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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!
You are confusing two separate issues, perhaps intentionally.
First, the Military _may_ be overstaffed and maybe not. Sure, we could close some remote bases or seek funding from the countries we are there to supposedly protect instead of paying them to be there. But lets not forget that a whole lot of traditional military work has gone to "Contractors" who have almost zero accountability. I'd rather have soldiers sworn to protect the constitution doing that work. Sure, there are always problems and Abu Graib was horrible. That said, at least some people were punished for it. Unlike Blackwater that has done things at least this bad yet noone gets punished. So perhaps the Military is not so much over staffed as they are used improperly and mismanaged.
The second issue is how promotions work in the Military. If you spent ten years of your life serving and want to continue to retirement you have to make rank. In order to make rank, you have go get points. Those points are nothing simple, and nothing like it exists in the civilian sector that I know of. If your job is a 35R there may be 100 E4 rank jobs, but only 5 jobs at E5 rank, and 1 at E6. If you have spent 12 years serving and can't get E6 in that time you, can't reenlist. Your 12 year investment into a career is gone. And it's not like you get some great civilian job out of 12 years military service. A military mechanic, electrician, etc.. is not considered the same as a civilian and very few of the military certifications count as civilian certifications.
All 100 of the E4s know that they need points to get rank and if they plan to make the military a career they all do the same things. They all go to airborne school, air assault school, work to shoot well and do well on their PT tests. It's little things like these BS tests and ass kissing that get the next rank and let a person continue at their desired career.
Seems like you know jack about the Military on the surface, so I'll point out another huge difference between civilian jobs and military. In the civilian world you can change jobs when ever the hell you want. In the Military you can't do this, you have to serve out your term. This means reserve time after active duty whether you want it or not, in addition to your active time. People that volunteer for a second term have given up a hell of a lot to protect you and your way of life. An attitude like yours ensures that we get shit people in the military, not people who care to do a good job. Considering the true purpose of their job, you don't really don't want shitty people (there even though you may try and claim otherwise).
FYI I am a vet and lived the life. I worked in DOD for 10 years and another 20 in the civilian sector. I can speak to both sides from an educated perspective.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
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.
I wouldn't be so sure. Recent modelling to update the 'nuclear winter' theory has not only shown that the theory is most likely valid, but actually far worse than the model that the Soviets and US came up with in the 1980s. Our current best modelling shows that even a hypothetical regional exchange with as few as 50 Nagasaki-sized weapons on each side between India and Pakistan would cause a "nuclear autumn" bad enough to cause famine in many countries, and a growing season shortened by 60 days the first year after this hypothetical war.
An exchange using the remaining weapons of the former Soviet Union and the United States - well, nuclear winter is a misnomer. Nuclear six month long night is a better description. Daytime lighting conditions in the aftermath of such an exchange would reach no more than that of a moonlit night. Continental temperatures would fall very low, and if this hypothetical war were to happen in the growing season, that's all of your food gone. Water would be hard to get as it would be frozen over. Coastal areas would be milder, but be lashed by constant violent storms due to the temperature difference to the extremely cold inland temperatures. Since the soot would be lofted to the stratosphere, there is no mechanism that will rapidly bring it down and the climatic effects would last long enough that the decade after the war would be a truly miserable experience, and most likely fatal. Those who managed to survive this would then have to deal with a world with no ozone layer and no manufacturing industry to make sunblock. Growing crops would be extremely difficult in those conditions.
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