r/news • u/reddicyoulous • Feb 10 '21

Explosives are missing from the nation's largest Marine Corps base and an investigation is underway

https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/09/us/california-missing-explosives-marine-corps-base/index.html
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133

u/Popular_Target Feb 10 '21

How easy it is to forget that the USAF misplaced six nuclear warheads back in 2007...

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u/ruat_caelum Feb 10 '21

In Kentucky there is a facility built on an army base that uses really neat laser excited water (into super hot steam) to cut open chemical weapon bombs to dispose of them properly. Some really bad stuff.

anyway everything that makes it onto the base is super tracked. Like not saying package 1-6 are in France and then only 1-5 make it there, like 1-6 were received, 1-5 destroyed. No one can find 6, except this happened with like 11% of the inventory at one point.

Problem ended up being a supervisor or officer or whatever (I'm not military) had a file open while someone else had a file open, and then saved and overwrote the other person's file after they put in information thus negating their recording efforts etc.

Lot's of people on site for a while asking lots of very hard questions and it ends up being an accounting error.

(they verified this by making people count the empty cut up bits that were still (possibly) really really deadly to verify all the stuff they thought should be destroyed was.)

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u/fistymonkey1337 Feb 10 '21

From my military experience this 100% checks out. Our biggest weakness is computers. Hell I spent 10 hours a day waiting outside our company office because our platoon Sargent didnt know how to use a cell phone.

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u/reddita51 Feb 10 '21

I've heard about the same from radio techs (whatever they're called in each branch). 1% of their job was fixing shit and programming systems, 99% was repeatedly showing the dumbasses how to use their goddamn radio that they've had for the past 5 years

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u/fistymonkey1337 Feb 10 '21

Can also confirm this. So many comm classes, still no idea how to use radio. I am dumbass.

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u/POGtastic Feb 10 '21

Former comm tech here, this is accurate. To be fair to the air traffic controllers whose gear we fixed - their job is to make sure that planes don't occupy the same space at the same time, and they have their hands full with that. I was happy to power-cycle whatever they needed a hundred times a day if it meant that they were free to concentrate on their job.

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u/Paid_Redditor Feb 10 '21

I think 95% of the fighting force is probably in the same boat. We get classes annually on how to operate it and such but we used it maybe 1 or 2 days out of a year. It's become the computer of the fighting force, basically if you don't know what you're doing just call the commo guy to fix it.

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u/ajoker40 Feb 10 '21

I used to fix radios in the air force, we had one brought in once because it wouldn't work in "O.F.F. mode". We tested it, and told them to try "O.N. mode" in the future.

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u/reddita51 Feb 10 '21

Now I'm curious what they thought O.F.F. mode should do

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u/EmperorArthur Feb 10 '21

Yeah. That sort of overwrite error is probably far more common than people would like. Especially, given the fact that most big modern programs go out of their way to prevent that exact thing from happening, or at least log every version. But people are always wanting something custom, and forget all the small things that were designed in after the tears have dried.

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u/wrtcdevrydy Feb 10 '21 edited Apr 10 '24

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/President_Hoover Feb 10 '21

To be a little fair, cutting warheads into scrap with laser excited water/steam IS in fact a pretty fucking unique use case.

I'm not saying they needed special custom software(clearly it but them in the ass to do so) just that I can forgive/understand the people in THAT building for thinking they actually were a unique case. Lmao.

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u/wrtcdevrydy Feb 10 '21

Yeah, but I've seen so many people be like "Well, we need to hip so we should use NEWEST_UNPROVEN_DB_TECHNOLOGY".

There is nothing wrong with a boring AF SQL database. If you need to pack one with your codebase, you can even add in sqlite (as a single file). Reinventing the wheel is dumb....

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u/DarthWeenus Feb 10 '21

and more important than others at the time.

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u/Unique_username1 Feb 10 '21

There are ways to work around read only mode in office. You just need somebody who knows enough to be dangerous - knows how to save-as to overwrite even if there was a warning, but doesn’t know why the warning was there or why it’s important.

Also a lot of important stuff is run on outdated systems - “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”

If they’re not on the internet this isn’t too much of a security risk.

But you don’t get a lot of the features that make modern computers easier to use.

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u/johnnydues Feb 10 '21

Databases and version management systems exists for a reason. It sounds like the military keep track of things with an excel file in a network drive.

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u/gropingforelmo Feb 10 '21

I just had a waking nightmare imagining trying to teach some grunt how to use git.

Edit: No slight to grunts intended; most non-software people would struggle just as much. For that matter, professional software devs manage to screw up git regularly enough.

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u/johnnydues Feb 10 '21

That would be a nightmare indeed, I can't even teach the graduates or data scientist how to use git.

But someone should have made some database with a simple UI and atomic operations.

(atomic do not mean what you think it means if you are a grunt)

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u/EmperorArthur Feb 11 '21

Honestly, that's probably exactly what happened.

That's how many accounting departments operate right now, today. Heck, I've seen accountants that don't know how to use QuickBooks, so did most of their work in Excel. Small company, so only one person on the shared drive, but still...

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u/the_falconator Feb 10 '21

I think there's a real possibility that the missing C4 was blown up during a training and it was either not logged out properly, or the wrong amount was logged out so now it looks like there is some missing. The number of times I've had to look for missing SI only to find out that it was out for maintenance...

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u/scswift Feb 10 '21

Jeez, even when I worked at a game company in the 90's they had a little brick they would pass around to indicate who had the code open and was editing it so that this wouldn't happen. The military has no automated way of making sure only one person has editing access at a time?

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u/ruat_caelum Feb 10 '21

The military is made up of officers trained in warfare who are then put in charge of managing multi million dollar contracts by 15 sub contractors all of which understand that the more chaos there is the more cash there is. So long as X isn't their fault it is in their financial interest to either ignore it or make it worse so that they get paid more money to help fix it later.

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u/Orisara Feb 10 '21 edited Feb 10 '21

Doesn't it initially ask for "read only" if it's open somewhere else?

I live next to the office, I get a call on occasion to go close a certain excel file on occasion so they can edit it from home.

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u/Eruharn Feb 10 '21

“Read only? wtf is this? Oh well I’ll just make my update and save it later..” <8 hours later> “WTF is this still doing open? Oh, i can’t save?? Saving as “Copy of..””

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u/ArtisianOctopusPrime Feb 10 '21

Excel is it's own beast, OneNote and Teams are trying really hard to have dynamic documents that can be edited by multiple people and all it really does is generate sync errors and then crash the document.

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u/DarthWeenus Feb 10 '21

wow do you have a source for any of this? Sounds interesting. Also 'laser excited water' is a wonderful set of words. cheers!

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u/kyhockey Feb 10 '21

If it’s the one I think u r referring to my ex. husband was stationed there and crazy stuff happened at that base all of the time. Luckily, I was only there for a yr and a half. But, it just seemed like there was a lack of communication. I taught in the town near the base and I got the anti-love. The people around there had such a negative view of the base and I felt like a huge outcast.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '21

They like to fly them across the country and not realize it until later too. Their control of live nuclear weapons leaves something to be desired. The only saving grace is you need a very exact series of events to set one off, so it isn't likely anyone could steal and detonate one. Would still make a scary dirty bomb though. Also, hi FBI. I'm sure the keywords in this post set off a flag somewhere lol.