EDITORIALS

Threat Vector

When officers aren’t gentlemen

THE PLOT could come straight out of a Tom Clancy novel. Or it could be the starting point for one of Cormac McCarthy’s-written when Mr. McCarthy was in an even darker mood than usual.

Let’s see if we’re missing anything here:

-Nearly 100 officers of the United States Air Force have been implicated in a cheating scandal.

-They are accused of either cheating on tests or knowing about the cheating but ignoring it. The tests were monthly proficiency exams to see how well the officers knew their equipment.

-Oh, yes, the equipment. Nuclear weaponry.

Scared? You ain’t heard nothin’ yet.

Out of a force of 500 officers in charge of Minuteman missiles at the Malmstrom AFB up in Montana, 92 are said to have been caught up in this scandal. Only a few months back, the Air Force estimated that only a handful of officers were involved. Now it’s a sizable portion of the whole Minuteman force.

“This is not a healthy environment,” said the new secretary of the Air Force, Deborah Lee James, displaying her own proficiency-in understatement.

USA TODAY reports that the officers in charge of the missiles work underground in 24-hour shifts. The cheating on the monthly tests may have come about because of what the military calls a Zero Defect Atmosphere. To translate into civilian, that means officers think they must score 100 percent on 100 percent of the tests they take in order to be promoted.

A high standard? Sure. Too high a standard? Not so sure. Not when it comes to maintaining the nation’s nuclear weapons. We’re not talking beanbag here. Millions of lives could be on the line should something, or somebody, go wrong.

This latest bulletin out of Montana is only one of a succession of embarrassments-dangerous embarrassments-for the Air Force and all the rest of us in recent years.

Back in 2008, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates removed two top-level Air Force officials after a mixup at Minot AFB in North Dakota sent nuclear-tipped missiles to Louisiana. Only they weren’t supposed to be nuclear-tipped. The missiles sat unguarded at Barksdale for 30 hours before anybody realized what was sitting out there.

Last May, the Associated Press got its hands on an email from a lieutenant colonel who complained of “rot” among the nation’s nuclear missile crews. In response, the military benched more than a dozen officers for several months.

A few weeks ago, the Washington Post reported on the details of Major General Michael Carey’s trip to Moscow, the one in Russia. He seems to have been under the impression he was there on a bender. The general, who was in charge of three wings of ICBM nukes, was promptly fired. Good decision.

As for this latest cheating scandal, which has led to a fifth of the nation’s Minutemen force being taken off the job, it was discovered as the result of an investigation into drug abuse by several officers.SECRETARY James, who was sworn in only last week, says the “situation remains completely unacceptable.”

Agreed.

And, she adds, “I believe now that we do have systemic problems within the force.”

Sounds like it, all right.

And she said the cheating among the officers may have been due in part to the stress and fear of not getting those 100 percents on all the tests. “I heard repeatedly that the system can be very punitive, come down very hard in the case of even small, minor issues that crop up … .”

O-o-o-o-kay. (Minor issues? Among those responsible for nuclear weapons?)

But the secretary assures the nation-and the world-that “I want to reassure everybody again that this is the failure of integrity on the part of certain airmen. It was not a failure of the mission.”

Not so fast. A failure among so many nuclear-armed airmen is a failure of the mission. These aren’t fire guards in the barracks, as important as those are. These are officers in charge of the nation’s nukes. And they thought they needed to cheat to pass tests on how to maintain those nukes.

You may be new in this job, Madam Secretary, but surely you can see how this amounts to failure, or at least potential failure, of the mission. A catastrophic failure.

Clean this up, Secretary James. And you may have to start by cleaning house. Thoroughly. So not a trace of this mess is left. Except the strongest impression that This Kind of Thing Will Not Be Tolerated.

Editorial, Pages 18 on 02/01/2014

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