Air Force's Nuclear Focus Has Dimmed, Studies Find

[American Patriot]

Loss of confidence.... did he have some kind of an affair on the side that isn't being mentioned? Did they just fail their inspections? Is there something more amiss here?

Seriously, this is really a bad thing at a critical time in American history. I think this is a planned event.

[Ryan Ruck]

As far as I can tell it is from their failed security review.

[Ryan Ruck]

Nuclear Officers Napped With Blast Door Left Open

October 23, 2013

Air Force officers entrusted with the launch keys to long-range nuclear missiles have been caught twice this year leaving open a blast door that is intended to help prevent a terrorist or other intruder from entering their underground command post, Air Force officials said.

The blast doors are never to be left open if one of the crew members inside is asleep - as was the case in both these instances - out of concern for the trouble an intruder could cause, including the compromising of secret launch codes.

Transgressions such as this are rarely revealed publicly. But officials with direct knowledge of Air Force intercontinental ballistic missile operations told The Associated Press that such violations have occurred, undetected, more times than in the cases of the two launch crew commanders and two deputy commanders who were given administrative punishments this year.

The blast door violations are another sign of trouble in the handling of the nation's nuclear arsenal. The AP has discovered a series of problems within the ICBM force, including a failed safety inspection, the temporary sidelining of launch officers deemed unfit for duty and the abrupt firing last week of the two-star general in charge. The problems, including low morale, underscore the challenges of keeping safe such a deadly force that is constantly on alert but is unlikely ever to be used.

The crews who operate the missiles are trained to follow rules without fail, including the prohibition against having the blast door open when only one crew member is awake.

The officers, known as missileers, are custodians of keys that could launch nuclear hell. The warheads on the business ends of their missiles are capable of a nuclear yield many times that of the U.S. atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945.

"The only way that you can have a crew member be in `rest status' is if that blast door is shut and there is no possibility of anyone accessing the launch control center," said Lt. Gen. James Kowalski, the commander of Air Force Global Strike Command. He is responsible for the entire force of 450 Minuteman 3 missiles, plus the Air Force's nuclear-capable bombers.

The written Air Force instructions on ICBM safety, last updated in June 1996, says, "One crewmember at a time may sleep on duty, but both must be awake and capable of detecting an unauthorized act if ... the Launch Control Center blast door is open" or if someone other than the crew is present.

The blast door is not the first line of defense. An intruder intent on taking control of a missile command post would face many layers of security before encountering the blast door, which - when closed - is secured by 12 hydraulically operated steel pins. The door is at the base of an elevator shaft. Entry to that elevator is controlled from an above-ground building. ICBM fields are monitored with security cameras and patrolled regularly by armed Air Force guards.

Each underground launch center, known as a capsule for its pill-like shape, monitors and operates 10 Minuteman 3 missiles.

The missiles stand in reinforced concrete silos and are linked to the control center by buried communications cables. The ICBMs are split evenly among "wings" based in North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana. Each wing is divided into three squadrons, each responsible for 50 missiles.

In neither of the two reported violations was security of the crews' missiles compromised, the Air Force said in response to questions from the AP, "due to the multiple safeguards and other protections in place." But these were clear-cut violations of what the Air Force calls "weapon system safety rules" meant to be strictly enforced in keeping with the potentially catastrophic consequences of a breach of nuclear security.

In the two episodes confirmed by the Air Force, the multiton concrete-and-steel door that seals the entrance to the underground launch control center was deliberately left open while one of two crew members inside napped.

One officer lied about a violation but later admitted to it.

Sleep breaks are allowed during a 24-hour shift, known as an "alert." But a written rule says the door - meant to keep others out and to protect the crew from the blast effects of a direct nuclear strike - must be closed if one is napping.

In an extensive interview last week at his headquarters at Barksdale Air Force Base, La., Kowalski declined to say whether he was aware that ICBM launch crew members had violated the blast door rule with some frequency.

"I'm not aware of it being any different than it's ever been before," he said. "And if it had happened out there in the past and was tolerated, it is not tolerated now. So my sense of this is, if we know they're doing it they'll be disciplined for it."

It is clear that Air Force commanders do, in fact, know these violations are happening. One of the officers punished for a blast door violation in April at the 91st Missile Wing at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., admitted during questioning by superiors to having done it other times without getting caught.

Both officers involved in that case were given what the military calls nonjudicial punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, rather than being court-martialed. One was ordered to forfeit $2,246 in pay for two months and received a letter of reprimand, according to Lt. Col. John Sheets, spokesman for Air Force Global Strike Command. The other launch officer, who admitted to having committed the same violation "a few" times previously, was given a letter of admonishment, Sheets said.

Kowalski said the crews know better.

"This is not a training problem," he said. "This is some people out there are having a problem with discipline."

The other confirmed blast door violation happened in May at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont. In that case, a person who entered the capsule to do maintenance work realized that the deputy crew commander was asleep with the door open and reported the violation to superiors. Upon questioning, the deputy crew commander initially denied the accusation but later confessed and said her crew commander had encouraged her to lie, Sheets said.

The crew commander was ordered to forfeit $3,045 in pay for two months, Sheets said, and also faces an Air Force discharge board, which could force him out of the service. The deputy crew commander was given a letter of reprimand. A letter of reprimand does not require the officer to leave the service but usually is a significant obstacle to promotion and could mean an early end to his or her career.

The AP was tipped off to the Malmstrom episode shortly after it took place by an official who felt strongly that it should be made public and that it reflected a more deeply rooted disciplinary problem inside the ICBM force. The AP learned of the Minot violation through an internal Air Force email. The AP confirmed both incidents with several other Air Force officials.

Sheets said the Minot and Malmstrom violations were the only blast door disciplinary cases in at least two years.

The willingness of some launch officers to leave the blast door open at times reflects a mindset far removed from Cold War days when the U.S. lived in fear of a nuclear strike by the Soviet Union. It was that fear that provided the original rationale for placing ICBMs in reinforced underground silos and the launch control officers in buried capsules - so that in the event of an attack the officers might survive to launch a counterattack.

Today the fear of such an attack has all but disappeared and, with it, the appeal of strictly following the blast door rule.

Bruce Blair, who served as an ICBM launch control officer in the 1970s and is an advocate for phasing out the ICBM force, said violations should be taken seriously.

"This transgression might help enable outsiders to gain access to the launch center and to its super-secret codes," said Blair, who is now a research scholar at Princeton University. That would increase the risk of unauthorized launch or of compromising codes that might consequently have to be invalidated in order to prevent unauthorized launches, he said.

"Such invalidation might effectively neutralize for an extended period of time the entire U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal and the president's ability to launch strategic forces while the Pentagon scrambles to reissue new codes," he added.

[American Patriot]

They probably just wanted some fresh air. Don't you think those places get musty?

lol

[American Patriot]

After reading this (and knowing a little something about those places) I'd say this is a load of bullshit and smoke and mirrors

Sure, someone left a door open. There are multiple layers of security. EVEN IF they could have gotten through some of them, they wouldn't have made it to the blast door.

[Ryan Ruck]

Study Finds Key Members Of Nuclear Missile Force Feel 'Burnout' From Their Work

November 21, 2013

Key members of the Air Force's nuclear missile force are feeling "burnout" from what they see as exhausting, unrewarding and stressful work, according to an unpublished study obtained by The Associated Press.

The finding by researchers for RAND Corp. adds to indications that trouble inside the nuclear missile force runs deeper and wider than officials have acknowledged.

The study, provided to the AP in draft form, also cites heightened levels of misconduct like spousal abuse and says court-martial rates in the nuclear missile force in 2011 and 2012 were more than twice as high as in the overall Air Force.

These indicators add a new dimension to an emerging picture of malaise and worse inside the intercontinental ballistic missile force, an arm of the Air Force with a proud heritage but an uncertain future.

Late last year the Air Force directed RAND, a federally funded research house, to conduct a three-month study of attitudes among the men and women inside the ICBM force. It found a toxic mix of frustration and aggravation, heightened by a sense of being unappreciated, overworked, micromanaged and at constant risk of failure.

Remote and rarely seen, the ICBM force gets little public attention. The AP, however, this year has documented a string of missteps that call into question the management of a force that demands strict obedience to procedures.

Gen. Mark Welsh, the Air Force chief of staff, said in an interview Wednesday that he sees no evidence of fundamental problems in the ICBM force.

