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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."
What are the questions for this exam? Why do they need to cheat?
least the launch codes aren't 000000 anymore
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!
Hold on, let me consult the cheat sheet...
The same way we do everything else: by force. Our government sees itself as the masters of the world, unfortunately. Don't agree to their terms? They'll bomb your country. Don't want to provide them with cheap products? They'll hack into your corporate networks, steal plans, and hand it over to American companies (for which their cousin/nephew/whatever works). Don't want to provide them with a constant stream of where you are and what you're doing at all times? Too bad, that wasn't an option.
I am deeply ashamed at how our government is behaving yet still tries to hold up the illusion of democracy.
So the NSA, for all of it's intrusion into privacy to protect us all, could not find 93 co-conspirators who had access to nuclear weapons, how on earth can we expect them to find a small terrorist cell? What the hell are we trading our liberties, privacy, and freedom for if they can't even uncover something as large as this?
Answer the fucking question.
You can't handle the truth.
Repeat after me: I misinterpreted the rules.
Thirty four characters live here.
hmmmm. I do not think that you understand what the job is. These men are ran through drills where all of the sounds, and feelings would be the REAL thing. IOW, for their drills, they really believe that they are going through the real thing. That is harsh. It causes these men/women to have some hard strains on them. And being locked up when your family is suffering, is even harder.
My sister was in the hospital with a 106 fever when the cuban missle crisis started. So, he had to sit on a runway for 3 days, with a nuke about 20' away from him, ready to fly to USSR and drop it, while he had absolutely NO idea of how his daughter was doing in the hospital. It was not until the stand down that he found out that she was alive. That is a hard thing to do.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why the hell aren't they all being dishonourably discharged and even court-martialed?
It takes 5 minutes to decertify somebody and pull them from their duties. You can't be 'dishonourably discharged' without a General Court-Martial, which the civilian equivalent is a full up court trial. As such, it takes time to build a case, time to put together a court, time to assemble a jury of equal or higher rank*, time to hold the trial, etc...
Now complicate it by having to do it by x92. A *busy* base might have 1 general court marshal(overseen by a federal judge) per month. Most only have 1 court room, though I suppose they can set up others ad-hoc, but the rooms can't be too bad or it generates a point to base an appeal on.
As such, in order to expediently conduct the trials they'd have to ship the offenders to bases all over the country. Finding enough federal judges would be a problem.
Honestly, I do expect a number of discharges ranging from 'Dishonorable' to 'Other than honorable', even a number of honorable discharges - the military is shrinking so even if the court doesn't find them liable enough for discharge(standards for this are NOT supposed to change year by year), what will happen is that the conviction or article 15 will be a black mark for the 'Quality of Force Review Board' to hook on, forcing them to stand a board and defend themselves as part of a 'whole person' concept, including said black mark, when the board is looking to kick out between 30-70% of those they review.
Their careers in the military are done, even if it might take a couple years for some to be forced out.
*Easy for enlisted, not so easy for officers.
I don't read AC A human right
They never were. That was actually the code for what essentially amounted to a superfluous lock on the devices. There were still multiple layers of security, physical and otherwise, that prevented any kind of unauthorized use of, or access to, nuclear weapons. The idea that someone, armed with the code 0000000, could have done anything sinister with regard to nuclear weapons is beyond laughable and is well into the realm of nutjob conspiracy theories.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Are you claiming that General Jack Ripper is a nutjob conspiracy theorist? Next you'll be claiming that the fluoride in the water isn't affecting you when obviously it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism