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F.E. Warren missile wing fails nuke inspection

The 90th Missile Wing at F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo., will fail its Nuclear Surety Inspection that is set to end Wednesday because its maintenance group did not properly document tests on its missiles, an Air Force official said.

The 90th will be the second nuclear missile wing and at least the fifth nuclear unit known to fail its NSI this year.

Inspectors failed the 341st Missile Wing at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont., last month. The Air Force’s third and only other nuclear missile wing, the 91st Missile Wing at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., received failing grades on its NSI this year from Defense Threat Reduction Agency inspectors, but passed after the Space Command Inspector General overruled DTRA, said an official inside the nuclear community.

DTRA and Space Command inspectors failed the 90th Missile Wing after discovering the maintenance group had not properly documented tests done to its missiles, even leaving some tests completely undocumented, said the Air Force official, who asked to not be identified. An unsatisfactory grade on any portion of the NSI fails the entire wing; the maintenance group received an unsatisfactory grade early in the inspection, the official said.

Thus far, the wing has passed all other areas of the NSI including the personnel reliability program — which tracks who can handle nuclear weapons — that caused the 341st to fail along with problems it had in its maintenance group.

Inspectors will brief the wing Wednesday on the final results of the inspection.

Air Force Space Command could not confirm or deny the wing failed because the inspection has not ended, said Maj. Laurie Arellano, an F.E. Warren spokeswoman. The Defense Department does not release details from NSI reports even after inspections are complete.

However, Col. Michael Morgan, 90th Missile Wing commander, did say that improvements need to be made.

"The Inspector General gave us an exceptionally thorough review, looking deep into all areas,” said Morgan. “Improvement continues, but as highlighted by this inspection, we need to do much better in administrative and equipment control processes."

An NSI typically takes place every 18 months and measures a unit's readiness to execute nuclear operations over a two-week period. The wing passed its last NSI, held in September 2007.

The 90th’s NSI failure comes less than a year after Defense Department officials discovered the wing was involved in the mistaken shipment of ballistic missile fuses to Taiwan in 2006.

Airmen at F.E. Warren shipped the fuses in 2005 to Hill Air Force Base, Utah, where they were placed in unclassified storage after being misidentified as helicopter batteries because of wrong labels and classifications, former Secretary Michael Wynne said at a news conference to explain the error. A year later, Hill airmen shipped the fuses encased in ballistic missile nose cones to Taiwan.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired Wynne and former Chief of Staff Gen. Michael T. Moseley in June for the erosion of the Air Force’s nuclear mission.

Since then, new Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz has made revamping the service’s nuclear enterprise, including its nuclear inspection process, his top priority.

Only 18 nuclear units received NSIs in 2006 and 2007 combined, according to a report done by a panel led by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger; this year, 22 NSIs have been held.

Five of those 22 NSIs resulted in failures — only the fourth time since 1992 that at least five failures have occurred, according to the report. The Air Force had zero failures in 2006 and 2007.

Schlesinger wrote that “over the past 10 years, inspection pass rates point to anomalies that indicate a systemic problem in the inspection regime. Something is clearly wrong.”

Nuclear units inspected this year have faced the extra challenge of keeping up with the new nuclear regulations Air Force leaders have added as nuclear handling procedures are re-examined, said 5th Bomb Wing commander Col. Joel Westa in November.

“There are so many policy changes that the inspectors even had trouble keeping up with them,” said Westa, whose wing failed its NSI in May but has since passed its re-inspection.

Inspectors return to wings that have failed three months after the inspection to ensure corrections had been made, Arellano said.