National Park Service via AP file

A deactivated nuclear launch facility near Wall, S.D., similar to classified facilities at Minot (N.D.) Air Force Base. All 17 of the AirForce officers disciplined last month are assigned to Minot.

A "breakdown in overall discipline" led the Air Force to suspend 17 officers and disqualify them from controlling nuclear missiles after a poor inspection at one of the service's most important nuclear bases, military officials told NBC News on Wednesday.

All 17 officers are assigned to 91st Missile Wing at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, headquarters of the 5th Bomb Wing, which maintains 150 nuclear-tipped Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The unit received a "D" rating during inspections in March, leading senior officials at the base to call for an immediate crackdown, NBC station KMOT of Minot reported.

The inspection was only the latest in a series of high-profile failings, which led the group's deputy commander, Lt. Col. Jay Folds, to send an internal email complaining that the unit is suffering "rot" within its ranks, according to a copy obtained by The Associated Press.

"We are, in fact, in a crisis right now," Folds wrote, according to the AP.

The 17 officers — representing almost 5 percent of the 91st Missile Wing's missile launch staff — were suspended for 60 days last month and were stripped of their authority to control and launch nuclear missiles after the "D," or "marginal," inspection in March, an inspection the Air Force publicly labeled a success.

Air Force and other Defense Department officials confirmed the basic details of the AP report, telling NBC News that a "breakdown in overall discipline" led to a series of relatively minor violations of rules and procedures.

The base's nuclear weapons and facilities were never in jeopardy, they said. But the combined potential impact of the violations raised serious concern within the base's leadership, they confirmed.

The base has come under scrutiny for other incidents in recent years that raised questions about its security and oversight.

In August 2007, six cruise missiles loaded with W80-1 nuclear warheads were flown from Minot to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana before authorities discovered that the warheads hadn't been removed for safety, as required.

In a review of the incident in February 2008 (.pdf), the Defense Advisory Board blamed "process and systemic problems" that had "developed over more than a decade and have the potential for much more serious consequences."

But just five months after the blistering report was issued, in July 2008, three Air Force officers fell asleep at the controls of a component that contained old launch codes for nuclear ICBMs. They were immediately barred from working with classified and nuclear materials and were later discharged from the service.

The new report comes as the base is breaking in a new commander, Col. Alexis Mezynski, who took over in January and must now work to put out the fire.

In an interview with KMOT as he assumed command in January, Mezynski acknowledged that there were problems at the base, which was built in the 1950s and needs to be brought back up "to conditions that are workable."

"There are going to be changes," he promised at the time.

Jim Miklaszewski and Courtney Kube of NBC News contributed to this report. Follow M. Alex Johnson on Twitter and Facebook.

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The Army and Air Force have reopened their Tuition Assistance pipelines to service members — following a Congressional mandate — yet similar funding remains stalled within the Marine Corps, a leading veterans’ advocate complained Wednesday.

The federal sequestration had previously blockaded all money that’s normally funneled to troops to help them pay for college classes in order to further their educations and their military careers. In most branches, that tab reaches $4,500 per year for each service member who takes the classes.

On March 21, Congress voted to order the Defense Department to locate the necessary funding to relaunch Tuition Assistance across the branches. That directive has now become law. Navy leaders had already opted to keep that program alive for sailors despite sequestration, “and we’re quite proud of that, too,” said Lt. Shawn Eklund, a Navy spokesman.

At midnight Tuesday, the Army turned on the web portal used by soldiers to formally ask for Tuition Assistance money.

“This will allow soldiers to request Tuition Assistance for the remainder of fiscal year 2013. For the balance of (this year), the eligibility rules for use of TA, the $250 semester-hour cap, and the annual ceiling of $4,500 remain unchanged,” said Lt. Col. S. Justin Platt, an Army spokesman.

On Wednesday, the Air Force also reinstated Tuition Assistance for its members, said Air Force spokesman Lt. Col. Laurel Tingley.

"The program is going to remain exactly the same as it was before the suspension," Tingley said. 

Marine Corps public affairs officers didn’t immediately respond to emailed questions on when that branch will again offer Tuition Assistance.

“Here’s the issue: It’s been passed by Congress and signed by the president. There’s no reason this shouldn’t (already) be reinstated at the branch level,” said Michael Dakduk, executive director of Student Veterans of America, a support network with more than 500 campus chapters.

At some military posts, including North Carolina’s Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, the attendance of Marines who once used on-base college classes has been cut by more than half since DOD halted all tuition help amid the sequestration, Dakduk said.

“It’s absolutely extreme,” he added. “And that’s exactly kind of thing we don’t want to see as far as supporting service members. Especially as our military force in total begins to draw down and we have folks exit the military.”