"There are issues like there are in every other mission area we have in the United States military, and we deal with the issues as they come up, and we deal with them pretty aggressively. But as far as getting the job done, they're getting the job done — they do a great job of that every single day," Welsh said.

The AP was advised in May of the confidential RAND study, shortly after it was completed, by a person who said it should be made public to improve understanding of discontent within the ICBM force. After repeated inquiries, and shortly after the AP filed a Freedom of Information Act request for a PowerPoint outline, the Air Force provided it last Friday and arranged for RAND officials and two senior Air Force generals to explain it.

Based on confidential small-group discussions last winter with about 100 launch control officers, security forces, missile maintenance workers and others who work in the missile fields — plus responses to confidential questionnaires — RAND found low job satisfaction and workers distressed by staff shortages, equipment flaws and what they felt were stifling management tactics.

It also found what it termed "burnout." In this context, "burnout" means feeling exhausted, cynical and ineffective on the job, according to Chaitra Hardison, RAND's senior behavioral scientist and lead author of the study. She used a system of measure that asks people to rate on a scale of 1 to 7 — from "never" to "always" — how often in their work they experience certain feelings, including tiredness, hopelessness and a sense of being trapped. An average score of 4 or above is judged to put the person in the "burnout" range.

One service member said: "We don't care if things go properly. We just don't want to get in trouble." That person and all others who participated in the study were granted confidentiality by RAND in order to speak freely.

The 13 launch officers who volunteered for the study scored an average of 4.4 on the burnout scale, tied for highest in the group. A group of 20 junior enlisted airmen assigned to missile security forces also scored 4.4.

This has always been considered hard duty, in part due to the enormous responsibility of safely operating nuclear missiles, the most destructive weapons ever invented.

In its Cold War heyday, an ICBM force twice as big as today's was designed to deter the nuclear Armageddon that at times seemed all too possible amid a standoff with the Soviet Union and a relentless race to build more bombs.

Today the nuclear threat is no longer prominent among America's security challenges. The arsenal has shrunk — in size and stature. The Air Force struggles to demonstrate the relevance of its aging ICBMs in a world worried more about terrorism and cyberwar and accustomed to 21st century weapons such as drones.

This new reality is not lost on the young men and women who in most cases were "volunteered" for ICBM jobs.

Andrew Neal, 28, who completed a four-year tour in September with F.E. Warren's 90th Missile Wing in Wyoming, where he served as a Minuteman 3 launch officer, said he saw marked swings in morale.

"Morale was low at times — very low," Neal said in an interview, though he added that his comrades worked hard.

Neal says his generation has a different view of nuclear weapons.

"We all acknowledge their importance, but at the same time we really don't think the mission is that critical," Neal said, adding that his peers see the threat of full-scale nuclear war as "simply nonexistent." So "we practice for all-out nuclear war, but we know that isn't going to happen."

Every hour of every day, 90 launch officers are on duty in underground command posts that control Minuteman 3 missiles. Inside each buried capsule are two officers responsible for 10 missiles, each in a separate silo, armed with one or more nuclear warheads and ready for launch within minutes.

They await a presidential launch order that has never arrived in the more than 50-year history of American ICBMs. The duty can be tiresome, with long hours, limited opportunities for career advancement and the constraints of life in remote areas of the north-central U.S., like Minot Air Force Base, N.D.

In his doctoral dissertation, published in 2010 after he finished a four-year tour with the 91st Missile Wing at Minot, Christopher J. Ewing said 71 of the 99 launch officers he surveyed there had not chosen that assignment.

RAND was looking for possible explanations for a trend worrying the Air Force — higher levels of personal and professional misconduct within the ICBM force relative to the rest of the Air Force. Courts-martial in the ICBM force, for example, were 129 percent higher than in the Air Force as a whole in 2011, on a per capita basis, and 145 percent higher in 2012. Cases handled by administrative punishment were 29 percent above overall Air Force levels in 2011 and 23 percent above in 2012.

On Wednesday the Air Force provided the AP with statistics indicating that courts-martial and reports of spousal abuse are on a downward trend in recent months, while still higher than the overall Air Force in percentage terms. Administrative punishments also are trending downward.

Reported cases of spousal abuse in the ICBM force peaked in 2010 at 21 per 1,000 people, compared with 10.3 per 1,000 in the overall Air Force. The rate for the ICBM force dropped to 14.4 in 2011 and to 12.4 last year. It also has declined for the overall Air Force.

The RAND study and AP interviews with current and former members of the ICBM force suggest a disconnect between the missile force members and their leaders.

"There's a perception that the Air Force (leadership) doesn't understand necessarily what's going on with respect to the ICBM community and their needs," says Hardison, the behavioral scientist who led the study.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel delivered a "no-room-for-error" message when he visited U.S. Strategic Command in Nebraska last week to welcome Navy Adm. Cecil Haney as the nation's new top nuclear war-fighter, succeeding Air Force Gen. Robert Kehler.

"Perfection must be the standard for our nuclear forces," Hagel said, noting that "some troubling lapses in maintaining this professionalism" have been exposed recently by "close scrutiny" and "rigorous evaluations."

In Hardison's view, expectations of perfection are "unproductive and unrealistic."

"People who are even top performers, who are exceptionally good at their jobs, fear that they are going to make one mistake and that's going to be the end of their career," she said in an interview.

RAND's survey results, while revealing a level of discontent, are not definitive. Hardison said the findings need to be confirmed on a larger sample population and the results tracked over time.

Perhaps ironically, the person who raised concerns about problems in the missile force was Maj. Gen. Michael Carey, who was fired in October as commander of 20th Air Force, the organization responsible for the full ICBM fleet — for alleged misconduct that officials have said was related to alcohol use.

In November 2012, Carey told Welsh that his organization's misconduct record was out of line with the broader Air Force and he wanted to find faster fixes.

One change already being implemented is ensuring that lower-level officers and enlisted airmen in the missile fields are given more decision-making authority, said Maj. Gen. Jack Weinstein, the interim successor to Carey. He said he also is seeking to ensure more stability in the ICBM force's work schedules so service members have more predictable periods to spend with their families.

Internally, concern about the ICBM force is not new.

In a little-noticed report published in April, a Pentagon advisory group that has studied the nuclear mission said weaknesses in the way the Air Force manages its ICBM workforce have made it hard to maintain.

"This should be a cause for serious concern," the Defense Science Board advisory group concluded.

It said the problem is especially acute in notoriously frigid Minot, where the Air Force has had trouble keeping people in its maintenance and security forces. Harsh climate is no excuse, it said.

"Minot weather has always been Minot weather. What has changed is the perception of negative career impacts, the slow response to concerns and the need for tangible evidence" that work conditions and equipment will improve, it said.

Kehler, the retiring head of Strategic Command, acknowledges that with national security attention focused elsewhere, it's easy to see why some nuclear warriors would be uneasy.

"What happens is, that translates into a very personal concern that's out there in all parts of the nuclear force, and that is: What's my future?"

[American Patriot]

Study Cites 'Dangerous Weak Link' in Nuke Security


Associated Press | Jan 09, 2014 | by Robert Burns



WASHINGTON - The number of countries possessing the makings of a nuclear bomb has dropped by almost one-quarter over the past two years, but there remain "dangerous weak links" in nuclear materials security that could be exploited by terrorist groups with potentially catastrophic results, according to a study released Wednesday.


The study by the Nuclear Threat Initiative said Mexico, Sweden, Ukraine, Vietnam, Austria, the Czech Republic and Hungary have removed all or most of the weapons-usable nuclear materials on their territories since 2012.


That has reduced the number of countries with one kilogram or more of weapons-usable nuclear materials, such as highly enriched uranium, to 25 from 32 two years ago, the study said. The Nuclear Threat Initiative is a private, non-partisan group that advocates reducing the risk of the spread of nuclear weapons.


"That's a big deal," said Page Stoutland, vice president of the group's nuclear materials security program. "Getting rid of the materials is one less country where somebody could potentially steal weapons-usable material."


Among the 25 countries with weapons-usable nuclear materials, the study ranked Australia as having the best nuclear security arrangements, followed by Canada, Switzerland, Germany and Norway. The U.S. was ranked No. 11. The weakest nuclear security is in Israel, Pakistan, India, Iran and North Korea, according to the study, which assessed factors such as accounting methods, physical security and transportation security.


