they still "Passed" they CUI. They recieved a "Marginal" but it's passing. The leadership then took steps to correct the test failures by increasing training and testing on the missile crews once the inspectors left. After about a month of increased training and testing, the leadership did not notice an improvement in the missile crews performance.

Also, a crew member disclosed that he had violated procedures and weapon system safety rules. This is the crewmember who is getting disciplinary actions. Those 17 who were taken off duty will be retrained and return to pulling alert soon. They just have an attitude problem where they don't see the point and importance of the nuclear mission and decided to not give thier best effort as expected of officers in the USAF.

This has nothing to do with what happened with the B-52 flying to Barksdale. Just happened to be at the same base. Malmstrom and FE Warren both recently went through the same inspection and had less than 5 failures on the testing combined. Most crewmembers don't want to be Missileers but that is what they are assigned to do. It's a tough duty. 24 hours underground with extremely high standards. Couple that with constant testing, evaluations, inspections, and scrutiny and it wears people down.

Bottom line: They failed some testing and didn't improve enough so leadership decided to try and motviate them.

reply to post by ug87


And they lost a Nuclear Warhead.

ETA: I understand that you are saying the two instances have nothing to do with each other, but I just wanted to reiterate.

Wonder if it has anything to do with operation_ring_of_fire. Now, that's a conspiracy worth mentioning.

reply to post by ug87


Thanks, I was hoping that someone with some level of inside info could chime in. And I see from some of your past posts that you would be likely to hear more than most of us. I appreciate it.

I can see how the job would be stressful. I certainly wouldn't want the responsibility. It still seems weird that it affected more than 3 times as many Missileers at Minot than the other 2 bases combined even though Missileers at other bases would be under similar stress.

I can't help but think someone may have thought Missileers at the other bases would buy the cover story. Or do you think there was some reason for such a large difference in test results at the one base?

reply to post by JayinAR


They didn't lose a nuclear warhead. There were conflicting reports as to how many were downloaded at Barksdale, and how many were uploaded at Minot, but all of them were accounted for. Reports said they were "lost" while they were sitting on the ramp at either end, because they didn't have security, and no one checked if they were dummy warheads or real ones.

reply to post by Zaphod58


Aren't nuclear, non-nuclear, and dummy warheads all painted different colors and clearly marked so that such a mistake would be almost impossible unless it was purposeful? Theoretically, this should have at least made it pretty easy to accurately count the warheads, even if it was possible to mistakenly mount them on a plane.

I'm not sure what's more scarey, thinking that the bookkeeping on nuclear warheads is so easily mistaken, or thinking that there's a loose nuke around somewhere, either stolen or transferred somewhere for some future black op.

Is it certain they were all accounted for?

reply to post by JayinAR


Only 30 people take each test in 3 subjects for the inspection. So only 10 crew members failed the test in that subject. And again they have to score at least a 90% to pass the tests. The 17 crew members who were restricted hadn't showed improved test scores and attitudes after the inspection.

I have a couple suspicions why they had a higher failure rate but since I'm not at Minot I don't know for sure and don't want to speculate.

reply to post by ikonoklast


They were at one point, but IIRC not more recently. They're just marked differently. The guys in the weapons section were using their own checklist, instead of the computerized one that they were supposed to be using, so they went by the previous list, and didn't check to see if it had been changed. Then the guys that were taking them out to the aircraft showed up early, grabbed the ones that were marked by the weapons guys, and took them out to the plane without checking with anyone. The Nav only checked the right wing (the weapons were loaded on the left), and marked off as 12 dummy weapons loaded on the preflight. The Aircraft Commander failed to do his walk around and double check the weapons.... It was just one screw up after another after another. When they got to Barksdale, since they were supposed to have dummy weapons, they were parked in a regular parking spot and sat for hours before the download crew showed up, and discovered that they were live weapons. I believe all in all they were unattended for almost 36 hours (they uploaded the day before the mission, and downloaded late the night they arrived).

reply to post by Zaphod58


Exactly, it was a string of people cutting corners that led to them flying the weapons across the country. Complacency leads to people making mistakes. And yes you do get complacent even dealing with nuclear weapons. I'm so glad that I'm not at Minot right now and for the foreseeable future.

As stewards of nuclear weapons, the public demands perfection from 22 year old college graduates who are in command and control to the 18 year old security forces airman who ensures the security of the weapons. And 99% of people don't know we exist or the mission we do every day is accomplished.

reply to post by ug87


I've heard about that happening so many times. The best description of an accident I've ever heard is "a series of events, leading to the outcome. Any one of the events in the series stopped, and you have a different outcome." Something like this isn't just one mistake, it requires a string of them, and at any point, someone doing their job correctly would have stopped it from happening.

Originally posted by ikonoklast

The Minot AFB B-52 UFO Incident.

Ikonoklast, thanks for linking the thread mate although I wouldn't say there are any tie ins with these Minot AFB dismissals and the UFO incident there in 1968 (or 1967 or 1966) - thought Ug87's post about the CUI makes some pertinent points and the crew failing to show proper respect to their superiors couldn't have gone down very well -especially in a job as uniquely responsible as this.
Cheers.

reply to post by Zaphod58


Thanks for the info.
I remember the thread here well. It was a huge to do. I guess I just took the general consensus at the time and never followed up on it.

In any event, it shows a systemic problem at Minot. Mistakes like that ARE inexcusable and accountabiliy of weapons like that IS expected to be 100% at all times. As it should be.

Sounds like they need to be taught some respect for the chain of command as well

reply to post by Zaphod58


Thanks, that's some interesting info.

I guess it's human nature to cut corners and for some people to have attitude problems that need to be addressed. It's just really disturbing to realize that such human nature even applies to [some of] the people handling nuclear weapons.

Originally posted by karl 12

Originally posted by ikonoklast

The Minot AFB B-52 UFO Incident.

Ikonoklast, thanks for linking the thread mate although I wouldn't say there are any tie ins with these Minot AFB dismissals and the UFO incident there in 1968 (or 1967 or 1966)...

You're welcome. I also doubt any link between the recent disciplinary action and past UFO incidents from the 1960's. I just thought it was interesting that I recognized the name of the base as being associated with some interesting past events/threads. But before doing a little research for this thread, I didn't realize there are apparently only 3 such bases. So maybe it's not so unusual for any one of them to stand out.