When you think of national defense, visions of fighter jets or aircraft carriers may come to mind.
But one of our nation's greatest weapons is often overlooked.
Although you rarely see or hear about them, they're always armed, always ready.
The nation's silent protector, intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Having a family can be tough. Disagreements, finances, just everyday stresses, able to break down even the strongest of families.
Factor in an external stressor such as being in the military, and it could become even harder.
And while less than 1% of the US population has ever served in the military, many of the remaining 99% have a family member who has or is serving.
Mark and Kristen Demish are in an even less common situation because both of them are members of the United States Air Force.
They try to live a normal life in Montana with their two children, Emma and CJ, but balancing life with the military has its obstacles.
As a joint spouse couple, the Air Force still treats you as individual airmen, and so the Air Force doesn't owe us anything.
We came to the Air Force. We owe them. We're on call 24-7. You can't just walk away from it and come home.
What I try to do, though, especially for my kids, is make sure that when I am here, that I'm present with them.
The kids aren't old enough to understand yet, but Emma gets some of it.
She thinks it's cool that we wear a uniform. She thinks it's cool, especially that we have security forces guys running around with guns and frightens me a little bit.
But, you know, she gets it that we do a job that not a lot of people do.
But seeing them and being able just to have quiet time with them and focus on them, regardless of what happens at work, it always is fine when you walk through that door and see their smiling faces.
They might be more happy to see me because they're hungry and not actually happy to see me, but that's my job and the family is to make the food.
Every time we drive past the missile coming on base, my daughter will run through this whole thing about, we have that in case the bad guys do bad things.
That's pretty much it in a nutshell. She understands just enough of it to know that we're in a business of trying to take care of people and make people safe.
You know, we go out, we do our jobs, as long as nothing goes bad, that's good. That's a good day.
It's a good day if we don't need to be involved as ICBM operators and maintainers and security forces.
It's a good day when everything goes perfect and nobody knows that you're here.
The nuclear deterrent is the foundational defense for the United States of America. It is the baseline defense that's in existence every day.
A nuclear weapon is the only existential threat that we have to our country that could change the way of life.
We're not going to have a ground landing of soldiers or a whole air force that's not going to come bomb us out of existence, but nuclear weapons can do that.
To restrain other nations from resorting to nuclear warfare, we have to show that we have these weapons and that we're willing to use them if we need to.
There's an old saying, it takes a village to raise a child. Well, for the ICBM community at Maus from Air Force Base, one might say it takes an entire base to power a nuke.
And unlike a normal air force base where everybody comes to work and works on that runway generating aircraft, I got 166 Maus from Air Force Bases.
I mean, we show up to the base to pick up our equipment and go to the field. 15 forward operating locations, the MAFs.
And then 150 operating locations, the launch facilities spread across 14,000 square miles of Montana.
In order to take care of that and keep that functioning, it takes all 4,000 of us here at the base.
That is everybody's mission here. Whether you're a maintenance group, security forces group, or ops group, it's to come together to make sure that that nuclear deterrent is safe, secure, and effective.
4,000 airmen working together to accomplish one mission, kind of similar to the four neemishes living in one household, working together to maintain their way of life.
One team, one family. That's the mindset of Maus from Air Force Base. All 166 Maus from Air Force Bases, actually.
And out in the middle of the Montana countryside lays one of them. This structure is known as a MAF, or Missile Alert Facility.
Over 50 feet below sit two missileeers, ready to launch a nuclear warhead at any second. Every position at the MAF is manned at 24-7, and those on duty live there, eat there, sleep there.
On the MAF, you have this small-scale deployment, like, feel. I mean, everyone's kind of family out here. Everyone eats together, or sits down together. It plays ping-pong. We always make the joke that the facility manager's almost like the MAF dad, and the chef's almost like the MAF mom, or vice versa.
So it's like your cops are your kids. You might not like what they do sometimes, but you still like them.
In my opinion, there's the two jobs that are out in the missile field that are kind of at the forefront of security forces, and obviously the combat crews, the missileeers.
Those are the two jobs that are kind of out front, leading the pack, but a lot of people don't understand how much additional work goes into it, you know.
The facility managers, the chefs especially, the chefs can make or break someone's tour, if you're honest with you, you know.
To me, I think it's a simple job if you know how to cook. I mean, everyone's got to eat, and that's my main purpose is to get some food, because I mean, what are they going to do if they forget food they bring?
So I'm like, I'm the guy.
It's got to be hard for that one chef cooking for 12 to 15 people every single day, every single meal, you know, and it's not like, hey, we're cooking steak today, everybody's getting steak.
You know, everybody gets an individual order, everybody, you know, they cook to, you know, whatever they want.
They like my food. I don't get complaints.
Same thing with the facility managers, making sure that, you know, the facility's taken care of, making sure the beds are squared away, making sure, you know, all of our equipment is working, everything else.
As a facility manager, every inch of this facility is ours, and we are responsible for it. If a window is dirty, it's our responsibility to make sure it gets clean.