The drop in the number of countries possessing such materials could be seen as modestly encouraging for President Barack Obama's declared ambition to lock down all of the world's highly enriched uranium and plutonium -- the building blocks of a nuclear weapon. There are an estimated 1,400 tons of highly enriched uranium and almost 500 tons of plutonium stored in hundreds of sites around the world.


The report said a significant portion of these materials is poorly secured and vulnerable to theft or sale on the black market. Relatively small amounts of highly enriched uranium or plutonium are required to build a nuclear bomb, which is a declared ambition of terrorist groups such as al-Qaida.


"The result of a nuclear blast at the hands of terrorists or a rogue state would be catastrophic -- with dire consequences that would stretch across the globe for economies, commerce, militaries, public health, the environment, civil liberties and the stability of governments," the report said.


The Obama goal, first proclaimed in 2009, will be the focus of a summit meeting of world leaders in the Netherlands in March. And although concern about the security of nuclear materials is generally directed at Iran, North Korea and Pakistan, the study released Wednesday said the United States has its own vulnerabilities.


It cited two recent incidents in the U.S. that point up imperfections in U.S. control of nuclear weapons materials, including a July 2012 break-in by anti-war protesters at the Y-12 complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., that stores the nation's supply of weapons-grade uranium, makes nuclear warhead parts and provides nuclear fuel for the Navy.


The study by the Nuclear Threat Initiative also cited the firing in October of the No. 2 commander of U.S. Strategic Command, which is in charge of nuclear war planning and would operate nuclear weapons if a president ordered their use. Vice Adm. Tim Giardina was fired amid allegations of involvement with counterfeit gambling chips -- an allegation that raises questions about the potential corruption of nuclear secrets. Giardina has been under investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service; results have not been released.


The Giardina matter, combined with the break-in at Oak Ridge, suggests that "it is dangerous and inappropriate" to take the security of U.S. nuclear materials for granted, the Nuclear Threat Initiative study said.



http://www.military.com/daily-news/2...tml?ESRC=eb.nl

[vector7]

Pentagon scandal: U.S. missile launch officers suspected of drugging

January 13, 2014

Two U.S. servicemen who on a daily basis have their fingers on the "red buttons" that would initiate a nuclear war are accused of using illicit drugs by the Pentagon, according to George Lamonica, a drug enforcement officer.

At least two missile-launch officers at Montana's Malmstrom Air Force Base are being investigated by Air Force law enforcement officers for possession and use of illegal substances, a Pentagon spokesman said.

However, while the investigation started with only two officers, it eventually included nine Air Force lieutenants and one captain, according to Lt. Col. Brett Ashworth, an Air Force spokesman.

The drug investigation came to light when Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel toured Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming and gave a talk to members of the highly-classified and elite nuclear missile force.

Besides stateside Air Force bases, U.S. launch control units in a Royal Air Force base in Great Britain and also being investigated by the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations (OSI).

Other known bases involved in the emerging scandal are Colorado's Schriever Air Force Base and the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California .

The OSI is not discussing the case with the media and will report its findings to the Secretary of the Air Force and the Defense Secretary. It's still not known what types of drugs -- marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, opiates, etc. -- the officers are accused of ingesting.

http://www.examiner.com/article/pent...alerts_article

[vector7]

Malmstrom nuclear launch officers tied to narcotics probe

Jan. 9, 2014



Two officers at Malmstrom Air Force Base are being investigated for allegations of drug possession, said a service spokesman in Washington, Lt. Col. Brett Ashworth.


F.E. WARREN AIR FORCE BASE, WYO. — Hoping to boost sagging morale, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel made a rare visit Thursday to an Air Force nuclear missile base and the men and women who operate and safeguard the nation’s Minuteman 3 missiles. But his attempt to cheer the troops was tempered by news that launch officers at another base had been implicated in an illegal-narcotics investigation.

Two officers at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana are being investigated for allegations of drug possession, said a service spokesman in Washington, Lt. Col. Brett Ashworth. Both of those being investigated are ICBM launch officers with responsibility for operating intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The launch officers’ access to classified information has been suspended, and they have been prohibited from serving on missile launch control duty while the Air Force is investigating, another defense official said. That official provided no further details and spoke only on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly by name.

“Two officers assigned to Malmstrom AFB are being investigated by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations for illegal drug possession,” said Chief Josh Aycock, with 341st Missile Wing Public Affairs. “Both individuals are missile launch officers. Due to the fact this is an ongoing investigation, I have no other information to provide at this time.”

At the Wyoming nuclear missile base, meanwhile, Hagel addressed officers and airmen after a series of security lapses and discipline problems that were revealed in Associated Press news stories in 2013. Officials have said the service members are increasingly tired of working in what can seem like oblivion. They win no battles, earn no combat pay and only rarely are given public credit of any kind.

“You are doing something of great importance to the world,” Hagel told the group. Lest they sometimes doubt that importance, he said, “You have chosen a profession where there is no room for error — none.”

(Page 2 of 3)

He made no direct reference to the problems revealed in the past year but declared, “How you do the job is really as important as the job itself. We depend on your professionalism.”

A day earlier, he said he realized the ICBM workforce has morale issues.

“It is lonely work,” he said. “They do feel unappreciated many times.”

F.E. Warren Air Force Base, which is headquarters for the organization in charge of all 450 U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles, has about 3,100 enlisted airmen and officers and saw 12 courts-martial in 2013, compared with nine the year before, 12 in 2011 and eight in 2010, according to Air Force statistics provided to the AP last week in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

In each of the past four years, the courts-martial rate at F.E. Warren was higher than in the Air Force as a whole

The AP documented problems that go well beyond low morale in a series of stories in 2013, including one that disclosed that an ICMB operations officer had complained of “rot” infesting his missile force. Since then the service has tried to improve nuclear operations, but problems remain, including attitude issues, leadership lapses and, far more perilously, security lapses such as troops taking naps during 24-hour shifts with the blast door of their launch control center open. That could leave the missiles and airmen vulnerable and violates Air Force rules. A RAND Corp. study done for the Pentagon also found signs of burnout and behavioral problems such as domestic violence.

Before his Wyoming stop, Hagel flew by helicopter to a Minuteman 3 missile launch control center in Nebraska. Besides Nebraska, the missiles are in underground silos in Wyoming, Colorado, Montana and North Dakota.

Each launch center, buried 60 feet or deeper underground, controls 10 Minuteman 3 missiles, each in its own silo.

The last Pentagon chief to visit an ICBM base was Robert Gates, who in December 2008 spent a day at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., home of the 91st Missile Wing responsible for 150 Minuteman 3 missiles, although he did not go down into a missile launch control center as Hagel planned to do. Gates earlier that year fired the Air Force’s top uniform and civilian officials for what he considered weak responses to serious lapses, including an unauthorized transfer of six nuclear weapons from Minot in August 2007.

(Page 3 of 3)

Gates noted that he was the first defense secretary to visit Minot and said — much as Hagel did on Thursday in Wyoming — “We owe you the attention” and the resources needed to properly perform the nuclear mission — “the most sensitive mission in the entire U.S. military.”

Hans Kristensen, a nuclear weapons expert at the Federation of American Scientists, said publicity about missteps has made the ICBM force a “hot potato,” causing Pentagon officials to “scratch their heads about how to manage this program. You cannot reassure the public about this when you are having these failures all the time.”

The ICBM force is less than half the size it was during its Cold War heyday, but the missiles remain on high alert, with pairs of officers on duty in the launch control centers 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s a job that relatively few volunteer for, and the RAND study last year found signs of burnout.

In another disconcerting development, just last month, the Air Force released an investigation report chronicling inappropriate behavior by Maj. Gen. Michael Carey, who was commander of the ICBM force until he was fired in October. Investigators said that while leading a U.S. government delegation to a nuclear security exercise in Russia last summer, Carey drank heavily, was rude to his hosts, cavorted with “suspect” local women and complained in public about a lack of support from his Air Force bosses.

Carey also said the men and women in the ICBM force had “the worst morale of any airmen in the Air Force,” according to a member of his travel delegation quoted in the report.

Carey was given a “letter of counseling” as punishment, in addition to being relieved of command, but he remains in the service as a special assistant to the commander of Air Force Space Command. He was replaced as ICBM commander by Maj. Gen. Jack Weinstein

http://www.greatfallstribune.com/vie...arcotics-probe

[American Patriot]

Hate to say this, but I simply don't believe anyone that high level was "drugging".

