Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

General Curtis LeMay had created an institutional culture at the Strategic Air Command that showed absolutely no tolerance for mistakes. People were held accountable not only for their behavior but for their bad luck. “To err is human,” everyone at the command had been told, “to forgive is not SAC policy.”

BLAMING YOUNG ENLISTED MEN for the accident at Rock, Kansas, didn’t eliminate the problems with the Titan II. The Pentagon had announced in 1967 that the Titan II was no longer needed and would be decommissioned, with the first missiles coming off alert in 1971. But every year the Air Force successfully battled to keep the Titan II. Its warhead was more than seven times more powerful than the warhead carried by the Minuteman II. The United States had about one thousand land-based missiles — and the fifty-four Titan IIs represented roughly one third of their total explosive force. SAC didn’t want to lose all that megatonnage without getting new weapons to replace it. As the Titan II aged, however, its ability to reach the Soviet Union became more uncertain. The last test-launch of a Titan II occurred in 1976, and no more were planned, due to a shortage of missiles and parts.

When Senator Pryor and Skip Rutherford visited a Titan II site in Arkansas, the place looked impressive. But one of Rutherford’s confidential sources later told him that there’d been an oxidizer leak at a nearby launch complex that day — and that the vapor detectors in thirteen of the state’s eighteen silos were broken. Pryor came up with a relatively inexpensive plan for protecting rural communities from fuel and oxidizer leaks at Titan II missile sites: install a siren, at every complex, that would blare whenever the crew turned on the red warning beacon topside. The siren could easily be mounted on the same pole. It would warn neighboring homes and farms of a leak. The Air Force opposed the idea, arguing that a siren “might cause people to leave areas of safety and evacuate into or through areas containing propellant fumes.” Colonel Richard D. Osborn told Pryor that during those rare occasions when civilians needed to be alerted, the combined efforts of Air Force personnel and local law enforcement officers would ensure public safety. Pryor nevertheless decided to seek funding for the sirens through an amendment to a Senate bill.

The Titan II missile wasn’t the only Air Force weapon system having maintenance problems. Amid the defense cutbacks following the Vietnam War, the purchase of new planes and missiles had a much higher priority than buying spare parts for the old ones. During the late 1970s, on a typical day, anywhere from one half to two thirds of the Air Force’s F-15 fighters were grounded for mechanical reasons. The Strategic Air Command had lost more than half of its personnel since 1961. Some of its B-52 bombers were twenty-five years old. And SAC’s aura of invincibility had taken a beating. The highest-ranking officers in the Air Force tended to be “bomber generals” who’d risen through the ranks at SAC — and many of the pilots who flew bombing missions in Vietnam resented their insistence on rigid, centralized control. Tactics designed for executing the SIOP proved ineffective during combat in Vietnam, where the targets were often mobile and flying in a rigid formation could get you shot down. American pilots began to disobey orders, ignore their designated targets, bomb those that seemed more urgent, and lie about it in their reports.

Chuck Horner — who flew more than a hundred missions in Vietnam and later commanded the U.S. and allied air campaign during the first Gulf War — resented the inflexible, “parent-child relationship” that SAC’s bomber generals often demanded. He felt a tremendous anger, shared by many other young officers, about how the Air Force leadership had behaved during the Vietnam War:

I didn’t hate them because they were dumb, I didn’t hate them because they had spilled our blood for nothing, I hated them because of their arrogance… because they had convinced themselves that they actually knew what they were doing and that we were too minor to understand the “Big Picture.” I hated my own generals, because they covered up their own gutless inability to stand up to the political masters in Washington and say, “Enough. This is bullshit. Either we fight or we go home.”

Horner vowed that he would “never again be a part of something so insane and foolish.” After the war, thousands of young officers left the Air Force, profoundly disillusioned. Many of those who stayed were determined to change things. And the influence of the Strategic Air Command gradually diminished, as a younger generation of “fighter generals,” who rejected centralization and standardization and rigid planning, who had firsthand experience in real combat and little interest in abstract theories about nuclear war, rose to power.

During the years following the Vietnam War, antimilitary sentiment in the United States became stronger, perhaps, than at any other time in the nation’s history. Vietnam veterans were routinely depicted in books and films as racists, stoners, nutcases, and baby killers. Morale throughout the armed services suffered — and illegal drug use soared. By 1980, according to the Pentagon’s own surveys, about 27 percent of all military personnel were using illegal drugs at least once a month. Marijuana was by far the most popular drug, although heroin, cocaine, and LSD were being used, too. Among the armed services, the Marines had the highest rate of drug use: about 36 percent regularly smoked pot. About 32 percent of Navy personnel used marijuana at least once a month; the proportion of Army personnel was about 28 percent. The Air Force had the lowest rate, about 14 percent. It also had the most powerful warheads and bombs. The surveys by the Department of Defense most likely understated the actual amount of drug use. Random urine tests of more than two thousand sailors at naval bases in Norfolk, Virginia, and San Diego, California, found that almost half had recently smoked pot. Although nuclear weapons and marijuana had recently become controversial subjects in American society, inspiring angry debates between liberals and conservatives, nobody argued that the two were a good combination.

Donald Meyer served as a corporal with the 74th United States Field Artillery Detachment in Germany during the early 1970s. His detachment kept Pershing missiles on alert, ready to fire within fifteen minutes. Each missile carried an atomic warhead ten to twenty times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Meyer told the Milwaukee Journal that almost every one of the more than two hundred men in his unit regularly smoked hashish. They were often high while handling secret documents and nuclear warheads. A survey found that one out of every twelve members of the United States Army in Germany was smoking hashish every day. “You get to know what you can handle,” Meyer said. “Too much hash and you would ruin a good thing.”

At Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, thirty-five members of an Army unit were arrested for using and selling marijuana and LSD. The unit controlled the Nike Hercules antiaircraft missiles on the base, along with their nuclear warheads. The drug use at Homestead was suspected after a fully armed Russian MiG-17 fighter plane, flown by a Cuban defector, landed there unchallenged, while Air Force One was parked on a nearby runway. Nineteen members of an Army detachment were arrested on pot charges at a Nike Hercules base on Mount Gleason, overlooking Los Angeles. One of them had been caught drying a large amount of marijuana on land belonging to the U.S. Forest Service. Three enlisted men at a Nike Hercules base in San Rafael, California, were removed from guard duty for psychiatric reasons. One of them had been charged with pointing a loaded rifle at the head of a sergeant. Although illegal drugs were not involved in the case, the three men were allowed to guard the missiles, despite a history of psychiatric problems. The squadron was understaffed, and its commander feared that hippies — “people from the Haight-Ashbury” — were trying to steal nuclear weapons.