I mean, if you can imagine, like, back in the old days, an old apartment super that had to come fix the plumbing in this apartment one day and the air conditioning in that one the next day, it's similar.
You take it outside even, you know, the helo ops, helos, you know, bringing people to and from the maps, making sure that things are squared away.
We're the automatic response force. We're there with our special weapons and taxes, kind of a, like, SWAT team, pretty much.
We have snipers, and we have three-chargers, and we're that force multiplier, so our main responsibility is to capture, recover.
If anybody gets a hold of one of those, it's our sole responsibility to make sure that doesn't leave government control.
Maintenance, you know, making sure that, you know, our nukes are taken care of, that they're up to speed, you know, on alert, making sure they're, you know, doing all the right things and whatnot.
Every day, a team is going out and fixing a missile, putting it back on alert, and keeping our country safe. I love it. It's one of the coolest things I've ever done.
Being the first line of defense, making sure we're always ready. Rain, snow, negative 40 degrees, you know, 95 degrees, it doesn't matter where we're always ready.
Families are a huge priority in the Air Force, and while one of the core values explicitly states service before self, it doesn't say service in spite of others.
A photo went viral on Facebook in late 2014 that showed the Vice Wing Commander at Malmstrom Air Force Base caring for an airman's child when the airman had to stay late for work.
This is a prime example of how the community at a missile base is really like one large family.
It's that balance between making sure that you're there for your kids and your family, you're there for your squadron and the people that need you there, and she was a wonderful role model.
And that picture, I love that picture of her. I absolutely adore it. And that little baby, I think she was about four months old or so. Perfect.
We spend a lot of time away from home. We spend, you know, four days a week in the field. I mean, we spend more time with our flight than we do with our families.
It's a niche mission in the Air Force. It only gets done at three bases, but I mean, it absolutely takes us all, you know, to be tied together to be able to go out there and keep the 150 Minivan 3 missiles on alert every single day.
And because of that, we challenge the vehicle.
It's basically all a teamwork thing. The site goes down, it takes, you know, three different teams of people in order to get that site back up and running, and everyone has some part of that operation.
We're always on alert, always ready to go out and fix something if it's broken. My grandfather's actually used to maintain it as well, so that's really cool to be able to be following in his footsteps.
I just love what I do. That's a great family here, and it's an important task that not many people know about, and they should know about because, I mean, we don't launch missiles every day, but they're used every day for deterrence, and they definitely are active.
We put together a very large missile to do an extremely large task, and it's very humbling.
We're keeping our two men, we're keeping very loud, so that we all know we're all doing our tasks, so that we know where your partner is.
We do everything from simple repairs to complex things that you haven't seen in two years, and it might take you three or four days just to get back into it.
It's pretty crazy to think that this old missile system, you know, back in the 70s is when the Miniman 3 started, and this is what basically protects us from every other country. This is our deterrence.
I think this generation, they want to know why more than I did. I was proficient at my job, but I didn't look for the why the way that they do, and as a Squadron Commander, I know I have to provide that more than I think what my Squadron Commander has provided it in the past.
I didn't have appreciation for what I did as a Lieutenant until I came here a year ago, and realized that I was trusting everyone in the Squadron to do this very important mission that our nation relies on tremendously, and that it was under such scrutiny.
But as a Commander, you have to trust that they're going to do the right things, and often I remind myself that I had a Squadron Commander that trusted me.
I used to say, you know, 10 years ago, yeah, what do you do? I'm a missileeer. People would say, oh, I'm sorry. I'm like, no, no, I'm not. I chose this. Like, I like it.
Right now, we're situated on shock isolators, and it's a suspension system, and so their function is if something were to happen, we would be able to kind of be this little box inside the cement bubble.
We wouldn't just smash up against the concrete, so we would be survivable in the event that we are attacked, so that we can maintain our mission, regardless of the environment that's around us.
And that's one of the great things about this weapon system is because it is survivable. A lot of the equipment is older, and it's one of those things where we've had it for so long that it's proven itself,
and it's not easily able to get hacked into.
The missileeers out in the capsule, I trust them 100%. I'm not a missileeer. You know, I trust those guys to do their job.
At any point in time, there are two missileeers down in a capsule below each of the 15 MAFs. They work in 24-hour shifts and then are replaced by the next crew, but above them are teams of security forces airmen who are deployed to the MAFs for 96 hours, four days at a time.
We do have 24-hour video surveillance of all of the sites at any time. We pull a playback. We have response forces on standby 24-7 ready to go out there, both in the complex and at the base.
When you go out and you do an exercise or anything that happens, security-related, at the end of the day are the nuclear weapons safe. If you can answer that question, yes, then we've done our job.
It's easy to kind of lose sight that it is a huge deal because it's day-to-day. It's repetitive. I think it's sometimes hard to remember that what we do really is a big deal, and what if we weren't doing it?
Individuals in the vehicle, turn off the engine.
Guarding the most powerful weapon in the world, and we play an important role in that, just making sure those are all secure every single day.
