


They spend some of their 24-hour alerts seated in front of steel Minuteman III missile launch control panels mounted on shock-absorbers, with toggle switches capable of hurling ten to fifty nuclear warheads - each with twenty times the explosive force of the Hiroshima bomb - to the other side of the globe, at speeds of 15,000 mph.īut their day-to-day enemy, for decades, has not so much been another superpower, but the unremitting boredom of an isolated posting that demands extreme vigilance, while also requiring virtually no activity, according to accounts by missileers and a new internal review of their work. That understandable boredom, when paired with the military’s sky-high expectations for their workplace performance, has pushed some of them to use drugs, others to break the rules - even deliberately, and still more to look for any way out. The millennials who populate this force can watch television, read, study, or sleep in their cramped, often damp quarters. Robert Vercher, the commander of a missile wing in Minot, North Dakota, told the Air Force’s news service in February that “there is no other Air Force unit, other than our sister ICBM wings, where we put this much responsibility on very junior Airmen.” Referring implicitly to the officers’ ability to wreak almost unimaginable destruction on foreign populations, Col.īut their checklist routines are typically unvarying, their moment-to-moment responsibilities are few, and the temperature underground - like the policy requiring their presence - is unnervingly stuck in the mid-60’s. Their official job criteria require that they have “a positive attitude toward nuclear weapons duty.” Those who don’t feel up to detonating such warheads are generally referred either to chaplains, legal counsels, or “mental health clinicians,” the Air Force says, to try and set them straight.

Moreover, until recently, the Air Force’s policy dogma for the force - dating at least from a 2007 episode in which the service for a day lost track of six nuclear warheads fitted atop cruise missiles - is that mistakes cannot be made.
#GUITAR CENTER LAUNCHCONTROL XL PROFESSIONAL#

One track is the guitar's built-in preamp, and the other is a condensor mic. I currently record my acoustic guitar into two mono tracks at the same time.
