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Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Navy Orders Forcewide Housing Inspections After Secretary 'Appalled' by Guam Barracks Conditions
Navy Secretary John Phelan visited Guam earlier this month and was "appalled" after seeing the conditions of an Air Force barracks where junior service members were living, prompting an ongoing Navy-wide inspection of more than 100,000 barracks units, according to a government watchdog and service officials. Conditions included exposed wires, corroded plumbing and dilapidated walls splattered with paint to cover mold; after Phelan's visit, more than 70 Marines and sailors were moved out of the Palau Hall barracks, a housing facility at Andersen Air Force Base. Another 77 airmen there are "in the process of being relocated" in anticipation of a $53 million renovation scheduled to start later this year, an Air Force spokesperson told on Friday. The Project on Government Oversight, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group, obtained images of the squalid housing and correspondence sent by the Navy's head of installations, who ordered all regional commands to inspect their barracks by the end of May. Read Next: Air Force Wants Private Company to Take Over its On-Base Hotels The Navy official, Vice Adm. Scott Gray, noted that the Palau Hall barracks were "way outside of any reasonable standard" and that the conditions were "a failure of leadership across multiple echelons of command," according to the documents. Not all of the inspections have been completed, the Navy told Friday, but are expected to be finished by the end of June. Following his visit May 1-2, Phelan ordered Marines and sailors be moved out of the Air Force-owned barracks within 10 days and that new housing aboard Marine Corps Base Camp Blaz be opened about a month ahead of schedule in response to the squalid conditions, according to POGO and confirmed by the Navy. "I actually thought the buildings were condemned," Phelan told POGO in an interview. "When we pulled up to them and saw what shape they're in, I was shocked." Days later, on May 5, Gray sent the email, with photos of the barracks conditions attached, directing the worldwide inspection and adding that "if you would not want a sailor's mother/family visiting them at the housing unit, then you have a problem that needs to be addressed. Fix It!" The inspections are meant to "ensure our sailors are residing in unaccompanied housing that meet living standards regardless [of] if they are Navy-owned or not," Leslie Gould, the Fleet and Family Readiness director for the service's installation command, told in an emailed statement Friday. Palau Hall is Air Force-owned, but it is not uncommon for troops from different branches to stay in cross-service housing. The Navy's inspection includes barracks where sailors are living, but that are operated by other branches. There are more than 104,000 unaccompanied housing units across the Navy, Gould said. They are given a "red, yellow or green" designator following a multi-leader inspection of the barracks' exterior, common areas such as kitchens and laundry rooms, and quarters, according to Gray's email. Within the "yellow" category, Gray urged leaders to apply the "Washington Post test," meaning that "if the pictures you have taken or the results of your assessment conducted of a particular facility were published online tomorrow, would you be able to personally justify sailors living there?" Gould said that housing facilities deemed to be "red" will result in a sailor being immediately removed from the barracks. Those identified as "yellow" will be prioritized for restoration. She said that there are currently no sailors or Marines living in Air Force-owned barracks on Guam, having been relocated to Blaz facilities, and that the Joint Region Marianas commander, Rear Adm. Brett Mietus, inspected all other barracks on the U.S. territory and found that they were not "below standards." René Kladzyk, a senior investigator at POGO and former reporter El Paso Matters in Texas, told in a phone interview Friday that her reporting stemmed from a tip the organization received this month. "I think it's pretty well known that the problems in barracks conditions are quite pervasive. It's not unique to Guam," she said. "When talking about barracks conditions, often we're talking about single, more junior service members who may be in a culture where they are kind of told or taught that they should just be willing to tough it out." "Exposed wiring has very real fire hazard risks. Mold can have a range of severe health impacts that often can be really hard to directly tie," she added. "It's worth mentioning that there are very serious dangers connected to not maintaining housing facilities." The Marine Corps announced last month that Marines and sailors began relocating into new barracks at Camp Blaz from Andersen, citing testimony from troops calling it a "huge upgrade," but did not disclose that the move was a result of poor conditions at Palau Hall. "Luckily, we were in a position to move them out of the Air Force barracks into the brand new built Marine Corps barracks," Capt. Brenda Leenders, a spokesperson for the Marine Corps, told on Friday, adding that "there are nine [barracks facilities] still in the construction phase" on Guam. Barracks conditions for junior troops have been squalid for years as many service leaders recognized that upkeep and funding for their living conditions fell by the wayside as pressing operational needs took priority during 20 years of the Global War on Terrorism. In 2023, the Government Accountability Office found that barracks across the services were infested by mold, rodents, raw sewage and general dilapidation, leaving tens of thousands of young troops in substandard living conditions. While many of the services have said they are continuing to prioritize and fund fixing and building new barracks, reported on Wednesday that the Pentagon will shift $1 billion meant for Army barracks maintenance and renovation to its southern border mission. The "One Big Beautiful Bill" legislation working through Congress, meant to help enact President Donald Trump's agenda, allocates another roughly $1 billion for barracks maintenance and improvements. But that funding would be split between