For nearly 50 years during the Cold War, the nuclear mission was America's top defense priority, but all that changed when the Soviet Union collapsed. As the world's sole remaining superpower, America's attention shifted away from nuclear deterrence.
While it was still important and remains so to this day, the crews in the missile fields may have interpreted this lack of attention as a lack of relevance.
A bombshell report today implicating 34 Air Force missile launch officers exposed widespread cheating on written exams.
Other officers apparently knew about the cheating, but didn't stop it or report it.
In 2014, it was discovered that missile crew members at Mountstrom Air Force Base were sharing answers to multi-proficiency tests.
The Air Force Secretary just announced 92 nuclear officers are now implicated in this cheating scandal.
Those 92 crew members have all been temporarily decertified.
The Air Force wanted to find the root of the problem and initiated the FIP, or Force Improvement Program.
It is ongoing and involves one-on-one discussions with airmen in an effort to improve their quality of life, and thus enhance the nuclear mission.
It has been a while since we've been under the limelight. It's been a while since a lot of attention.
Bad or good has been paid to us. Something bad happened, but out of that came a lot of good.
And it is the reminder that we don't still stand here and say, yeah, nukes are important. We're actually following through.
I'm 100% sure we're not going to get it 100% correct right off the bat.
But we've got to make those periodic course adjustments to help guide us out of this.
And it'll probably be two, three, four, five years before this culture change really takes shape.
It lived in a zero-defect culture in which anything less than a perfect score was liable to damage their chances for promotion.
The Air Force reached out to those in the missile fields and heard concerns about career advancement, outdated equipment, and the stressful evaluation processes.
As part of the FIP, numerous changes have come out so far to address these problems, including a new pass-fail grading system for the missile leaders,
where they no longer feel pressured to get 100% every time.
This career field has been in existence for decades, and there hasn't been much change.
And so now is the opportunity that they've taken the feedback of the people doing the job, not just, okay, this is what we think we should do.
For me, it all started in January of last year, and I was just two or three weeks in the job, just newly confirmed,
as the Secretary of the Air Force, when it came to my attention that there had been a significant cheating situation at Momstrom Air Force Base, Montana.
And I was very driven to find out how did this happen to us?
And then even more importantly, what are we going to do?
I came in in March of 2014 following the test compromise case.
And I mean, our main focus was, hey, let's get beyond this.
Focus on the mission, focus on the improvement areas, treat everybody with respect and dignity, and let's move forward.
I didn't have much notice when I came up here.
A lot of us didn't back in March of 2014.
So we actually thought we were going to mine out Air Force Base.
We worked really hard to get a joint spouse assignment.
That was our number one priority, was to be stationed together.
We didn't care where.
She came in last year, kind of in the midst of the turmoil that was going on here at the wing.
She didn't get the benefit of a change of command.
She just rolled right in and started dealing with the problems.
I didn't get a normal person's assignment where you get to think about it and process it and understand where you're going.
I only had about three days notice.
I was seven months pregnant when I found out with my son.
And so trying to wrap my brain around the fact that I was going to come up, I was going to be a squadron commander.
We didn't have an assignment for Mark yet, but we knew that they would work that out.
And that I was going to have to leave them for a period of time before we knew we were going to be back together.
I think we're doing well.
I think we got a long way to go.
I think we're very relevant, even though the world may not have realized how relevant we were.
It takes bad press sometimes to get attention.
But I like to believe that we're relevant and that our people are starting to see and buy in to the fact that we are.
Recently, the FIP has been going on the force improvement program.
So we started getting incentive pay for what we do considering we're not with our family for half the year.
So that was awesome.
We're also getting new uniforms, new sites for our weapons, things like that.
After the Secretary of the Air Force came here, she started implementing all this stuff.
And it's come down pretty quick. It's made a big difference.
I had the opportunity to sit on the focus group of the SECAF.
And I said, we made a lot of changes.
And the nature of the Air Force is there's a lot of phase type things where this phase we're paying attention to this type of thing.
But then it phases out and we don't care about it anymore.
And I brought that up to her and I asked her, what are we doing to sustain these changes?
And she spoke to me about the current budget and the five year plan attached to it.
And she said that it's a goal of hers to make sure these initiatives and these changes that we've made stick.
After a lot of study and research and traveling out to the bases and meeting directly with our airmen and focus groups
and meeting with those leaders on the scene, there's a lot of changes that are in the works.
The NUCA Enterprise is our number one mission in the Air Force.
We have got to put our money where our mouth is.
Our morale is off the charts, you know, as evidenced by a recent survey.
An anonymous survey that they took, they like where we're going.
The defenders like the new uniform.
Maintenance loves being able to have parts.
Morale is on the increase.
I've seen it from the old days, you know, as everyone calls it.
I mean, I've seen that when the morale hit the bottom during the middle of the big investigation,
all the way up to now where I really feel like morale is just through the roof.
I really think that the FIP initiatives, the attention that we've gotten, it's all been positive.
They're listening to our voice.
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