The Disgruntled Guys Who Babysit Our Aging Nuclear Missiles 176
Lasrick writes This is a rather disturbing read about the troops who guard our nuclear weapons."'The Air Force has not kept its ICBMs manned or maintained properly,' says Bruce Blair, a former missileer and cofounder of the anti-nuclear group Global Zero. Nuclear bases that were once the military's crown jewels are now 'little orphanages that get scraps for dinner,' he says. And morale is abysmal. Blair's organization wants to eliminate nukes, but he argues that while we still have them, it's imperative that we invest in maintenance, training, and personnel to avoid catastrophe: An accident resulting from human error, he says, may be actually more likely today because the weapons are so unlikely to be used. Without the urgent sense of purpose the Cold War provided, the young men (and a handful of women) who work with the world's most dangerous weapons are left logging their 24-hour shifts under subpar conditions—with all the dangers that follow."
Relevant John Oliver segment (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Oliver is insightful 'round a number of topics dear to /dotters, least of all net neutrality, but twists Fagin on Scottish Independence, private prisons, the death penalty, and even Dr Oz & nutritional supplements.
He's not Carlin, but he's closer than most contemporaries.
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Science fiction comes to life, again (Score:2)
I remember an old story in which someone at one of those bases would periodically stand between the two launch keys, which are intentionally placed far apart so that it takes two people to turn them simultaneously, and try to stretch his arms far enough so that he could launch the missile. Anybody remember what that story was?
Re:Science fiction comes to life, again (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing not well documented (but it is covered if you take the tour at the Minuteman National Historic Site):
A missle will not launch until at least two capsules "vote" for launch. For a capsule to "vote" - both operators must engage the key within N seconds of each other.
So a person would need to, in addition to stretching their arms, twist two additional keys in a separate capsule using some sort of portal technology. Someone with such techology likely does not need nukes.
Also, as I understand it, in addition to the key turn, there is additional validation of launch codes by computer nowadays.
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One thing not well documented (but it is covered if you take the tour at the Minuteman National Historic Site):
A missle will not launch until at least two capsules "vote" for launch. For a capsule to "vote" - both operators must engage the key within N seconds of each other
Or, a missile can also launch if there's a hardware or software bug in the mechanism, or if there's a hardware or software failure.
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And how secure is this interlocking system? Could someone with writestrippers, soldering iron, and a wrench accomplish a launch? Say a Barney Collier or MacGyver type.
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The cables between sites are contained within pressurized conduits buried pretty deep. You'd have to dig down to the cables without a patrol seeing you, then you'd trigger a bunch of alarms the moment you breached the conduit (drop in pressure triggers alarms)
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You sure? He did mention MacGyver!
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Re: Science fiction comes to life, again (Score:4, Informative)
I was a Titan launch officer. There were two keys, one at the commanders console and a second one at the deputies console. In order to launch a message would come down with a series of letters that would have to match a sealed packet, kept in a safe with two locks on it. The keys were also kept in there. Additionally, we would receive a series of numbers to unlock a valve to allow fuel flow in the first stage.
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or get two people to turn key really. 1 crazy might not make it through, but 2 crazy ? Fundementalist which think the apocalypse is to come and just want to make it come quicker ? Not so far fetched...
"Also, as I understand it, in addition to the key turn, there is additional validation of launch codes by computer nowadays."
For the longest time it was 000000000000000000000. Now we are "told" it was replaced with a computer secure code... And seeing the old machine it runs onto with 7 inches floppy, my feeli
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1. The nuclear ordinance of the early 60's only has the materials in common with the warheads of today. These were giant lumbering massive bombs that would barely fit on top of a rocket that could also carry two people into orbit using a Gemini capsule. The physics packages of today are incredibly more complex, and incredibly more safe from an accidental detonation point of view.
2. In order for a nuclear explosion of any power greater than the conventional explosives inside, you have to compress the cor
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I remember an old story in which someone at one of those bases would periodically stand between the two launch keys, which are intentionally placed far apart so that it takes two people to turn them simultaneously, and try to stretch his arms far enough so that he could launch the missile. Anybody remember what that story was?
I don't know that one, but it occurred to me seeing those switches that they could be open to a hard hack -- a mechanism on a bar that attaches to both keys and allows one person to turn them simultaneously.