Then again, newbie Lieutenants aren't very smart. I know this from watching the kids come and go here and getting kicked out of the AFA. My wife sees and knows them all, and sees them come and go and usually knows why.

[vector7]

Hate to say this, but I simply don't believe anyone that high level was "drugging".

Makes me wonder if this is a smoke screen for more purging.

[American Patriot]

I don't think there's a smoke screen at all. I only assume now that when something is suddenly dropped on the military like that someone is up to something bad at high levels. The President's level.

[American Patriot]

More on this story of "drugs"

Air Force drug probe widened to include cheating


Posted: Wednesday, January 15, 2014 11:35 am | Updated: 12:04 pm, Wed Jan 15, 2014.
Associated Press


A drug investigation of officers at six Air Force bases, including two that operate nuclear missiles, has been widened to include allegations of cheating on certification tests, defense officials said Wednesday.


The officials said the cheating probe involves missile launch control officers at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont. One official said it includes about 37 people. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the expansion of the probe on the record before it was announced.




They said the cheating allegations revolve around routine tests the service members have to take to insure their job proficiency. They said information about the possible cheating emerged from the ongoing probe into drug use at several bases.


The Pentagon said the Air Force's top civilian, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James, and its top uniformed officer, Gen. Mark Welsh, planned a news conference Wednesday to update the status of the investigation.


Last week the Pentagon disclosed the original drug probe of a total of 10 officers _ nine lieutenants and one captain _ at six bases. It provided few other details beyond saying the officers were suspected of possessing "recreational drugs."


The matter is being probed by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.


The original disclosure of a drug investigation said the officers alleged to be involved were at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.; Schriever Air Force Base, Colo.; Royal Air Force base Lakenheath in England; Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., and two bases that operate intercontinental ballistic missiles _ F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo., and Malmstrom.


First word of the investigation came last Thursday moments before Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel appeared at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming to deliver a pep talk to members of the 90th Missile Wing, which operates 150 ICBMs. Hagel did not mention the drug probe but praised the missile force for its dedication and professionalism.


Last week an Air Force spokesman, Lt. Col. Brett Ashworth, said the probe began with an investigation of two officers at Edwards and quickly widened to other bases because of the officers' contacts with others about drug possession.

[American Patriot]

I have to ask... is this a woman... or a man converted to a woman?

Associated Press

This May 7, 2013 photo provided by Science Applications InternationalSAIC +1.12% Corporation shows Deborah Lee James.

[Ryan Ruck]

Air Force Security Reportedly Failed Nuke Test

May 22, 2014

An Air Force security team's botched response to a simulated assault on a nuclear missile silo has prompted a blistering review followed by expanded training to deal with the nightmare scenario of a real attack.

The Air Force recognized the possibility of such an intrusion as more worrisome after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But an internal review of the exercise held last summer at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana said the security forces were unable to speedily regain control of the captured silo, and called this a "critical deficiency."

The Associated Press obtained a copy of the report through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The previously unreported misstep was the reason the 341st Missile Wing flunked a broader safety and security inspection. The unit, which has been beset with other problems in recent months, including an exam-cheating scandal that led its commander to resign in March, passed a do-over of the security portion of the inspection last October.

The failure was one of a string of nuclear missile corps setbacks revealed by the AP over the past year. The force has suffered embarrassing security, leadership and training lapses, discipline breakdowns and morale problems. Earlier this year, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel ordered two reviews, still underway, to address his concern that the lapses could erode public trust in the security of the nation's nuclear weapons.

The partially censored document obtained by the AP indicate that the security team was required to respond to the simulated capture of a Minuteman 3 nuclear missile silo by hostile forces, termed an "Empty Quiver" scenario in which a nuclear weapon is lost, stolen or seized. Each of the Air Force's 450 Minuteman 3 silos contains an intercontinental ballistic missile armed with at least one nuclear warhead and ready for launch on short notice on orders from the president.

The Air Force review examined why the security force showed an "inability to effectively respond to a recapture scenario." It cited a failure to take "all lawful actions necessary to immediately regain control of nuclear weapons" but did not specify those actions.

A section apparently elaborating on what was meant by the phrase "failed to take all lawful actions" was removed from the document before its release to the AP last week. The Air Force said this was withheld in accordance with Pentagon orders "prohibiting the unauthorized dissemination of unclassified information pertaining to security measures" for the protection of "special nuclear material."

The document provided no details on how the silo takeover was simulated, the number of security forces ordered to respond or other basic aspects of the exercise.

The prize for terrorists or others who might seek to seize control of a missile would be the nuclear warhead attached to it, since it contains plutonium and other bomb materials. A rogue launching of the missile is a far different matter, since it would require the decoding of encrypted war orders transmitted only by the president.

In 2009, the Air Force cited a "post-9/11 shift in thinking" about such situations, saying that while this scenario once was considered an impossibility, the U.S. "no longer has the luxury of assuming what is and what is not possible."

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which helped conduct the Malmstrom inspection last August, has called its inspections "likely the most intense, invasive and critical" in the U.S. military. The agency says on its website that its drills are designed to "ensure everybody knows their job, the proper procedures — and how to react when chaos unfolds and the situation changes."

When the Air Force publicly acknowledged the broader inspection failure in August, it said "tactical-level errors" had been committed during one phase of the inspection, but it did not say the errors were made by security forces. At the time, the Air Force declined to provide details, saying to do so could expose potential vulnerabilities.

The report provided to the AP said that because security of nuclear weapons is paramount, "the inability to demonstrate effective recapture/recovery TTPs (tactics, techniques and procedures) detracts from the Wing's ability to conduct its day-to-day mission."

The document describes in broad terms the nature of the inspection failure, its significance and its underlying causes.

It said insufficient training was at the heart of the problem, beginning with a lack of familiarity among the security forces with "complex scenario" exercises. It also cited unspecified shortcomings in "leadership culture" and a lack of standardized simulations not only at Malmstrom but throughout the nuclear missile corps.

Among the corrective measures cited in the report: Arrange to hold recapture exercises at one launch silo among the 50 silos in each of the 341st's three Minuteman squadrons, using "realistic, varied, simple-to-complex" scenarios based on what the Pentagon calls its "local nuclear security threat capabilities assessment." Also, the Air Force is taking steps to more closely track lessons learned from each "recapture" exercise.

The Air Force document did not identify or otherwise describe the security team, but each Minuteman 3 missile base has "tactical response force" teams specially trained and equipped for nuclear weapons recovery.

Two years ago, the Air Force promoted these teams as a "secret weapon" ensuring nuclear security, saying they are provided "an extensive amount of unique training and are expected to perform flawlessly in whatever scenario thrown their way."

Lt. Col. John Sheets, a spokesman for Air Force Global Strike Command, which is responsible for the nuclear missile corps as well as the nuclear-capable bomber aircraft, said Wednesday he could not comment further.

"We cannot divulge additional details of the scenario or the response tactics due to it being sensitive information that could compromise security," Sheets said.

He added that all "countermeasures," or corrective actions, that were proposed in the review obtained by the AP have been accomplished. The only exception is a plan for more extensive practicing of security response tactics at launch silos, an effort that requires signed agreements with owners of the private land on which the missile silos are situated.

The silos are concrete-lined holes in the ground, mostly on remote stretches of private land whose owners have accommodated the facilities since they were built in the 1960s. They are spread across such large expanses that security forces cannot constantly watch every facility, although they are equipped with fire and security alarms.

Security forces are responsible for a range of protective roles on the Air Force's three nuclear missile bases, including along roads used to transport missiles and warheads to and from launch silos, at weapons storage facilities and at launch silos and launch control centers. The Air Force operates three Minuteman 3 bases — in North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming — each with 150 missiles.

Col. Robert Stanley, who was commander of the 341st Wing at the time, said that despite the inspection failure, "there was no question about our capability to operate safely and with complete confidence. Still, he said, more needed to be done to ensure that "some very young airmen" understand their responsibilities "much more clearly."

Nine days later he fired the officer in charge of his security forces, Col. David Lynch, and replaced him temporarily with Col. John T. Wilcox II. In March, Stanley resigned amid a scandal involving alleged cheating on proficiency tests by up to 100 missile officers at Malmstrom, and the Air Force replaced Stanley with Wilcox.

In an AP interview in January, Stanley suggested there had been disagreement about how the security exercise was conducted during the August inspection. Without providing specifics, he said it was simulated "in a way that we've never seen before," adding: "It confused our airmen. We were off by a matter of seconds."

