This needs to be addressed now and heads should roll:
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel demanded more information Wednesday after the Air Force removed 17 launch officers from duty at a nuclear missile base in North Dakota over what a commander called "rot" in the force. The Air Force struggled to explain, acknowledging concern about an "attitude problem" but telling Congress the weapons were secure. ...
The AP quoted from an internal email written by Lt. Col. Jay Folds, deputy commander of the 91st Operations Group, which is responsible for all Minuteman 3 missile launch crews at Minot. He lamented the remarkably poor reviews they received in a March inspection. Their missile launch skills were rated "marginal," which the Air Force told the AP was the equivalent of a "D'' grade.
"We are, in fact, in a crisis right now," Folds wrote in the email to his subordinates.
The bright spot is that the command structure initiated corrective actions to restore discipline.
The distressing part is that I thought we had addressed this problem. Wasn't the creation of Global Strike Command supposed to restore order? As I noted in commenting on the news from 2009:
There's been enough recent sloppiness involving nuclear forces. It doesn't matter if there is no peer with missiles looming over us, nuclear weapons are too serious a matter to treat lightly.
I guess another bright spot is that the unit in question does not reflect the improvements in other parts of our nuclear force:
It appeared the Minot force, which is one of three responsible for controlling — and, if necessary, launching — the Air Force's 450 strategic nuclear missiles, is an outlier.
The Air Force told the AP on Wednesday that the two other missile wings — at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont., and at F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo. — earned scores of "excellent" in the most recent inspection of their ICBM launch skills. That is two notches above the "marginal" rating at Minot and one notch below the highest rating of "outstanding." Each of the three wings operates 150 Minuteman 3 missiles.
So let the Air Force do its job to clean up the rot. I'm distressed that we are still cleaning it up, but we are. But until it is cleaned up, this is a huge problem.
Things like this remind me why it is understandable that President Obama would like to go to zero nuclear weapons. Heck, I've said as much for different reasons. I think that our conventional superiority would enhance our power and influence in a world without nuclear weapons. But if we even think anyone has nuclear weapons, we have to retain them. In a world of official zero, having a couple dozen secretly around could be quite the asset in a crisis.
But it won't even come to that. Russia, for example, is incapable of defending their long border without nuclear weapons to threaten invaders. The need for the nuclear insurance policy cascades out from there, no?
So as long as we have nuclear weapons, there can be no treating nuclear weapons lightly. Fortunately we aren't. But results matter. Finish cleaning that up.