That being said, I think the security isn't just that the keys are far apart, but that the room is manned 24/7 to prevent someone from trying a workaround.
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Yeah.. ..manned by you, and your partner, who is probably sleeping or watching TV, if there's anything on it he hasn't seen.
24 hours shifts, filled almost entirely with boredom broken by checklists.
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Right. Manned by a pair of people inside a bunker that would take days to breach from the outside -- by design. One of the goes nuts and kills the other, he's got plenty of time to rig shit. Someone on the surface would have to notice this, and then get maintenance crews to the site(s) and into the silo(s) to physically disable the launchers. Every step in that chain is measured in multiple HOURS -- assuming anyone outside even notices before a missile comes flyin' out.
I suspect that at one time there were measures to prevent these scenarios, but perhaps not anymore.
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blame the anti nuke crowd for causing the mess. I mean we all dont want nukes but alas, we have them. so we need to take care of them, and the people maintaining them
Especially in these times, with so many small but well funded organizations looking to get control of one.
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blame the anti nuke crowd for causing the mess. I mean we all dont want nukes but alas, we have them. so we need to take care of them, and the people maintaining them
Or, we could, you know, dismantle them if they no longer serve the purpose intended for them. Then we wouldn't have them, they wouldn't need maintaining, and there would be no risk of misuse or accident.
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They do still serve the purpose intended - to make sure someone else doesn't decide to use theirs.
Working as intended, still.
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The lids on the silo aren't that thick and disabling the lanchers is probably just a matter of throwing a few pounds of explosives at them. You can throw more it if makes you feel safer. Then you have a mildly radioactive mess but that can be delt with.
Re:Science fiction comes to life, again (Score:5, Interesting)
Reminds me of Silo [vimeo.com], a neat little short film about a caretaker of an ICBM (who does a very poor job) and is forced to fix up the place... and well, any more and I'd be spoiling. You're best watching it...
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Probably not what you are thinking of but... Superman III.
http://ffilms.org/superman-iii... [ffilms.org]
Scene around the 47 minute mark :-)
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Are you thinking of "Game" by Donald Barthleme?
I think that was it, yes. Thanks!
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There's an unintentionally hilarious scene in Godzilla where two soldiers practically scream "1... 2... 3!" in each other's faces, then turn their keys. Firstly, because they're shouting even though there's nothing loud going on, secondly because the keys are placed so close together it would have been easier for one of them to turn both.
Also one of them should have said, "wait, wait... on three, or after 3?"
I wonder if there's a specific regulation on that.
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Solved very easily by counting backwards. As in: "3... 2... 1... mark"
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Come to think of it, they may well have done exactly that.
But what if one of the guys is called Mark? He could get distracted.
dat's a nice nuke you got dare. (Score:2)
Automate! (Score:5, Funny)
The obvious solution is to automate this stuff! What could go wrang?
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Ask Joshua
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This:
"Skynet went online on August 4, 1997. Human decisions were removed from strategic defense. It originally became self-aware at 2:14 am Eastern Time on August 29th, 1997. In the ensuing panic and attempts to shut Skynet down, Skynet retaliated by firing American nuclear missiles at their target sites in Russia. Russia returned fire and three billion human lives ended in the nuclear holocaust. This was what has come to be known as "Judgment Day". "
Nuclear Armageddon is Bad, M'kay?
Re: Automate! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Automate! (Score:5, Informative)
I watched Colossus: The Forbin Project [wikipedia.org] on someone's recommendation the last time one of these topics came up.
As a fan of 70's dystopian sci-fi, it was a wonderful watch.
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P.S. it's a series of books that goes farther as well.
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This is why I liked the original ending to I, Robot, before the movie changed it.
A conspiracy of AIs starts plotting to take overr the world. Scientists discover this, and initially panic over how they could hope to stop an intelligence of such vast capabilitiy. Then they realise that the new robot overlords are designed without any greed, or lust, or craving for power. That they are of far greater intelligence than any human, approach all decisions from a rational basis alone, and cannot make a mistake. Th
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Even for the Computers, it's the Women that get you every time. :)
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The tapes are just the bootstrap. They only need to be run once.
See? THIS is how handwaving is done.
