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Moseley and Wynne forced out



Staff report
Posted : Thursday Jun 5, 2008 13:58:07 EDT
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley and Secretary Michael W. Wynne were forced to resign Thursday during hastily arranged meetings with their Pentagon bosses.
Moseley was summoned to an early morning meeting with Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to discuss a report on the Air Force’s problems handling nuclear weapons. The report, by Navy Adm. Kirkland Donald, director of naval nuclear propulsion, convinced Defense Secretary Robert Gates that senior officials should be held accountable.
Moseley resigned in response.
Later in the morning, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England was dispatched to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, to ask for Wynne’s resignation, sources said. Wynne resigned during the meeting.
It is not clear how quickly these changes will take effect, and other senior officers could still be relieved in the wake of the Donald report.
Moseley could stay on until July or later, at Gates’ discretion.
Navy Capt. John Kirby, Mullen’s spokesman, declined to comment but did not deny the story. A Defense Department spokesman and an Air Force spokeswoman also declined to comment.
It is not yet known who will succeed Moseley and Wynne, but Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Duncan McNabb will likely become acting chief of staff.
The stunning development follows a series of high-profile scandals and disagreements between Air Force leadership and Gates in the past year, during which both the Pentagon and congressional leadership have increasingly expressed frustration about the Air Force’s top bosses.
Wynne became Air Force secretary in November 2005, and Moseley took office in September 2005. Moseley’s term expires in September 2009, and Wynne served at the pleasure of the president.
Moseley, a former fighter pilot, has been in the Air Force since 1972. Before becoming chief, he served as commander of U.S. Central Command Air Forces and then as vice chief of staff from August 2003 until September 2005.
Wynne served as an Air Force officer from 1966 until 1973 and then began a nearly 30-year career in the aerospace industry. He rose to become president of General Dynamics’ space division and general manager of space launch systems at Lockheed Martin. He re-entered government service in 2001 and served four years as principal deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics before becoming Air Force secretary.
While the simultaneous removal of a service’s top civilian and uniformed leaders comes as a surprise and is unprecedented, there has been speculation for months among defense insiders that Moseley, Wynne or both could be in trouble.
The Air Force has been rocked by a series of missteps during the past year, and Moseley and Wynne’s relationships with Gates, England and members of congressional defense committees have steadily eroded.
Both men are well-liked personally, but that apparently was not enough to make up for a perceived lack of leadership.
Loren Thompson, an analyst with the Lexington Institute in Fairfax, Va., said the writing has been on the wall for several months, and that Moseley’s demeanor has changed noticeably during that time.
“It was clear the relationship between the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Air Force was deteriorating,” Thompson said. “But it wasn’t clear what that would mean for Air Force leadership. … “This [is] the final chapter in a long list of grievances between OSD and the Air Force.”
Those grievances include criticism of the Air Force’s nuclear weapons handling, two major acquisitions programs that have been stalled by protests, the service’s inability to rush more surveillance drones to the war zones, apparent conflicts of interest of current and retired senior officials related to a $50 million contract to produce a multimedia show for the Thunderbirds, and repeated clashes with Pentagon leaders over the number of F-22s the Air Force will buy and other budget issues.
The most serious blow to the credibility of the Air Force and its leadership has been a scandal spawned by the service’s accidental transfer in August of six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., to Barksdale Air Force Base, La.
A B-52 from the 5th Bomb Wing at Minot were supposed to transfer unarmed air-launched cruise missiles to Barksdale to be decommissioned, but munitions loaders accidentally attached nuclear-armed missiles to the pylons. The missiles were flown to Barksdale and sat unguarded on the tarmac for several hours before anyone realized what happened, some 30 hours after the mistake was made.
The 5th Bomb Wing commander, two group commanders and the 5th Munitions Squadron commander were relieved of their commands.
Moseley ordered a service-wide review of the nuclear enterprise two months after the incident, resulting in 36 recommendations for improvements. The review report was presented to the Senate Armed Services Committee, members of which were highly critical of the Air Force’s nuclear weapons handling.
The 5th Bomb Wing in late May failed its defense nuclear surety inspection, despite having months to prepare and being under close scrutiny since the incident. Inspectors found glaring deficiencies in the wing’s ability to protect its nuclear stockpile.
Then in March, it was discovered that the Air Force had accidentally shipped classified nuclear warhead fuses to Taiwan in 2006. That prompted Gates to order a military-wide inventory of nuclear weapons and components. That report was recently submitted to Gates but has not been released publicly.
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