Penalties Prompt Cheating, Nuclear Officers Say
By HELENE COOPER
Revelations that U.S. missile launch officers cheated on exams come amid a perception that they’ve been sidelined.
U.S.
Culture of Cheating Permeates Air Force Missile Corps
WASHINGTON
— Top military officials were quick to voice outrage over revelations
last week that 34 officers responsible for launching the nation’s
nuclear missiles cheated on monthly proficiency tests, but few expressed
surprise.
Cheating
has been a fact of life among America’s nuclear launch officers for
decades, crew members and instructors said. “When I saw that they got
something wrong, I would say, ‘Go back and look at No. 5 again,'” said
Brian Weeden, a former launch officer at Malmstrom Air Force Base in
Montana who said that he routinely asked new crew members to show him
their test answers before they turned them in.
The
same help, he said, was offered to him by his own instructors when he
first began a tour of duty in which officers are expected to score 100
percent on the monthly written tests, and anything below 90 percent is a
failing grade.
Air
Force officials insist that regardless of the cheating, there is no
potential for a nuclear mistake because several backup procedures are in
place. For their part, missile launch crew members say they do know the
test material — which includes how to handle nuclear launch codes — but
argue that the grading standards are unreasonably high.
Whoever
is right, the cheating scandal comes as the nation’s missile launch
officers, known as missileers, are caught in a vicious cycle. They work
with the lethal jewels of the nation’s arsenal, for which errors can be
catastrophic, but they find themselves forgotten on the sidelines,
overshadowed by combat and Special Operations forces central to the
marquee mission of fighting terrorism. No one wants a nuclear conflict,
but many launch officers see their lot as spending a lifetime waiting
for a war that will never come.
“The
nuclear deterrent mission has lost much of its status in the Air Force
as the Cold War ended, and many of the personnel on the mission are
demoralized,” said Loren B. Thompson, the head of the Lexington
Institute, a research organization.
Former
missileers say the cheating is also driven by what they say are onerous
consequences for failing the tests, including additional time on
“alert” in the isolated, cramped underground capsules from which the
missiles are launched. In the language of diplomacy, they say there are
few carrots for rewards and far more sticks for retribution.
“The
sticks are so severe, the punishment for imperfection so great, that it
encourages crew members to work together to ensure no one fails,” said
Bruce Blair, a former missile launch officer and a co-founder of Global
Zero, which advocates the elimination of nuclear weapons. Mr. Blair said
that he cheated on his proficiency tests, as did his fellow crew
members.
Missile
launch officers must also pass practical tests that include simulations
of attacks on specific cities, and are widely believed to be impervious
to cheating.
One
former missileer who left Malmstrom in 2010 said he believed that every
officer there knew about the cheating and that 85 percent to 90 percent
of them — himself included — cheated on the tests. “The penalty is so
severe that everyone is freaked out,” he said, speaking on the condition
of anonymity to avoid repercussions. “It makes your life so much worse
when you miss a question, and there are no real consequences to not
knowing the answers, so people help each other out.”
Current
and former missileers described a surreal circular dance in which crew
members routinely cheated on the tests, got promoted to higher rank and
then officially announced their zero tolerance of cheating, all while
looking the other way.
“The
colonels, they all did the exact same thing we did,” said one captain,
who left Malmstrom in 2011 after four years there, and who said he
routinely cheated. He also asked that his name not be used for fear of
reprisal from the Air Force. “Then they put on a facade that they had to
do the right thing now. But everyone knew.”
Last
week, the Air Force said that the 34 suspended launch officers, all at
Malmstrom, either knew about or took part in the texting of answers to
the tests. Air Force officials ordered all missile launch officers to
retake the test, and said that by Friday nearly 500 had done so, with an
overall pass rate of 95.6 percent.
Maj.
Gen. Jack Weinstein, commander of the Twentieth Air Force, Air Force
Global Strike Command, said the breadth of the cheating at Malmstrom —
the 34 officers represent 17 percent of the Malmstrom launch crew —
“shocked” him. A former missileer himself, he said he never cheated or
witnessed cheating.
“I’m
not saying that people did not complete a test and then tell others, be
careful of this question or that question,” General Weinstein said.
“But to the extent of full answer sheets being passed around, I’ve never
seen that before.”
Many
military officials believe that demoralization may have led to a spate
of recent mishaps among Air Force nuclear missile officers. In the past
year, a general who oversaw nuclear weapons was dismissed for drunken
antics during an official trip to Moscow, 17 officers assigned to stand
watch over nuclear-tipped Minuteman missiles were removed for violating
safety codes and having bad attitudes, and missileers with nuclear
launch authority were caught napping with the blast door open — a
violation of security regulations meant to prevent terrorists or other
intruders from entering the underground command post and compromising
secret launch codes.
Seeking
to stem the hemorrhaging, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel flew to Wyoming
and Nebraska on Jan. 9 to reassure disheartened missileers that what he
called their lonely work was still valued. It was the first visit to
missile crew members by a Pentagon chief since 1982.
“They
are stuck out in the areas where not a lot of attention is paid, and I
know they wonder more than occasionally if anyone is paying attention,”
Mr. Hagel told reporters.
But
on the day of his trip, another scandal erupted as investigators
reported that several missile launch officers had been implicated in an
illegal drugs investigation. That inquiry eventually widened to include
the cheating scandal at Malmstrom.
Mr.
Weeden, the former launch officer at Malmstrom, who is no longer in the
Air Force, summed up the view of many missileers as he recalled the
events of Sept. 11, 2001. For four days, he stayed in the underground
capsule, watching the images on television and reeling from the attacks.
It
changed the way he thought about his job, he said, by driving home the
fact that nuclear weapons are no longer the centerpiece of national
security — a fact, he said, that has yet to be acknowledged by the
military leaders who emphasize the necessity of scoring 100 percent on
the monthly proficiency tests.
“We
couldn’t do anything,” Mr. Weeden said. “The mantra had always been
that the nuclear deterrent would keep America safe. But it didn’t. So I
felt, not only did we fail to deter those attacks, but we couldn’t do
anything about it after.”
Correction: January 22, 2014
An earlier version of this article did not provide the complete name of the Air Force group that Maj. Gen. Jack Weinstein commands. It is the Twentieth Air Force, Air Force Global Strike Command, not the Air Force Global Strike Command.
COPY http://www.nytimes.com
An earlier version of this article did not provide the complete name of the Air Force group that Maj. Gen. Jack Weinstein commands. It is the Twentieth Air Force, Air Force Global Strike Command, not the Air Force Global Strike Command.
COPY http://www.nytimes.com
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