--
BMO
Scale down the land based forces (Score:5, Insightful)
Shift their responsibilities to the bomber and submarine forces. Land based missiles don't offer any benefit over the other two legs of the triad. Bombers can be recalled and submarines are much more likely to survive to deliver a counter strike. Both bombers and submarines lessen the need for launch on warning. The missile forces as constituted are an artifact from a very different technological era.
Re:Scale down the land based forces (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll concede there is an argument that submarine launch is sufficient. But, the facilities are already built, the missiles exist and the systems are already in place. Maintaining them is also far easier than a submarine. They've also got the advantage that being based inside the continental US they are nearly completely secure and the ICBMs are at the current time essentially unstoppable because you'd need an interceptor in the western hemisphere to shoot them down and the ability to deliver multiple warheads on one missile which submarines lack.
As long as we have nukes I like having the ability to ensure that no matter what someone thinks they can accomplish in a first strike that the US would be assured the total destruction of said group of people stupid enough to try it. Mutually assured destruction is the only thing that kept WWIII from happening.
Re:Scale down the land based forces (Score:5, Informative)
Submarine launched missiles are all mirv capable
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U... [wikipedia.org]
14 warheads per missile.
I can certainly see maintaining a land based missile fleet but it's always been the easiest part of our defense to target and the most provocative for any attempt of a first strike.
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When the primary delivery system was airborne bombers, ICBMs were created to make sure that if you got hit first, you could strike back by having missiles scattered all about.
When the primary delivery system was land-based missiles scattered all about that could be targeted by other land-based missiles scattered all about, SLBMs were created to have a truly hidden capacity to strike back.
SLBMs are there to make sure some idiot somewhere doesn't think they can take out the whole arsenal in a first strike. T
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ICBM have a range of Anywhere On The Globe.
SLBM have a range of about 4300 miles.
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LOL well aside from being wrong about the range. 4300 miles is the range with a full load of 14 warheads which treaties currently limit to 8 warheads per the reduced load range is 7000 mi.
That said if your target isn't in CONUS you need subtract the travel distance to get out of the country from your effective range.
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We have a lot of boomers in the Great Lakes? No, I'm pretty sure that we don't need to subtract distance from the midwest to the target if the submarine is in the Pacific somewhere.
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Oh and seeing as you didn't mention it
The range of a Minuteman III is 8000 miles vs 7000 for the Trident II
Re:Scale down the land based forces (Score:5, Informative)
ICBM have a range of Anywhere On The Globe. SLBM have a range of about 4300 miles.
You must be talking of ICBMs and SLBMs that belong to some other country - certainly not the U.S.
The U.S. SLBM, the Trident II D5, is a much heavier missile than the Minuteman III (130,000 vs 78,000 lb) so with the same warhead loading will travel much farther than the Minuteman. The shorter range you see quoted is only due to the fact that it carries up 14 warheads, versus a maximum of 3 for the Minuteman.
The maximum range of Minuteman III missile is about 13,000 km, but the farthest place in the world from U.S. missile fields is 20,000 km away. A good part of the Earth is outside of U.S. ICBM range.
But here is the kicker - the farthest point of land from an ocean in the world is the Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility which is only 2645 km from the shore. So we can place submarine warheads truly anywhere on Earth.
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Trident D5 missiles can carry up to 14 warheads. The Minuteman III can only carry three.
Neither one currently carries their maximum load due to treaty limitations.
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Huh?
Boomers on patrol are also "nearly completely secure", in some ways even more secure because they're on the move while no silo has moved, ever. And the submarine force
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And if I die before I wake, I pray the lord my toys to break, so none other kids can use them.
-- Prayer of a Selfish Child
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Yes, they do.
We can put an ICBM anywhere in the world within 29 minutes. Neither bombers or sub can do that.
Bombers an Subs can more easily have the comms disrupted
Bomber and Sub will hve an active defense targeting them.
Bombers and sub are tracked by other actors the various theaters.
.
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You have to find bombers and subs before you can target them
Or are you trying to say it's easier to target a submarine moving underwater than a fixed silo ?
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You have to find bombers and subs before you can target them
Security by obscurity?
Re:Scale down the land based forces (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, they do. We can put an ICBM anywhere in the world within 29 minutes. Neither bombers or sub can do that.
ICBMs can cover much of the Earth, but not all of it. The U.S. submarine fleet, consisting of multiple mobile missile fields, can. Submarines can be positioned closer to the target, and can thus put a warhead on it faster than an ICBM (not clear why you think shaving minutes is so important though).
