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Half of US Nuclear Missile Wing Implicated In Cheating
mdsolar writes "Just over half of the 183 nuclear missile launch officers at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana have been implicated in a widening exam cheating scandal, the Air Force said on Thursday, acknowledging it had 'systemic' problem within its ranks. The cheating was discovered during an investigation into illegal drug possession among airmen, when test answers were found in a text message on one missile launch officer's cell phone. The Air Force initially said 34 officers either knew about the cheating or cheated themselves. But Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James told a Pentagon news conference on Thursday that the total number of implicated officers had grown to 92, all of them at Malmstrom, one of three nuclear missile wings overseeing America's 450 inter-continental missiles, or ICBMs."
No surprise to me.
It is a terrible, mind numbingly boring job that is essentially a career killer in the Air Force. Not to mention the fact that the likelihood of them actually having to do what they train for is very low and if they do have to do what they trained for it basically means they are helping end life on this planet as we know it.
I completely understand why they would not be motivated to excel on the exams and/or might smoke a little grass.
I wonder what their Russian counterparts' moral is like.
Wax on, wax off baby!
Policies & procedures stuff, primarily. They cheat because, while there is a 'passing' score, your raw score also gets noted in member reviews. And when the review board sees that there's only 10 slots for the next rank in your specialty, and there's 20 people who graduated in the same class and all have good board interviews, of course they'll look at all your test scores next.
You don't seem to get it. That's exactly what's happening. The military is cutting troops, not re-enlisting them. When your entire career has been spent sitting in a bunker waiting for the order to destroy the world, getting laid off is a bit more of a threat to you than others. I know quite a few career military guys and they all fear for their jobs right now. Not that it's a bad thing, our military is way way too big... but you can understand why these people are going to such lengths.
Except that 1/2 of them are now shown to be cheaters. There goes the trustworthiness, the technical training, and the unblemished record in one shot. Maybe they can work...
^H ^H ^H ^H ... on Wall Street.... for a political party... as an HR Director... as IT management at a financial institution.... As head of the NSA [I hear they are looking]...
There, fixed that for ya!