the Army, Navy, Air Force and Space Force, resulting in "a net loss here for them on an uphill battle for quality-of-life initiatives," Rob Evans, creator of Hots & Cots, an app where service members can leave reviews about facilities, told on Friday. "They are all impacted by this, and I would love to hear some sort of steps forward on what the secretary of defense's agenda is for addressing this stuff because this will impact retention and this will impact recruiting," he added. The Air Force spokesperson said that the service "is committed to providing safe and adequate living conditions for its service members," adding that it is prioritizing barracks restoration as part of a "4-year Dorm Master Plan" and had allocated roughly $115 million to four dormitories at Andersen. They noted that Typhoon Mawar in 2023 caused severe damage to facilities there. The service has a $49.5 billion backlog in maintenance and repair efforts, Michael Saunders, the acting assistant secretary of the Air Force for energy, installations and environment, recently told Congress. In recent years, service leaders have tied troop quality-of-life conditions to urgent strategic efforts, recruiting and retention. Guam, located in the Western Pacific, is also a key strategic asset for the military's ability to project power amid escalating tensions between the U.S. and China. "Maintenance and repair funding levels have not kept pace with the rising cost of construction, leading to compounding sustainment costs, widespread degradation, and increases in infrastructure issues that adversely impact mission execution," Saunders said in a statement to the House Armed Services Committee, noting that those conditions make "installations vulnerable to adversaries and [place] mission generation at risk." Related: Pentagon Diverts $1 Billion from Army Barracks to Fund Border Mission
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Sentinel nuclear missiles will need new silos, Air Force says
The Air Force will have to dig entirely new nuclear missile silos for the LGM-35A Sentinel, creating another complication for a troubled program that is already facing future cost and schedule overruns. The Air Force originally hoped the existing silos that have housed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles could be adapted to launch Sentinel missiles, which would be more efficient than digging entirely new silos. But a test project at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California showed that approach would be fraught with further problems and cause the program to run even further behind and over budget, the service said. 'As the [Sentinel] program continues to undergo restructuring activities, the Air Force analysis continues to confirm unacceptable risks to cost, schedule and weapon system performance stemming from the original baseline strategy of converting Minuteman III silos,' an Air Force spokesperson said in an email Tuesday. 'Additionally, we have data based on a test launch facility conversion project at Vandenberg Space Force Base that validated the implications of unknown site conditions with significant cost and schedule growth. 'To mitigate this and other risks, the Air Force plans to build new missile silos on predominantly Air Force-owned real estate, which means reusing the existing missile sites but not the 55-year-old silos,' the spokesperson continued. Sentinel is the Air Force's program to replace the existing Minuteman III ICBMs — the United States' land-based portion of its nuclear deterrent — which are more than half a century old and reaching the end of their lives. But Sentinel, which is being built by Northrop Grumman, will be a massive modernization, involving construction projects spread out across thousands of miles in the Great Plains region. It was originally expected to cost $77.7 billion, but projected future costs ran so severely over budget that in January 2024, it triggered a review process known as a critical Nunn-McCurdy breach. After that review, the Pentagon last year concluded Sentinel was too critical to national security to abandon, but ordered the Air Force to restructure it to bring its costs under control. And further studies of the program are showing more potential problems. In a briefing with reporters in March 2024, discussing the Nunn-McCurdy breach and the program's complications, a Northrop Grumman official acknowledged that further study of the conditions of the existing silos may force the program to dig new ones. 'There's currently no plan to dig new holes,' the official said. 'But given the site conditions of the land, [there is] certainly the potential that when they get to investigating more of the silos, they may find that [reusing] some of them might not be possible.' Gen. Thomas Bussiere, head of Air Force Global Strike Command, said in a virtual forum last week that the service is still studying the Sentinel program's structure and finding ways to improve it. 'Nunn-McCurdy was a very stressful process for the department,' Bussiere said in an April 30 virtual forum, hosted by the Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance Deterrence Center. 'But what it did is it gives us the opportunity to revisit and open up the aperture for how those facilities are being designed, and how those facilities are going to be implemented with the new capability.' After the review, Bussiere said, the Air Force began looking at ways to reuse the existing land with Minuteman silos, if not the silos themselves. The service is also looking at other land already owned by the federal government to supplement its ICBM sites, he said. But as the service transitions from the older analog command-and-control architecture to Sentinel's new, digital-era control functions, Bussiere said, it will have to ensure it maintains a minimum number of ICBMs on alert to preserve the nation's nuclear deterrent. And considering the scale of this project could surpass even the Eisenhower administration's construction of the interstate highway system, Bussiere said, that will be a complicated balance to strike. 'That's going to be a graceful ballet between [operations] and maintenance, acquisition, a bunch of partners that are part of this program, to make sure we get this right. Quite frankly, we've never done it before, at this scale and complexity.'