Bombers an Subs can more easily have the comms disrupted.
Not at all clear that this true today, with modern communication systems. Silos have serious problems with communications when warheads land on top of them.
Bomber and Sub will hve an active defense targeting them. Bombers and sub are tracked by other actors the various theaters.
What effective "active defense" do you imagine exists in the world today against the U.S. SLBM fleet? They patrol a couple of thousand miles off the coast, if they need to, and there is no effective anti-submarine force in the world to target them. The Russian submarine fleet is less than 1/4 the size that it was under the Soviet Union.
You may have heard of the U.S. carrier battle groups of which the U.S. has 11, versus none for the rest of the world. SLBMs have the option of operating from the protective umbrella of battle groups, which makes the notion of them being effectively target truly ridiculous.
And the bombers have cruise missiles with a range of 1500 miles, so the effectiveness of active defense against them is questionable.
Sorry you are grasping at ancient, worn-out straws trying to prop up the case for the ICBM fleet.
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Boomers do not operate in conjunction with battle groups: they go out in to the vast ocean and disappear. Their biggest defense is that they are virtually impossible to find.
The ICBM's... well everyone knows where they are (ever notice how on google maps they all are oriented identically? It is neat in a morbid way.) Good luck trying to damage one however. A 2000 bomb would quite possibly mar the cover the the point that it would have to be repainted.
https://www.google.com/maps/@4... [google.com]
https://www.google. [google.com]
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Land based ICBM's can only be destroyed by a nuclear weapon (this will remain true for the foresee able future). While the US itself might be able to pull off a successful conventional strike against and undefended one, no adversary will be able to.
A foe MUST task a sizable portion of their arsenal to deal with them.
Bombers can be shot down, subs sunk. Maybe not easily, but it is possible.
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For the sake of discussion I won't examine the premise that land based missiles can only be rendered ineffective by nuclear strike. If you think about it you will see it's not such an absolute statement.
What I have to ask though is in what possible scenario of a nation launching nuclear strike on the U.S. do you see them not committing to wiping out the U.S. retaliatory capability ?
Remember when talking about submarine vs land any aggressor has to take out all the subs because any one ballistic missile sub
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>> What I have to ask though is in what possible scenario of a nation launching nuclear strike on the U.S. do you see them not committing to wiping out the U.S. retaliatory capability ?
Any nation that doesn't have the numbers to wipe out the US capability: that being every nuclear power on earth except Russia. In the case of Russia, the silos represent a force that absolutely must be dealt with. No attack subs or fighter jets or any other conventional means can counter the ICBM's: they have to be
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Shift their responsibilities to the bomber and submarine forces. Land based missiles don't offer any benefit over the other two legs of the triad.
"Redundancy, the very best there is. When you absolutely, positively got to kill every motherfucker on the planet, accept no substitutes."
Pretty much the only way to stop an ICBM from obliterating you is to stop it from launching. If it is in the air, you're already dead. 3 minutes into a launch, most ICBMs are higher than the maximum range of any SAM, but they're not even done climbing yet. Israel's Iron Dome claims 90% effectiveness at knocking down rockets. So assuming there is an equally effective
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Shift their responsibilities to the bomber and submarine forces. Land based missiles don't offer any benefit over the other two legs of the triad. Bombers can be recalled and submarines are much more likely to survive to deliver a counter strike. Both bombers and submarines lessen the need for launch on warning. The missile forces as constituted are an artifact from a very different technological era.
"Scaling down" does not seem to be the solution. As long as there are some ICBMs this problem will persist, and it is a bad idea to have any nuclear weapons under the control of a dysfunctional organization like this. It should be outright elimination.
There should be no "launch on warning" period. It is a deadly dangerous posture, and is unnecessary - we have subs that will survive any sudden strike, and airplanes that can scramble, then return to base if there is no strike (and continue to their targets, w
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Well while I agree with most of what you say everything has to be put in perspective of spending as much as we need to for defense but no more.
The Triad is certainly not holy writ but it does serve the purpose of complicating attack planning for potential enemies. Can we get away with eliminating a leg entirely ? I don't know and really not sure I want to find out.