[Ryan Ruck]

Air Force Admits Nuke Flaws, But Will Fixes Work?

December 20, 2014

Faced with one of its biggest challenges in years — repairing a troubled nuclear missile corps — the Air Force has taken an important first step by admitting, after years of denial, that its problems run deep and wide.

Less certain is whether it will find all the right fixes, apply them fully and convince a doubting force of launch officers, security guards and other nuclear workers that their small and narrow career field is not a dead end.

The stakes are huge.

The nation's strategy for deterring nuclear war rests in part on the 450 Minuteman 3 missiles that stand ready, 24/7, to launch at a moment's notice from underground silos in five states.

Some question the wisdom of that strategy in an era of security threats dominated by terrorism and cyberattacks. But whatever their role, those intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, will have to be safeguarded for years to come.

The responsibility is enormous, the cost of mistakes potentially colossal. The business end of these missiles can deliver mass destruction with breathtaking speed. Accidents, though rare, are an ever-present worry.

That's why it can be disquieting to hear missile officers describe their unhappiness and lack of faith in nuclear force leaders.

In sworn testimony to investigators looking into allegations that two ICBM commanders at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, were mistreating their subordinates, one officer spoke of deep pessimism.

"I go about most of my days wishing I was in another place, in another Air Force field," the officer said, according to a copy of investigation testimony provided in September and obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act. The officer's name was removed from the document by Air Force censors citing privacy protection.

The belated admission by the Air Force and the Pentagon's civilian leaders, after a series of AP stories revealing the issue, that the nuclear force is suffering from years of neglect, mismanagement and weak morale has yielded opposing interpretations of what it means.

Some, including experts who are critical of the Air Force, say it makes more obvious the need to invest billions to modernize the force. The flaws are fixable, they say. They cite a resurgent Russia and a belligerent North Korea as reasons to make the added investment to ensure that America's nuclear force is revitalized.

Subscribing to this view, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced on Nov. 14 that the Pentagon would make top-to-bottom changes — more than 100 in all — in how the nuclear force is managed and operated. He said the Pentagon would spend up to $10 billion more over six years to improve the force. Ten days later Hagel announced his resignation, leaving questions about follow-through.

The opposing view is that this moment presents an opportunity to reconsider and restructure the nuclear force, possibly eliminating the ICBMs while enhancing the remaining sea- and air-launched nuclear forces. That view, however, is not predominant in the Obama administration, which favors the policy embraced by its predecessors, that the decades-old nuclear structure must be preserved for the foreseeable future.

What that leaves is a risk of reverting to past practices, perhaps with additional failures.

Eric Schlosser, author of "Command and Control," a highly regarded 2013 book on the ICBM and nuclear risk, said there is little doubt that the Pentagon needs to update the nuclear missile force's basic infrastructure.

"But that's a short-term solution," he said in an interview. "The bigger question is: How many land-based missiles do we need in the 21st century? How should they be deployed, and do we need them at all?"

Schlosser and others have expressed concern about morale problems in the force — an issue the Air Force had been slow to acknowledge even after the AP wrote last year about an unpublished RAND Corp. study that found evidence of "burnout" and hopelessness among missile crews and other members of the ICBM workforce.

Paul Bracken, a Yale University professor and author of "The Second Nuclear Age," says he finds it unsettling to read about neglect of the ICBM force and the turmoil in the ranks of those who operate the missiles.

"If things are so bad, if for some reason we did want to fire an individual nuclear weapon, could we? Would the weapon take off?" he asked in an interview this month with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. "With all of the problems in our nuclear force, it seems to me that there'd be some real doubts. You really wouldn't want to use one of these weapons, because you don't know what is going to happen."

Bracken added that in the event of a massive nuclear attack by Russia, "I'm sure we could retaliate — we've got enough weaponry at our disposal. If we fire enough of them in a mass counterstrike, some are bound to work."

Evidence of what some would call the Air Force's willful disregard for its nuclear force is not hard to find. Michelle Spencer, for one, documented it in a little-noticed research paper she wrote for the Air Force in 2012. Her study team found examples of Air Force decisions to deemphasize nuclear training and education.

"At times the signs were clear that expertise and culture had declined to the point that the (nuclear) enterprise was in danger of catastrophic failure," she wrote.

Spencer put particular emphasis on nuclear expertise — how to expand it, how to maintain it and how to reward it.

"Without answers to these fundamental questions, the Air Force nuclear enterprise remains on the same trajectory as it has been for the last two decades - in ever-increasing decline," she wrote, adding that at some point it may be unable to sustain a nuclear mission that is supposed to be central to U.S. defense strategy.

[Ryan Ruck]

Interview: Paul Bracken On American Nuclear Forces In The 21st Century

December 15, 2014

Yale University professor Paul Bracken has written numerous books on strategic thinking, including The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger and the New Power Politics; Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power; and “Command and Control of Nuclear Forces." A physicist and engineer, Bracken teaches “Strategy, Technology, and War,” “Business, Government, and Globalization,” and “Managing Global Organizations” at the Yale University School of Management. He has written articles on topics such as “Financial Warfare” and “Business War Gaming,” because, he says, issues regarding government and multinational corporations often overlap. Bracken serves as a consultant for private equity funds and accounting and insurance companies, as well as several arms of the US government, and he describes his research interest as “the strategic application of technology in business and defense.”

In this interview, he talks about the recent exposés concerning the dangerous state of US nuclear forces, the long-term plans to renovate all three legs of the nuclear triad—at a cost of over a trillion dollars—and how to do so in the post-Cold War era. Bracken also describes how the multi-polar world of today compares to the old bipolar world of the United States and the Soviet Union.

(This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)

Bulletin: The Obama Administration has proposed spending money for 12 new missile submarines, 100 new bombers, and 400 land-based missiles—either new or refurbished. This is in addition to the tens of billions of dollars the administration already designated to upgrade nuclear laboratories and extend the lives of aging warheads and does not include any emergency fixes, such as for problems that were reported by the New York Times and the Associated Press in the past few weeks. (The November 14 New York Times quoted anonymous senior officials who said “they were trying to determine how much the emergency repairs would cost. The short-term fixes ‘will be billions’ over the next five years, one official said.” Altogether, the Monterey Institute of International Studies estimates the total cost of the country’s nuclear enterprise over the next 30 years will be up to $1.1 trillion. Do those numbers seem about right?

Bracken: These are just estimates; you and I both know we’ll be lucky to get it for under $2 trillion over 30 years, if the past is any guide. History shows that there’s a bias towards underestimating the final cost of any big overhaul programs by a factor of two-to-three in real dollars. This is presuming that you want to take everything we have now, in every leg of the triad, and replace every bit of it with more modern versions: new bombers, new submarines, and new ICBMs. That figure would not include the costs of building, testing, and distributing a brand-new warhead, which seems likely to happen.

Bulletin: Is a complete all-out, top-to-bottom modernization of the entire nuclear triad worth it? Couldn’t fewer nuclear platforms made more survivable do the trick?

Bracken: Absolutely. Historically, greater survivability has been a favored avenue. Which is why the United States shifted so much of its deterrence to submarines in the 1960s; they weren’t hardened, but if you can’t find them, you can’t kill them. The underlying idea is that survivability doesn’t always mean you need super-hardened concrete silos in Montana; you could get the same end result through greater mobility or concealment. So you have fewer platforms giving you more bang for the buck.

That means that there are many alternatives to the triad.

But it is striking to me that the intellectual capital to analyze these questions has more or less disappeared after the end of the Cold War. So for example, the Air Force doesn’t really explore any of these alternatives in anything like a creative way. I think they’ve forgotten how to think about these things. There’s a bias towards reproducing what you already have in place.

Bulletin: It’s a case of bureaucratic inertia?

Bracken: It’s bureaucratic inertia, but also a real absence of thought leadership in these areas. There’s no intellectual capital to reach out and draw on—or reject. In the Cold War, there were a number of think tanks that pursued some very creative—some would say wild—thinking about what our nuclear posture should be called upon to do, and what form it should take. But there are very few think tanks that study these issues any more, other than from a very partisan point of view; they know the answer before they start.

And hewing to preconceived viewpoints is not just confined to analysis of strategic forces. All of the major think tanks have moved inside the Washington Beltway over the past 20 years. The whole place of think tanks in American society today is nothing like what it was during the Cold War, when there was a real striving for scientific objectivity, drawing on people from all over the political spectrum, and from many different fields. The absence of the physicists today is quite striking.

