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6.05.2008

Air Force Top Brass Lose Nukes, Jobs

WASHINGTON DC - Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley and Secretary Michael W. Wynne, the top military and civilian leaders of the United States Air Force were forced to resign today amid accusations of poor performance, incompetence and "general fucked-uppedness" by their branch of the military.

Such serious repercussions at such a high level may seem a bit harsh, perhaps even an overreaction. After all, the Air Force has a budget of over 100 BILLION dollars a year, more than the entire defense budget of ANY country other than the United States of America. With that kind of moolah to spend on equipment and training, how bad could the Air Force's performance be?

Ok, so they may have accidentally sent components of nuclear warheads to Taiwan instead of helicopter batteries. What, you've never made a mistake at your job? So we dropped a few million training these guys on this equipment. So what? It's all . . . vaguely mechanical looking. Like the old song says, "You say po-tay-to and I say po-tah-to, you say harmless battery and I say device capable of arming a ballistic missile . . . " So they've got one strike against them, no big deal.

All right, so admittedly this next one is kind of a bone-headed move. Apparently an Air Force B-52 bomber flew across the country from South Dakota to Louisiana while accidentally carrying a payload of six nuclear-tipped missiles. Somebody misplaced some missiles. Big deal. People are human, mistakes happen. It's no different than the countless times you've probably misplaced your car keys. Only in this case the keys could have annihilated most of the midwestern United States. Two strikes. Not good, obviously, but I'm sure they learned from these blunders and decided to be much more careful in the future.

Except that last month the Air Force's 5th Bomber wing underwent a "nuclear surety" inspection and failed, in spite of having several months to prepare for the inspection and the intense scrutiny they were under following the previous mishaps. The inspectors concluded that they were was unable to properly safeguard it's portion of the nation's nuclear stockpile. Sure that's three strikes, I mean, if you want to be all mathematical about it. But I'm going to give them a mulligan on this one anyway. I support the troops, goddamn it. Inspectors are such pessimists anyway. Maybe they wouldn't be such Negative Nancies if they didn't go around looking for problems all the time.

Fine, so the Air Force can't keep track of their nukes. Really, what's the worst that could happen?

1 offerings of praise:

JJC1138 said...

Haha! I love the headline.

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