Launch on warning is indeed a very dangerous policy, on the other hand ruling it out is even more dangerous. If you only have a policy of launch
Can't, because of politics. (Score:2)
If you read the article you'll see that the senators from states with missile silos don't want any of them closed. That's why the airforce will be manning all 454 ICBM silos, even though 54 of them will be empty.
It's basically welfare for Montana, South Dakota and Wyoming. It would make more sense to cut 2.4 million checks for $819 and send them to every man, woman and child in those three states every year for perpetuity, rather than spendin that same 2 billion dollars on a half-assed job of maintaining
Non-story (Score:3)
This same thing gets reported every single year. We all know nuclear weapons will never get used, but we can't get rid of them because it would then make us seem weak. Like it or not, this is the only thing standing between us and another large scale war.
Re:Non-story (Score:5, Informative)
We might now be able to get rid of all of them, but we could get rid of MOST of them
We have already done that. America's nukes peaked in the 1960s at over 30,000 warheads. Today we have less than 5,000. Here is a nice graph [wikipedia.org]. The average yield per warhead has declined as well. Our current policy is to continue to decommission warheads until we reduce our stockpile to 1550 by 2021.
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Poor Promotability too (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Poor Promotability too (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a fairly shit job (Hey! It's time for work! 99.99% chance says it'll be a long stretch of pure boredom in some unpleasant bunker with a few instances of my superiors fucking with me as part of a 'routine drill'. Failing that, I get to be responsible for a few million deaths!) and doesn't have a terribly large overlap with the most desireable jobs(depending on how similar the UIs are, it may or may not be good practice for other parts of the air force that involve hunching over screens and coordinating stuff; and the people doing maintenance and inspection of ICBMs are probably picking up skills applicable to maintenance and inspection of other weapons systems). It's also hard to hide the fact that, while it isn't quite useless enough to eliminate, it's not exactly a job where you'll feel like you are doing anything of value, which won't help your morale.
How would you make doing a job like that not burn people out?
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Get rid of up or out and then actively recruit people who will put up with tedium in return for pretty solid job security.
Re:Poor Promotability too (Score:4, Insightful)
24 hours on watch in a bunker, with maybe a short drill or two? *yawn*.
I sat console (mumble) feet under the North Atlantic six out of every eighteen, with no TV and no daylight for three months. And back in my day, no laptops or portable game devices, or email, or... pretty much any personal electronics beyond a cheap-ass cassette player. Monday through Friday, ships drills in the morning and training most afternoons - both of which you racked out for if you weren't on watch. Saturday morning was field day. Most days, on top of all that I averaged 2-4 hours off watch working on quals, handling collateral duties, or standing proficiency watches. The guys who had to do their maintenance off watch had it even worse.
(And all this on a 640 class, an original 41' boat - not a 726 class Hilton. I'd been a month away from home before we even went to sea.)
Color me unimpressed that they're all emo because they have to spend a whole twenty four hours in a bunker.
The same way they did in the Cold War - treat 'em like an elite and kick the lesser performers to the curb. Figure out how to give them a valid career path. Make 'em feel needed and coddled and wanted. (And even then they whined like little toddlers about that 24 hour thing.)
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boo hoo you had it worse.
That still doesn't mean that fatigue and boredom don't exist and that it's a really fucking stupid idea to have your ICMB watchers fatigued and mind crushingly bored day after day, month after month, year after year.
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There are certainly lots of ways to grind down and demoralize people with actually important jobs; but with some care and skill, and a willingness to treat them like they are actually important, it's hardly an intractable problem.
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" Do something for us " (from the article) ...it's tricky to imagine how you could make the job more attractive...
>
--I have a couple of ideas.
First is to keep the mind occupied. How about starting a radio station for the silos (run by the on-duty guys) where the DJ duty gets rotated every day to a different silo?
Second, how about inviting the on-duty guys to a couple of prestigious events (2x/month or so, all expenses paid) where they can stand guard for a while and then enjoy the party? It would give th
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Re:Poor Promotability too (Score:4, Informative)
The military needs ditch diggers, too. How many Air Force personnel are pilots? 1%? I guess I could look it up. There we go...
324,820 Active Duty
13,811 pilots
A little over 4%. So good luck with that pilot path.
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Because mechanics, fuel men, air crew, guards, and weapons techs don't count.
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Those pilots are about a third of the officers, and the officers are most of the college graduates. The career path for enlisted personnel does not include flying airplanes.