And I say this as someone who worked for the Hudson Institute think tank back in the 1990s—it’s just not the same field today.

Bulletin: Still, despite the tendency towards partisan viewpoints, isn’t there a cheaper or more innovative way to accomplish nuclear deterrence?

Bracken: Well, we’ve sort of forgotten how to explore other nuclear postures outside of the dated, old Cold War measures. So there’s a ripe, rich area for analysis concerning alternatives. For example, we could give up one leg of the nuclear triad entirely. Or even two legs of the triad—such as the ICBM force and the bomber force—and put all of our nuclear deterrent on submarines. So, that’s one alternative.

Another idea is to retain all of the individual legs but make each one smaller—to simply have a much smaller overall numerical force in terms of launchers or warheads or whatever. That could be an adequate deterrent in a world where a massive surprise attack by a Russia or a China on US nuclear forces seems a remote possibility—or at least more remote than it did during the Cold War.

Bulletin: If a massive surprise attack by a major power is so remote, then does the United States really need a nuclear response at all? Can we have zero nuclear weapons?

Bracken: The easy answer is that it is precisely because the United States has nuclear weapons that the chances of such an attack are remote—retaliation from us is assured.

But beyond that, I think that there are always contingencies that we cannot consider, such as a local regional war that develops between two smaller powers and somehow causes the United States to need to get involved in order to prevent it from escalating further. Or maybe even the presence of our nuclear weapons deters that kind of regional war entirely.

It’s just like what could have happened during the Cuban missile crisis, or the Afghan war, or the Iraq wars: Conflicts can escalate in ways you can’t predict, and you can’t spell out the whole scenario beforehand. Who would have thought that the assassination of an obscure archduke in a remote part of the Austro-Hungarian empire would lead to France fighting Germany?

So, the United States needs more than zero nuclear weapons.

And let’s admit it: Domestic politics and perceptions have historically mattered a great deal in the Cold War, and are likely to do so in the future. The mere fact that Russia or China had some number of weapons—and say that, hypothetically, the United States did not—would cause domestic pressure for us to catch up.

I’m just thinking out loud here, but there is also another side to all this. It’s likely that US nuclear guarantees to other countries—saying that we’ll protect them by using our nuclear weaponry—means that those countries don’t need to get their own nuclear weapons. Places like Japan don’t need nuclear weapons of their own because they are protected by our nuclear umbrella. So you could argue that what we have stockpiled in the United States actually prevents nuclear weapons proliferation worldwide.

Bulletin: Wouldn’t this huge investment in upgrading the triad be hard to explain, coming from an administration that came into office talking about a path to eliminating nuclear weapons around the globe? Although in fairness, Obama did also pledge to spend the money to make the country’s nuclear arsenal as safe and reliable as possible.

Bracken: First of all, most of this money would be spent by future administrations. The pattern in the Obama administration is to come up with these very large modernization budgets and then not spend the money to put them into effect. But there’s a deeper question: The president’s 2009 Prague speech, in which he laid out a vision of a nuclear-weapons-free world, was viewed by many people as, well, a very “illusioned” one that had little chance of practical realization. At least so far—admittedly only five years—it does not seem to have convinced Russia, China, North Korea, Israel, Pakistan, India, or Iran to go down the weapons-free road.

Bulletin: If you feel that we cannot get rid of nuclear weapons entirely, then do you think it is possible to at least reduce their numbers?

Bracken: Most of the nuclear weapons in the world today are held by the United States or Russia. Which means you’ve got only two countries to deal with. Based on that, I would say that it is very possible to shrink that force. And it would be a good thing to do.

Bulletin: Can we further shrink the number of countries in the nuclear club? By way of example, South Africa got rid of its nukes, and Libya dropped its program.

Bracken: My view is that the fewer nuclear-armed countries, the better. It’s clearly a good thing to try to do.

But it’s harder, although still possible. For example, North Korea may collapse on short notice. And if it does so peacefully, that would eliminate one of them.

And although we just don’t know for sure, it is conceivable that we could stop Iran from joining the list of nuclear countries.

And then there are the interesting cases of Britain and France. It is striking to me that, after the president’s Prague speech, we put no pressure on either London or Paris to give up their nuclear weapons. If you think that the use of nuclear weapons by the United States is just a remote possibility, then it has to be transcendentally remote for the United Kingdom or France to use their respective nuclear weapons. This would have been an easy pathway for cutting down the number of countries who have atomic weapons. But the United States did nothing to pursue this option.

We also did nothing to restrain another nuclear-armed country that is often in the news: Israel.

Bulletin: Why didn’t we encourage our allies to get rid of their nuclear weapons?

Bracken: If those countries gave up the bomb, then the United States would be the only Western democracy with nuclear weapons.

And by letting them keep their bombs, that allows them to punch above their weight in international affairs, due to the mere possession of nuclear weapons. There’s a lot of subtle issues here; we can’t put as much pressure as we’d like on our allies, although we can put all the pressure we want on Iran.

But I think we should try to encourage our allies to go down this road; it makes no sense for Britain to have nuclear weapons. And yet we’ve never pointed this out to London.

If the United States could have put pressure on any one country to disarm, it would have been the United Kingdom: there’s a lot of domestic support for disarmament over there, and has been for years. Yet we fully supported Tony Blair’s decision to spend all that money on an upgraded nuclear submarine fleet.

And I also think that France is a possibility for nuclear disarmament, especially at a time when they are cutting so much of their defense budget. The French nuclear force consumes an enormous fraction of the overall French defense, despite the fact that most French generals think that they will never use these things. It would be far more practical for them to concentrate on building light, mobile forces—they would be much more usable, in Africa, the Middle East, and other places where France is most likely to be involved.

Bulletin: If these nuclear systems are so expensive, unpopular, and unlikely to be used, then why don’t these countries give up their nuclear forces of their own accord, without any encouragement from us?

Bracken: It gets complicated fast. For France, for example, to give up all its nuclear forces now would be to give up all pretenses of being a global power. Germany is clearly the major economic power in the European Union, and that doesn’t leave much for France to claim for itself, outside of military power. I was just in Berlin, and the remodeling and rebuilding there has turned that city into a sort of anti-war peace museum. This is not true of Paris, with its large military museum on Les Invalides and Napoleon’s Tomb—they’re still, in some sense, celebrating French military prowess.

French dictionaries still come with maps on the flyleaf showing old French possessions from the height of the French empire.

And there’s another element involved: If France did give up all its nuclear weapons and Britain didn’t, then this would play on the huge inferiority complex that France has with Britain already. And that would really be intolerable, it seems to me, for Paris.

So, one can think up all these reasons for our allies to want to give up nuclear weapons on their own, but then all these other factors come into play—it’s not just technical issues about "counterforce versus countervalue" targeting.

I don’t know why more analysts haven’t looked at these interesting political and cultural questions regarding why our allies still have nuclear weapons. We always want to focus on Iran or North Korea.

Bulletin: Do these complications mean that the world is a more dangerous place now than it was in the Cold War?

Bracken: I think that we are at least living in a second nuclear weapons age.

While there were several nuclear powers in the previous era, the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union overshadowed the others, which meant that the dynamics then were largely bipolar. In contrast, today we live in a multipolar nuclear world.

For example, although I’ve described it as an anti-war museum, Berlin is selling six Dolphin-class submarines to the Israeli Navy, and they are almost surely to be used by the Israelis as carriers of nuclear weapons. Now, the Germans didn’t have anything to do with the nuclear warheads, but that’s what von Braun used to say about his involvement with the V-2: “I just build the rockets, and what the military does with them isn’t my department.”

To top things off, the sale of those submarines was not even reviewed by the Bundestag—the German legislature. It was totally an executive decision, done over their heads.

Now, I’m not saying that I oppose this decision; just that there are so many interesting dimensions. Yet in the United States the whole debate is reduced to a very narrow conceptualization of what a nuclear posture is.

Nuclear weapons are now integral to foreign and defense policies in the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia, where governments have embraced them as necessary tools of regional stability and deterrence. This emerging global nuclear system will make it impossible to eliminate nuclear weapons for the next 50 years, although who knows what will happen in the longer term. The only solution for the near future is to manage the problem.

And everything is all inter-related. No one can look at the Middle East today and say: “We’ll just separate the peace process between Israel and Palestine from the Iranian nuclear program or Iranian support for Hezbollah.” Similarly, one can’t just look at South Asia and just look at the conventional military balance.

