In our business things are designed to “Blow Up” so we have to really know our business---the goal is to blow up the enemy and not ourselves! Back in “my day” there was a single overriding concept that guided all of our day to day activities in AMMO, both conventional and nuclear. From the first day of training in munitions school we were taught to know the rules of AFM 127-100 (now AFI 91-201) and follow them diligently – no deviation allowed without proper authority. We lived by this precept and deviated at our great professional peril because our bosses also knew the rules and demanded nothing less than full compliance.
It seems to some we were always out of sight and out of mind---i.e. the bomb dump is always 10 mile off-base for a reason; the flightline is where you get promoted? But when we go to war as we are now, live ordnance (conventional and nuclear) must be handled correctly or the mission will fail and good people will get killed. Sure, sometimes we screwed up or let political expediency (by officers who did not understand the requirement for “expert” management of the munitions function) overrule our better judgment -- the results were sometimes catastrophic, e.g. Bien Hoa (Blew up a base in Vietnam because of a loading error with an M121A1 anti-withdrawal fuze) and more recently the Minot and Taiwan incidents. We have to, as officers, KNOW OUR BUSINESS! By and large we lived this “culture of expert conscientiousness”, which seems to have been lost in the modern era of generalists “the utility-infielder officer” who can play any position. I fear that unless and until we recapture this idea of overriding officer experts with clear management responsibility more bad things will happen.
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