Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
2/13/2015
Bob Work, the Deputy Defense Secretary and Chairman of the Nuclear Deterrent Enterprise Review Group, highlighted strong airman morale while echoing officials’ concerns about aging facilities during his visit to Minot AFB this week, according to a Defense Department release. "Some of the stuff they’re doing is just amazing," Work said. "The stuff they’re doing in there is just unbelievable. … It’s because the troops are so damn good, so, the mission-capable rate of the missiles is really quite high. But man, they’re so old.” Work visited Minot to check on the implementation of a list of more than 100 recommendations generated from completed reviews of the nuclear enterprise commissioned in January 2014 by then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel after the discovery of cheating by Malmstrom AFB missileers on monthly proficiency tests.
Increased Scrutiny?
The release states that Work visited facilities created in the 1950s, while noting that officials have given increased scrutiny to such facilities as part of an initiative to reenergize nuclear forces. But stated contingency plans have cast the modernization of Minuteman 3 command and control system in doubt. The Pentagon requested $287 million for Fiscal Year 2016 to update the ICBM command and control architecture, which includes a nationwide network of buried cables dating back to the 1960s. The request is about $140 million more than the FY 2015-enacted amount, but Maj. Gen. James Martin, Air Force Deputy Assistant Secretary for Budget, last week indicated during an Air Force budget press briefing that funding for planned command and control modernization could be reduced or cut without action from Congress.
“Before we made any final decisions, we’d have to know what the actual [Budget Control Act] funding levels were,” Martin said. “Then we would go back and we’d look across all five core mission sets and make sure that we’re meeting the most urgent requirements that are expected out of the Air Force, and then we would … work this with [the Office of the Secretary of Defense]. Of course, Congressional feedback is part of that process as well.” To mitigate the depth of cuts, Martin said the Air Force would try to spread the imprint of any BCA-forced cuts among the service’s five stated core missions: Air and Space Superiority; Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance; Rapid Global Mobility; Global Strike; and Command and Control.
While Challenged, Airmen Still Capable of Getting the Job Done
Work noted that old equipment hasn’t stopped airmen from completing their mission, and that outside-the-box thinking by operators and maintainers is advancing the mission. Work conducted a private lunch with 12 Air Force maintainers who raised concerns about manning levels and the fact that mid-level noncommissioned officers (NCOs) are leading more new, inexperienced airmen. Work said the NCOs are not as experienced as the service would like. “That’s going to be something that, as the force grows, we’ll grow out of it,” Work said. The airmen did agree that attention focused on the aging missile and bomber fleets has been beneficial, Work said. “The troops were dedicated to the mission,” he said. “Overall, I was pretty pleased.”