Bulletin: Your 2012 book, The Second Nuclear Age, charged: “Nuclear forces were left to rot, technologically and intellectually.” This issue came to a head recently, as shown in an Associated Press exposé last month. A subsequent New York Times followup reported that the Pentagon will have to spend billions of dollars over the next five years to make “emergency fixes” to its nuclear weapons infrastructure. Investigators said that things had gotten so bad that the crews that maintain the nation’s 450 ICBMs had only a single wrench to share between them—and they have been forced to FedEx the one tool to three different bases in order to attach the nuclear warheads.

Bracken: (Laughs.) Yes, I saw that. You can’t make this up. This fits in very much with my findings and those of others. We’ve gone overboard in trying to save money.

But I want to point out something important, that’s easily missed. I teach at a business school, and if you looked at a company that had these characteristics, you wouldn’t blame the store clerks or the waitresses. You would blame senior management—the Department of Defense, the armed services—for its handling of the operation and maintenance of our nuclear weapons.

And all the studies that have been done of this issue all blame senior management for a lack of attention to the nuclear enterprise. These were major studies, one of which just came out two months ago.

The point here is not to blame the store clerks, but to blame who gets paid the big bucks to make the decisions. There have been inadequate efforts here.

Bulletin: The Times article went on to say that things such as the broken blast door and the lack of tools were just a few of the many maintenance problems that had “been around so long that no one reported them anymore.” Promises of new infrastructure had been made for so long that the missile launch crews did not believe the new equipment would arrive during their careers.

Bracken: That’s right. There was a very good, concise summary of this done within the last year by Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes during a visit to Strategic Command. One thing I’ll never forget was when she was on camera with some Air Force officer who said that they’re not susceptible to cyber attack—because they don’t have any Internet access. They are still using those big floppy disks that I used way back in college. I think that’s really looking on the sunny side of the street.

Bulletin: Is this decline something new, or has it been festering for a long time? A Wall Street Journal article said: “Most Americans have thought as little as possible about nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War.” Is that part of the reason why our missile command has been neglected?

Bracken: There are a number of factors, one of which is the Cold War’s end. Another is that the center of action in military operations has clearly been in areas like precision strike, information warfare, and other places.

But I think another dimension to this is that some people are so opposed to nuclear forces that they welcome their disappearing due to apathy and lack of maintenance. They would be the last ones to call out these problems because they think that if the problems go on indefinitely, the systems will just be too expensive to refurbish. And they think that’s a good thing.

But nuclear weapons are dangerous items to neglect, and there have been several well-documented accidents, which have been very troubling.

Although I do have to admit that I personally don’t think we were ever close to a nuclear launch or a detonation. Those who tell you that our nuclear forces are on a hair-trigger simply don’t know what they’re talking about—thank God.

If you had this force and only one wrench, you wouldn’t want to put it on a hair trigger either. We’re not that stupid. But the accidents we’ve had, have been bad enough.

Bulletin: The maintenance problems came on the heels of scandals over cheating on tests among nuclear forces. (In March, the Air Force fired nine officers and accepted the resignation of the commander at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana for failing to provide adequate oversight of the launch officers implicated in the scandal.) A newly released study by Gen. Larry D. Welch of the Air Force and Adm. John C. Harvey Jr. of the Navy found that in the tedious work of nuclear readiness, a culture of micromanagement flourished, creating busywork while huge problems with equipment and readiness were ignored. “Extreme testing” meant that the goal became scoring a near-perfect grade on exams, rather than making sure that the systems worked and the missile crews were ready to operate under combat conditions. Does that fit in with your observations?

Bracken: That squares with my experience and knowledge of the system from my research.

And it does raise a question that no one seems to want to ask: If things are so bad, if for some reason we did want to fire an individual nuclear weapon, could we? Would the weapon take off?

With all of the problems in our nuclear force, it seems to me that there’d be some real doubts. You really wouldn’t want to use one of these weapons, because you don’t know what is going to happen.

Now, if there was a massive Russian attack, I’m sure we could retaliate—we’ve got enough weaponry at our disposal, if we fire enough of them in a mass counterstrike, some are bound to work. But anything short of that is likely to offer only low-confidence options.

And if that’s what the situation is like here, it makes one wonder what it’s like in the former Soviet Union.

Bulletin: What could be done to improve things here?

Bracken: I would support the idea of more pay, more recognition, less nit-picking, more focus on essentials like having the proper equipment—and fixing blast doors. And doing things to bolster morale, such as handing out a pin or patch for successfully completing a hundred missile alerts.

But just as essential is that the Department of Defense and the armed services need to develop more intellectual capital in this field. They need to think about why we need nukes; what the important scenarios are, for us and other countries; how a nuclear war could start, and what difference it would make for the United States; and how arms control needs to be restructured to fit the situation of the 21st century and not a bipolar competition that ended in 1991.

These are not things that can be handled by simply changing some bureaucratic procedures. We have to ask, "What is the whole role of nuclear weapons in the 21st century?"

And I would go further and say that the problem today is not US nuclear weapons, but it’s really other countries’ nuclear weapons. That is what really influences what we should be buying.

Bulletin: Would you describe yourself as an optimist or a pessimist about the future?

Bracken: I’m an optimist, in that I sense that the problems relating to nuclear weapons in the 21st century are reaching such a level that they’re attracting better people, smarter people, and more government interest. So attention is coming back to these issues; I’ve seen a lot of it just in the past year, with the attention given to the Air Force’s problems being but one of several examples. At the same time, our nuclear force is wearing out from age, forcing us to take stock.

And we’re coming to realize that other countries will likely have the Bomb for a long time, so we’d better understand how they think about it.

[vector7]

Russian Strategic Missile Forces to Begin Exercise

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Russian Strategic Missile Forces' counter-terrorist exercise will start on Tuesday as part of inspection of the southeastern Orenburg Missile Army, the Defense Ministry's press service said in a statement Monday.

The complex inspection is carried out from March 30 to April 11 in line with the Strategic Missile Troops combat readiness training program.


© Sputnik/ Ramil Sitdikov
Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces Check Combat Readiness During Drills

"During the inspection, special attention will be paid to the exercise that will be conducted under supervision of the Strategic Missile Forces Commander-in-Chief and will take place between March 31 and April 4," the statement published on Russia's Defense Ministry official website read. The main aim of the exercise is to improve the operational performance of commanders and staff officers throughout the chain of command, and enhance practical skills within task forces, units and elements in case of an imminent threat or an actual terrorist attack, according to the statement.

The Orenburg Missile Army is equipped with RT-2PM Topol (NATO reporting name SS-25 Sickle) and R-36М Voyevoda (NATO reporting name SS-18 Satan) intercontinental ballistic missile systems.

The Russian Defense Ministry has announced plans to conduct at least 4,000 military exercises throughout the country in 2015.

Read more: http://sputniknews.com/military/2015...#ixzz3VyB83VTD

US Mainland Vulnerable to Massive ICBM Attack?

© AP Photo/ Charlie Riedel
Military & Intelligence
19:17 31.03.2015

The history of US missile defense since 1983 has been one of waning expectations, noted American military expert Steven Pifer, admitting that the country has not yet built a reliable and affordable domestic missile defense system that could protect America against a massive ICBM attack.

The United States has yet to build a reliable domestic defense system that would completely protect the country against a massive ballistic missile attack, admitted Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine and director of the Arms Control Initiative at The Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.


© AP Photo/ Czarek Sokolowski
US to Test Anti-ICBM System in 2015: Missile Defense Agency

"The history of missile defense since 1983 has been one of downsizing expectations, as US programs have regularly encountered technological and budgetary limitations," Steven Pifer noted. The former ambassador revealed that the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) announced by Ronald Reagan in 1983 was intended to deal with thousands of incoming warheads.A more modest Global Protection Against Limited Strikes (GPALS) project that replaced the ambitious SDI under President George H.W. Bush aimed to stop about 200 warheads.

However, the National Missile Defense (NMD) Act of 1999 set a goal of intercepting a few to a couple of dozen warheads.

Protecting the US homeland, "continues to be a difficult task," underscored Steven Pifer, pointing to the fact that the capabilities of the modern US Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system "remain uncertain at best."


