Re: AF COS and AF Secretary to Resign

On Sat, 7 Jun 2008 13:48:04 -0400, "George Z. Bush"
<georgezbush@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


The way I see it, it's less a political statement about cleaning house than
it is about what happens when we fail to do our jobs properly. Why the Air
Force, you might ask? Well, the Air Force was entrusted with the
responsibility of minding all of the nukes delivered to it for their
potential use, and when they, collectively and individually, fail to do the
job adequately (as in the Barksdale incident), then someone certainly does
need firing. We don't need people who can't hack the job looking out for
"big bang" weapons that could just about destroy the earth improperly used.
The public canning may have been a deliberate measure intended to make the
point that the standards of that job are incredibly high and that there's no
flex or toleration of less than 100% performance that could be acceptable
regardless of who's involved.

I have a problem reading the thing in the context of the Burger King
analogy, but then we weren't talking about a misplaced 500 lb. GP hunk of
iron, were we. In the old days, when someone that high up screwed up
royally, they got the word as to when their retirement request should hit
their boss' desk. Then, after the obligatory pro forma comments about the
individual's health or family problems that provided the impetus for the
retirement request, it was quietly dealt with acquiring little if any public
notice along the way. Handling it that way would hardly have gotten the
message down to all hands that performance of that kind might have been or
would be acceptable. Perhaps Sec/Def felt that he needed to make that point
and that's the way he chose to do it.

Maybe that's a hard ass approach to what seems to have happened, but it's
the way I see it.

George Z.

I've got to agree in part. First, as someone who had nuclear
certification and "owned" a nuke on alert at a couple of places, I
gained a required familiarity with nuclear weapons security
procedures. The two events cited in association with the Mosely/Wynne
firings defy belief. There simply was no way either of those things
could have occurred in the "good old days." The submittal of the
investigation report to Gates apparently provided the grounds for
action.

Yet, in either case (the B-52 flight and the Taiwand fuse shipment) an
argument could be made that the actually responsible heads rolled and
that updated procedures, training, etc. have been instituted, briefed,
etc. (I confess that I've always thought the AF had a tendency to
consume their best and brightest for the slightest error--the cycling
of half a dozen promising colonels that were wing commanders at Hill
AFB during the introduction of the F-16 was a good example.)

What is under the mass media radar here is the real agenda of Gates.
He, for better or worse, wants to focus on UAVs for the current
engagement and in the process ignore the greater strategic
requirements of maintaining a force in which the average aircraft in
the fleet is more than 25 years old. While an argument can be made for
that position, there are also significant factors in opposition.

Maybe the bigger concern here is the review of the Boeing boondoggle.
The GAO (may they burn in hell...) is "investigating the Northrop EADS
contract and it might suit Gates to have the folks on watch when the
competition was held out of the argument.

More to follow....

Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret)
"When Thunder Rolled"
"Palace Cobra"
www.thunderchief.org
.

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