Geez, USAF – Not Again!
Well, it seems as if there have been some additional problems in the USAF’s Nuclear Kingdom.
Four USAF officers were disciplined recently. They were launch officers and/or assistant launch officers assigned to Minuteman units.
The issue? They failed to follow procedures regarding sleeping while on alert duty.
Per current policies, one of the two-person team manning an underground Minuteman launch bunker is authorized to get some sleep at any given time – IF the facility’s blast doors are closed and locked and only the launch crew is present. If the blast doors are open, or if anyone but the launch crew is present, either member of the crew sleeping is an absolute “No Go”.
The reason for this policy regarding blast doors and sleep should be pretty damn obvious.
Yeah, you guessed it. Some crews decided to cut corners – on at least two occasions this year alone, and apparently on multiple other occasions that weren’t caught. No compromises or incidents resulted, but still: “That’s not good”.
Fox News has more details.
Category: Air Force
USAF- Not Again! Unfortunately it is again, and it is a leadership problem.
There’s an old saying that goes “The fish rots from the head.”
Sounds likes the chain of command needs to be rebuilt with new people.
What is this BIG RED BUTTON for?
DON’T press the Big red Button. Bad things will happen.
Big Red Button? I’ll just leave this here. Make sure you watch the last 45 seconds . . . . (smile)
They still have Minuteman missiles?
Gee, my grandma used to take us out to dinner at the Lincoln, NE, airbase and told us all those lights marked Minuteman missile silos. But that was 55 years ago.
I thought that stuff was all gone.
And the General I wrote about here, http://valorguardians.com/blog/?p=37936 was fired for personal behavior….because, well, I guess this isn’t as bad?
Old family story from my mom (who’s not up on military things, so some details may be off).
My great uncle retired as a E8 from the USAF back in the SAC days, and was with the security forces. He and my mom exchanged letters when he was in Vietnam and when he was in Minot, amongst other places.
One winter day he walked past a guard post somewhere at Minot, flashed a card that wasn’t an ID (or an ID he’d stolen that somebody left in a coat, I forget, I know he did that too), and got waved through by the inattentive guard who just saw a Master Sgt he knew. Great uncle got the Christmas leave of everybody underneath him who had it cancelled. Everybody. Because one or two guys failed to properly check an ID.
My mom was horrified. People, after all, had made plans, bought tickets, etc. He said that if they wanted to go home for Christmas they shouldn’t have fucked up where nukes were concerned. They spent it doing training on procedures instead.
Wonder if they’d still do that.
Well THAT’S where the phrase… “Ya Snooze, Ya Lose” came from.
/Damn you, my USAF.
Just proving once again that my beloved AF, NEVER should have gotten rid of SAC!!!
-Ish
Hondo–why is this making me thing of Ren and Stimpy and the History Eraser Button?
Ex-PH2: Minuteman IIIs these days, with 3 MIRVs each if I recall correctly. First versions went into service in 1962 (Minuteman I). Minuteman III began deployment in 1970.
I think the missiles you’re remembering may have been Atlas missiles. AI did a quick search regarding the deployment of Minutemen and can’t find any record of them ever being deployed in vicinity of Lincoln, NE. However, there were Atlas missiles deployed in various locations in Nebraska during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Some of those were run by a unit headquartered at Lincoln AFB (98th SAW) and were in the general vicinity of Lincoln, NE.
Dunno, NHSparky. I was never a big R&S fan. But if I understand the concept correctly – yeah, under the right circumstances could be.
The button reference made me think of the clip I posted the link to above. It should be safe for work as long as work allows YouTube.
Spade – I heard back in the day holding up a pack of Marlboro menthols sideways when going through the gate worked too.
My Grandfather worked for a construction company and was the construction site foreman for a number of missile silo installations. My Dad worked at a number of them as summer jobs while he was in college. Just my small world contribution!
One of the funniest Ren & Stimpy ones before they went full on adult.
But seriously, all they need to get free rack time is to close the doors and be alone??? SERIOUSLY???
With this incident there seems to be a systemic failure at the command level to produce properly motivated and trained teams to accomplish this mission. It’s time to SAC a large amount of leaders, in addition to the turds who believe the rules are a waste of time and are to be ignored.
Do your f@cking job as required or expect poor career outcomes, how hard is that to comprehend. Leaders who don’t give a f@ck create troops who don’t give a f@ck, this is not news it’s well understood throughout the military.
It’s time for some new leaders who are clear on the concept.
AtDrum: as I understand it – and I wasn’t USAF and thus was obviously never a missile crew member – it’s a 2-person launch crew. They’re on for 24hrs straight. Since there are two persons on duty, one is allowed to get some rack time – PROVIDED (1) the other crew member is awake and alert, (2) no non-launch-crew personnel are present, and (3) the blast doors are closed and secured.