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They've all been pilots and the majority have been fighter/bomber pilots athough there are a rare few that weren't like Thomas White and Norton Schwartz.
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Then make qualifying to serve in a silo and spending at least a year in the silo a requirement for anyone who wants to make a certain level, say full colonel. That would guarantee that *every* general officer would have first hand experience with that part of the service. It'd be an unpopular policy because it's a shit job, but maybe it wouldn't be such a shit job if everyone had to do it.
Since you typically need post-graduate education to be a colonel, and boredom is the biggest problem in the job, maybe
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This is easily the best idea posted yet. The only issue being training churn - you would have career-minded fly-boys rotating in and out as fast as they can in order to check the "silo duty" checkbox on their military LinkedIn equivalent, and then you are still left with either airmen that hate the job, or similarly disinterested officers "getting it out of the way"
There are some problems with the story (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:There are some problems with the story (Score:4, Insightful)
Would you care to share any of those factual errors, or did you just want to announce that they existed?
Re:There are some problems with the story (Score:4, Interesting)
I was in in FE Warren SAC in the early 80's. I was no in the hole, I was support.
Moral was crap then, and they where short staffed(Thanks Reagan!)
I worked many 72-100 shifts with no sleep.
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I don't know where you've been for the last few years shipmate, but the story coming out of the USAF (from a variety of sources) has pretty much been what's recounted here - the USAF nuclear forces are badly fucked up. Their gear is old and ill maintained. Their training substandard. The supervision and chain of command below substandard. Etc... etc
I'm more worried about the Ruskies (Score:2)
Our troops are making standard military pay for doing a fairly stress free job (compared to other military jobs).
Given that Russia is essentially a kleptocracy, I have to wonder how safe their nukes are.
Command and Control (Score:2)
https://www.goodreads.com/book... [goodreads.com]
A groundbreaking account of accidents, near misses, extraordinary heroism, and technological breakthroughs, Command and Control explores the dilemma that has existed since the dawn of the nuclear age: How do you deploy weapons of mass destruction without being destroyed by them?
North Dakota (Score:3)
MotherJones as the source? Really? (Score:2)
Staplers! (Score:2)
Babysitting A Missile Silo Is Punishment (Score:2)
When my 16-year-old mother ran away from home to have my older half-brother and marry the 21-year-old father from the Air Force base in Idaho, my grandfather tracked them down and told the base commander that the marriage was illegal without parental consent. A major scandal back in the 1950's. The base commander told the guy that he could go to prison and get a dishonorable discharge, or get a divorce and finish his enlistment babysitting a missile silo in the Midwest.
My mother was newly divorced and a sin
Yet another example... (Score:2)
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Boredom is a big human factor in many accidents. We *should* be making a big deal about the boredom of people in charge of some incredibly dangerous weapons. Certainly in other safety related fields, boredom has resulted in serious fatal accidents (for example automation in airliners leading bored crews to trying experiments, leading to a crash). Attributing it to the "pussification of America" just shows this opinion to be rather ignorant of the serious consequences of ignoring human factors.
On the pussifi
Re:Start with a biased source (Score:4, Informative)
From: http://www.esmerel.com/circle/... [esmerel.com]
Gruntled, however, is now in the dictionary, in use since the 1920's, from people taking the "dis" off of disgruntled.
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Unlike, say, submarines and bombers, which have other purposes to keep the crew busy; but can deliver nuclear payloads; or nuclear weapon research and maintenance, which is single-purpose but involves a lot of potentially interesting work in physics, materials engineering, etc. watching over the ICBMs is pure grind.
It's hard to imagine how you could keep morale up when the job is 'nothing but drill
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You should read a short story called "The Big Flash" by Norman Spinrad.
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transmits to the booth as: Do it -static- do it -static- kill everyone!
Something vaguely similar actually happened, killing 500+ people. In 1977, two 747s collided on the runway [wikipedia.org] in part due to miscommunication.
ICAO phraseology has since been changed to use separate terminology for positive and negative communications. For example, when an ATC controller asks whether or not your capable your aircraft is capable of maintaining straight and level flight at a speed of 80 knots, the pilot will not say "I don't think we can do that" or "we can not do that". He or she will say "Aff
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I flew both cargo and carrier based aircraft in the 90s, in the US and abroad.
You are aware that in aviation things are continue to improve, right? One of those things is phraseology.