© Flickr/ Michael Baird
US Ballistic Missile Defense Costs Rise Nearly 6 Percent

"When I once asked a knowledgeable US official what he would do if a (currently nonexistent) North Korean ICBM were launched in the direction of Seattle, he said he would fire a bunch of GMD interceptors and cross his fingers," the expert stressed. Steven Pifer elaborated that GMD interceptors were deployed by the Bush administration before they had been thoroughly tested. The GMD project is still sparking concerns regarding its effectiveness and reliability.

The system has not yet been tested against a target with the speed of an intercontinental ballistic missile or a target equipped with advanced electronic components complicating its interception. Alas, almost eleven years after implementing its GMD interceptors in Alaska, US military officials are struggling to ensure that the system works properly.

Insisting that the White House should pay more attention to its domestic missile defense system deployment, the expert emphasized that Washington's geopolitical rivals will not "sit passively," watching the US bolster its military might. They will obviously expand their own defensive and strategic offensive capacities, Steven Pifer warned.

[American Patriot]

Basically those last three paragraphs tells me I won't even know it happened.

[Ryan Ruck]

America Has a Very Expensive Plan to Replace Very Old Nukes

Pricey new missile could take the place of today’s Minuteman III

January 26, 2015

The U.S. Air Force has announced its strategy for replacing America’s Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles—which have stood alert, awaiting Armageddon, for nearly five decades.

Making nukes is hard. But squeezing another multi-billion-dollar project into the Air Force’s already bulging budget is perhaps the bigger challenge.

We’re talking about the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, an effort to replace the stockpile of Minuteman nuclear missiles Boeing built for the Pentagon back in the late 1960s.

According to a Jan. 23 notice on the government’s contracting Website, the Air Force wants to build an entirely new booster stack but keep the existing Minuteman payload assembly, capable of delivering one or multiple independent nuclear warheads.

The proposed missile will occupy renovated Minuteman silos and use the same launch control centers. Those have been in the ground since the ’60s.

If Congress funds it, the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent program will deliver an entirely new command-and-control network that connects the president to his nuclear options. This replaces the network of outdated computers that perhaps should be in a museum instead of commanding the most fearsome weapons on Earth.

The notice comes as the White House prepares to submit its budget for fiscal year 2016, and as outgoing Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel pushes for the Pentagon to direct more money toward the nuclear force.

Hagel’s not the only one calling for more nuke cash. Recently, a top Air Force general spoke in Washington to lobby for more money to replace almost every strategic weapon system in the Pentagon’s nuclear arsenal.

Maj. Gen. Garrett Harencak, assistant chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration, said the Air Force has been on a nuclear weapons “procurement holiday” for the past quarter-century. Modernization efforts should be a priority, Harencak said.

“Other countries have not, they did not take that procurement holiday,” Harencak claimed on Jan. 20. “It is unfortunate a lot of these bills are all coming due now. We should have been taking care of this, we didn’t. That’s in the past. I’ve got to deal with today and the future.”

The general’s “holiday” statement is a familiar one—and not entirely fair. “If ‘holiday’ generally refers to ‘a day of festivity or recreation when no work is done,’ then it’s been a bad holiday,” pointed out Hans Kristensen, a nuclear weapons policy expert with the Federation of American Scientists.

“One can always want more, but the ‘procurement holiday’ claim glosses over the busy nuclear modernization and maintenance efforts of the past two decades,” Kristensen wrote on Jan. 21.

Krinstensen points to several rounds of nuclear warhead life-extensions by the Energy Department plus the Air Force’s fielding of the nuclear-armed B-2 stealth bomber and the introduction of the Navy’s Ohio-class missile submarines in the 1990s.

The government spent $8 billion upgrading the current Minuteman system in the 2000s while the Navy fielded its new Trident II D5 missile in the Pacific. Advanced command-and-control satellites boosted into orbit and the bomber force received several new features.

So maybe it’s not accurate to claim America has neglected its nuclear forces. Still, the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent has arrived at the back of a long, long queue for funding—and it’s not certain whether the next-generation ICBM project will attract kick-starter money in the next budget.

The Air Force is simultaneously seeking funds to buy new bombers worth $550 million each, plus a new cruise missile and secondhand Army UH-60 helicopters to replace the old UH-1s that fly security missions around missile fields. The B-52 also needs a new radar and new engines.

“In truth, none can wait,” Brig. Gen. Ferdinand Stoss, Air Force Global Strike Command’s top planning and requirements official, wrote in an email in December. “Therefore, we are developing strategies to modernize each based on operational risk and program maturity.”

These “priorities” must compete with efforts to modernize conventional forces with, among other things, new satellites and the over-budget F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Air Force officials want to retire older, inexpensive planes such as the A-10 in order to free up cash for F-35s, but Congress has blocked the moves.

As of Friday, the Minuteman replacement program is in the “market research” phase. Defense firms are keen to offer their support, considering the billions of dollars and decades of maintenance work on the line for whichever contractors the Air Force selects for the program.

In fact, work on the new missile is already underway. Three firms have secured small contracts to begin designing new guidance systems. Contracts to help design the other components should be forthcoming as the GBSD program matures.

The Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center’s ICBM division at Hill Air Force Base in Utah is directing the missile work. The focal point for industry is Falcon Hill, an aerospace research park located alongside the base.

Next month, Falcon Hill will host a briefing between the Air Force and industry to outline the main performance characteristics of the proposed missile system. By December, the Pentagon’s top acquisition office should make a decision whether to move the project to the technology-maturation phase.

If Falcon Hill does get the green light, work will ramp up almost immediately. It would be the flying branch’s first new ICBM project since the ironically-named Peacekeeper program. The Peacekeeper, capable of delivering 10 nuclear warheads to anywhere on Earth, retired from service in 2005.

To maintain and upgrade the Minuteman while simultaneously preparing for the introduction of the replacement missile, the Air Force is rejigging its ICBM contractor arrangements.

The new ICBM world order, called the Future ICBM Sustainment and Acquisition Construct, does away with the previous prime contractor model, where one company reigned supreme and everybody else was a subcontractor.

The contract arrangement has built-in flexibility so the Air Force can shrink and grow its Minuteman and Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent teams as needed, without having to repeatedly go through the source-selection process.

The Air Force will centrally manage the Minuteman and GBSD projects, and in 2013 hired BAE Systems to assist, ending an existing prime contract that Northrop Grumman had held since 1997.

It’s not all bad news for Northrop, though. On Jan. 14, the company secured a spot on the team by winning a five-year deal worth up to $1 billion to support the Air Force’s ICBM ground infrastructure, consisting of 450 silos, 45 launch control centers and dozens of test sites spread across 32,000 square miles and five states.

On Jan. 8, Boeing secured a FISAC contract that extends through 2023 to maintain the guidance subsystem. Last June, Lockheed Martin won the FISAC reentry vehicle contract. A final contract to manage the rocket booster stack is due later this year.

These awards are important for each contractors’ current and future involvement in the ICBM business, according to Peggy Morse, Boeing’s vice president of directed energy and strategic systems.

“It’s very important for the government that anything that’s done on GBSD is going to be evolutionary from what we have today, and in some cases has to be backward compatible,” Morse said in a Jan. 14 interview. “From our point of view, winning this business was extremely important to keep our finger in the game.”

Harencak said during his speech that the government’s position is to work toward a world free of nuclear weapons. But until that “happy day” comes, he said, the Air Force cannot fall behind on nuclear modernization.

“It’s not going to be inexpensive, but it’s also not unaffordable,” Harencak said. “It’s something we have to do to protect our nation.”

In reality, the cost will be enormous. This week, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the government’s planned nuclear weapons spending through 2024 at $348 billion. Spending on the ICBM force will total more than $26 billion over the next decade, the budget office found.

“The big costs for recapitalizing and rebuilding the arsenal aren’t scheduled to hit the balance sheets until the early- and mid-2020s,” Kingston Reif, a nuclear weapons policy expert at the Arms Control Association, said in a Jan. 23 interview. “We’re still only seeing a small slice of the planned cost.”

On Jan. 1, the State Department reported that during 2014 the U.S. had 794 deployed land- and sea-based ballistic missiles and heavy bombers. There were 1,642 deployed nuclear warheads.

Russia, by contrast, had 528 deployed nuclear “delivery vehicles” and 1,643 warheads.

America’s nuclear weapons stockpile in 2014, accounting for deployed and non-deployed assets, included 698 Minuteman missiles, 56 Peacekeeper missiles, and 411 Trident II missiles. There were 20 nuclear-capable B-2 bombers and 89 nuclear-capable B-52 bombers, according to the report.