I’ve been in units that treated the SDO/SDNCO duty similarly – e.g., 2 persons on duty (1 officer, 1 NCO) and one could get some sleep (cot) if conditions permitted. However, one of the two had to be awake and alert in the HQ at all times.
From photos, the blast doors look to be huge and heavy. I’m guessing they’re a pain to close and secure, and that some of the crews thus decided to cut corners and “blow off” the requirement to close and secure blast doors before getting some sleep during their shift.
HONDO … thanks for the BLAST into the past! A good 4 minutes!
This is what happens when the vast majority people you put in these positions are pilot wash-outs. Couple that with the zero “job satisfaction” and a career that pretty much goes no where and you are just asking for stuff like this to happen. Just my two cents I suppose.
@8 Spade,
They can’t swear at us in BMT- I mean they still do- but heaven help the MTI that gets caught doing it. Point is, the canceling of Christmas (errrr- “Holiday”) leave, would never happen.
I’m currently serving as a Battlefield Airman, and that sort of thing wouldn’t even happen in a unit like mine- a freakin’ combat unit!
I’m painting a pretty broad picture of the Air Force and her reserve components here, but I feel confident in saying that said painting applies to %99.99 of Big Blue. I hear stories from ol’ SAC dudes, Air Commandos, and Vietnam-era Security Forces types, and I let then know they wouldn’t recognize the Air Force today if it sat on their faces.
-M
You say current policy allows one member of a two person crew to sleep. Never heard of this but I’ve been retired for a long time now and I never worked missiles. I have to wonder though, doesn’t this clash with the two man concept in that one person is never allowed to be alone with a nuke?
I think the “keys” or “buttons”, whatever they use are far enough apart that one person could not activate the nuke. So the two man concept could still work.
Hondo, they probably were Atlas missiles, but were referred to in the papers as Minuteman missiles. It was a long, long time ago and Lincoln, NE, was considered a target city. But then, so were Decatur, IL and likewise, Rantoul, IL.
Big, bulky, heavy doors? They’re called ‘blast doors’ for a reason. If one of those things has to launch, you need a lot of ‘stuff’ between you and the blast from the engines on those things. And those doors are on something that makes them easy to move. Not sure if it’s ball bearings or what, but they’re no harder to open and close than a bank vault’s doors.
This just sounds like a bit or laziness by the missile crews to me.
No, they’re Minute Man III’s.
The Atlas missle systems were phased out in the mid to late 60’s.
@8. I recently had to enter a ‘secure’ site (non-military) but remembered to pull the special ID from a drawer before I left for the place. Now, the photo-ID card I was supposed to present was yellow and longer than it is wide. I presented a photo-ID card that was devoid of yellow, was wider than it is long, showed me with a full head of red hair, and had expired about 15 years ago. Problem? Not at all. I was buzzed right in!
@23 Retired Master: The no lone zone is not just about being able to set one off, it is also about physical security of the bomb. I worked on F-16s and when one was loaded under the wing, the two man rule was also so no one would take a hammer to the bomb an make it inoperable.
I was in SAC and worked in a ICBM silo and launch center . This is much ado about nothing . The biggest mistake the AF made (aside from having McPeak as CSAF ) was getting rid of SAC . Perfection was required. As a former CINSAC said- “To err is human,to forgive, divine. And neither is SAC policy”. It was very easy for anyone,even a wing commander,to be removed from duty .
PArdon me but since when did the tSA and DHS start vetting USAF missile crews? Do they do the same for Boomer Jockeys as well? We need guys like Powers and LeMay back. God how I’d like to make either of them head of the Air Force again or even TSA. Some days I weep for the Republic.
YOu aren’t gonna believe this. Looks like ole I CAUGHT PTSD FROM DRONE PILOTING is back…
http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/23/us/drone-operator-interview/index.html?iref=allsearch
If you only have to close a door to be able to nap all you want while the other guy is up, then I would manage to pull the doors to NORAD closed…
Ex-PH2: even on good bearings, a large and heavy object can be a pain to move due to inertia (think pushing a stalled car by hand). Takes a bit of “oomph” to get something that might weigh a ton or two moving even on good wheels/bearings. I’m guessing the doors were a pain to open/close for that reason, so some crews just said “screw it” and didn’t bother.
Jacobite: Ex-PH2 was referring to missile launch locations she saw in the Lincoln, NE, area 50+ years ago. Those weren’t Minutemen – Minutemen missiles weren’t ever deployed near Lincoln, NE. But Atlas missiles were indeed deployed in the Lincoln, NE, area in the late 1950s-early 1960s.
Ahhhh, I stand corrected, my apologies ma’am. I didn’t read the previous posts close enough, thanks for the clarification Hondo. 🙂