Towards a Fail-Safe Air Force Culture: Creating a Resilient Future While Avoiding Past Mistakes - Rewards and Punishment, Zero-Defects Culture, Preventing Incidents, Tragedies, and Failures

This excellent report has been professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction. The inadvertent transportation of nuclear cruise missile warheads on a B-52 from Minot AFB and the shipping of non-nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile components to Taiwan are contemporary incidents that reveal shortcomings. Dr. Schlesinger's 2008 report to the Secretary of Defense documented atrophy in the Air Force's nuclear enterprise as a primary cause for these failures. The report highlighted "a serious erosion of focus, expertise, mission readiness, resources and discipline in the nuclear weapons enterprise within the Air Force." The Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff General T. Michael Moseley both resigned in the wake of these incidents, and on October 24th 2008 the new Secretary of the Air Force Michael Donley and Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz issued their "Strategic Plan to Reinvigorate the Air Force Nuclear Enterprise." Notably, the strategic plan identified the establishment of a "zero-defect" culture as a primary attribute for a successful Air Force nuclear enterprise, stating "there is no tolerance of complacency or shortcuts as we rebuild a "zero-defect" culture."
Each of these incidents represents a catastrophic institutional failure - failures which must be prevented. Ceding the impossibility of omnipresence, Col Goldfein correctly observes that choice of vision and cultural development are leadership's fundamental tools in building a successful organization. The cultural options available to espouse span a continuum from a ruthless Zero-Defects method to a gentler Tolerance-Based style. While a Zero-Defect approach can garner short-term success, the ensuing culture of fear and reprisal are not conducive to sustained excellence. Conversely, a tolerant approach may achieve short-term morale benefits, but the resulting lack of discipline arising out of a culture of ambivalence dampens long-term productivity. Ultimately, long-term high performance is possible through a Fail-Safe culture which paradoxically embraces failure in building a resilient enterprise. Modern research on High Reliability Organizations (HRO), coupled with contemporary leadership theory, provide a framework to expose the shortcomings of both the Zero-Defect and Tolerance-Based approaches, assess current culture and then define the cultural characteristics required to implement a mindful approach to ensuring the Air Force can achieve its mission by maximizing our ability to "fly, fight and win ... in air, space and cyberspace."