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Four different branches of the U.S. military are spending millions of dollars to equip troops with combat uniforms in seven different but similar camouflage patterns, says the Government Accountability Office, wasting money and potentially exposing some troops to increased risk on the battlefield.

That’s one of the findings in the GAO’s latest report on government waste, its third annual report on overlapping, redundant and/or wasteful federal government programs and spending. (GAO is the independent, nonpartisan investigative and auditing agency that works for Congress.)

The report identifies 31 new areas in the federal government "where agencies may be able to achieve greater efficiency or effectiveness" – 17 areas where the GAO found evidence of "fragmentation, overlap or duplication" and 14 where it found opportunities for significant cost savings and "revenue enhancement."

On combat uniforms, the GAO found that the military services “employ a fragmented approach” in acquiring them.

Have a look at the visual included in the report (below). It shows images of seven different camouflage patterns for uniforms separately ordered by the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines.

Government Accountability Office

Before 2002, all the military services had used only two basic camouflage patterns – one woodland pattern and one desert pattern.

Contracting separately for similar uniforms, GAO says, has resulted in “numerous inventories of similar uniforms at increased cost to the supply chain.”

GAO found that if the services partnered together in procuring uniforms, the Defense Department could save tens of millions of dollars.

Previously the Army has estimated it could save $82 million by partnering, and the Navy has estimated it could save $6 million.

Spending watchdog groups say the uniform waste is one example of a widespread problem.

“When you look at combat fatigues it's like a microcosm of the whole problem,” says Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog group. “Combat fatigues are an example of how, left to its own devices, government creates more complication, and it's up to Congress to reign them in and to make them concentrate and only do one thing.”

Of the 31 new areas the GAO identified, here are a few examples of areas the GAO found with overlap and duplication:

• Drug abuse prevention and treatment programs: “Federal drug abuse prevention and treatment programs are fragmented across 15 federal agencies … in fiscal year 2012, about $4.5 billion was allocated to these 15 agencies that administer 76 programs that are, in all or in part, intended to prevent or treat illicit drug use or abuse.”
• Renewable energy initiatives: “23 agencies and their 130 sub-agencies implemented 679 renewable energy initiatives in fiscal year 2010…9 agencies implemented 82 overlapping duplicative wind-related initiatives in fiscal year 2011 … including 7 initiatives that have provided duplicative … financial support to the same recipient for a single project.”

Here are a few examples of areas GAO found with significant potential cost savings or increased revenue:

• Crop insurance subsidies: Congress could save up to $1.2 billion if it reduced or limited subsidies for individual farmers.
• Medicaid supplemental payments: by identifying improper Medicaid payments, HHS could save up to hundreds of millions of dollars.
• Tobacco taxes: the federal government lost as much as $615 million to $1 billion between 2009 and 2011 “because tobacco manufacturers and consumers substituted higher-taxed smoking tobacco products with similar lower tax products.

The entire list is in the full report, GAO-13-279SP - "2013 Annual Report: Actions Needed to Reduce Fragmentation, Overlap, and Duplication and Achieve Other Financial Benefits." The report runs 293 pages and is available here.

The GAO’s report includes recommendations for policy changes in each area. But the report includes some positive statistics about the impact of the GAO’s previous efforts.

Since its first report in 2011, the GAO found that the Obama administration’s executive branch agencies and Congress “have made progress.”

As of the latest report’s completion last month, the GAO found, a majority of the areas it identified in the first two reports in 2011 and 2012 got attention from the agencies involved: 16 of the 131 areas “were addressed”; 87 were “partially addressed”; and only 27 were “not addressed.” 

Of approximately 300 “actions needed” within these areas, more than half were addressed or partially addressed: 65 were addressed, 149 were partially addressed and 85 were not addressed.

The GAO’s recommendations to reduce waste and duplication on combat uniforms were originally provided to the Defense Department in September 2012. The department responded with a statement saying, “the DOD plans to provide joint criteria and policy guidance for camouflage uniforms to the military departments by March 2013, and plans to … provide additional oversight and further pursue active partnerships for joint development and use of uniforms.”

Logistics Spc. 2nd Class Darlene Kemble / U.S. Navy

U.S. Navy Seabees display Navy Working Uniform Type III in January 2012 in Pearl Harbor.

Contacted Tuesday by NBC News for a response, representatives of the Defense Department referred to the previous statement. 

At a hearing Tuesday afternoon before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, GAO staffers testified about the report's findings and answered committee members’ questions.

In his opening statement, U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the committee’s chair, expressed disappointment that only 16 of the 131 areas the GAO previously reported got fixed.

“As budget pressure increases and the American taxpayer says I cannot afford to pay for the same services twice,” he said, “both Congress, including the GAO, and executive branch must find these programs, must find this waste and must do our job differently.”

Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the committee’s ranking Democrat, blamed Congress for failing to act and said he hoped that Republicans and Democrats could “join forces to reduce waste, fraud and abuse.”

“We should all be able to agree that a dollar wasted here is a dollar that is not put to better use elsewhere,” Cummings said.  “I think Republicans and Democrats will agree that we want to see taxpayers' dollars spent in an effective and efficient manner.”

U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, who runs the GAO and was the hearing's main witness, summed up his testimony with this observation:

“My term goes to 2025.  I hope that I won’t be reporting all these same issues in that year. But I can tell you that it won’t change unless the Congress gets involved in this process with active oversight.” 

Related story: Uncloaked: How Army is testing new camo to replace flawed design

Erin Trieb for NBC News

Monica Velez, pictured in Austin, Texas, had two brothers, Jose "Freddy" Velez and Andrew Velez, both of whom served the U.S. military and both are now dead -- Freddy was killed in action in Iraq, and Andrew took his own life.

Before Army Spc. Andrew Velez left Texas for the final time, he asked his fragile sister to write him a promise – a vow he could carry with him to Afghanistan.

Monica Velez knew she owed him that much. In the horrid weeks after each had lost their beloved brother, Freddy Velez, to enemy fire in Iraq, Monica tried to end her life with pills and alcohol. Now, she put pen to paper: “I will not hurt myself. I will not do anything crazy. I know that Andrew loves me. I know that Freddy loved me.” Andrew folded her note and slipped it into his pocket.

“Don’t break your word to me,” he told her before heading back to war.

Seven months later, Andrew, 22, sat alone in an Army office at a base in Afghanistan. He put a gun to his head and committed suicide. Back in Texas, word reached Monica Velez who, once again, found herself in a dangerous place. Only now, she was alone. Days of alcohol and anti-depressants. Nights of dark thoughts: “It would just be better if I was gone.”

'The storm' is coming
As the U.S. military suicide rate soared to record heights during 2012, the families of service members say they, too, are witnessing a silent wave of self-harm occurring within their civilian ranks: spouses, children, parents and siblings. 

Some suicides and suicide attempts — like those that ravaged the Velez family — are spurred by combat losses.

Others may be triggered by exhaustion and despair: As some veterans return debilitated by anxiety, many spouses realize it's now up to them — and will be for decades — to hold the family together.

Specific figures are lacking as no agency tracks civilian suicides within military families.

However, Kristina Kaufmann, a long-time Army wife, knows of three other Army wives, all friends, who took their lives in recent years.

Courtesy Kristina Kaufmann

"When you know that you are the anchor — and if you go down, the family's going down — the problem is that you can only do that for so long," said Kristina Kaufmann.

One was Faye Vick, described by Kaufmann as “the perfect picture of an Army wife — pretty, nice, always with a smile.” Vick and her family lived around the corner from Kaufmann and near Fort Bragg, N.C. In 2006, when Kaufmann’s husband was in Afghanistan and Vick’s husband was deployed overseas, the 39-year-old mother placed herself, her infant and her 2-year-old son in a car inside a closed garage and started the engine, asphyxiating all three with carbon monoxide, according to Kaufmann and to local news reports at the time.

“And I know of too many others through the grapevine,” said Kaufmann, executive director of Code of Support, an Alexandria, Va.-based nonprofit that seeks to bridge the gap between civilians and military America.

“When you know that you are the anchor — and if you go down, the family’s going down — the problem is that you can only do that for so long,” said Kaufmann. “That population (of spouses) is at the most risk. Because the storm is going to happen when everybody comes home. That’s where we are, unfortunately, going to see an uptick in lots of negative outcomes, including suicide, including suicide among the spouses.”

On Jan. 14, Department of Defense officials acknowledged that during 2012, service members committed suicide at a record pace as more than 349 people took their own lives across the four branches. The military suicide rate is slightly lower than that of the general public. However, one active-duty member died by suicide every 25 hours last year. 

The Army sustained the heaviest branch toll at 182 suicides, which — as NBC News reported Jan. 3 — meant that soldier suicides outpaced combat deaths for the first time, according to Pentagon officials.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta informed Congress last July that American armed forces are in the grip of a suicide "epidemic." 

One of the darkest undercurrents of the glaring statistics is that one suicide in a family boosts future suicide risks for everyone else inside the home. They can be contagious, say experts like Dr. Barbara Van Dahlen, a psychologist in the Washington, D.C., area and the founder of Give an Hour, which develops networks of mental-health volunteers who respond to both acute and chronic situations.

Numerous researchers have explored the so-called contagion effect of suicides within families and “there’s no question the data supports there’s at least a doubling of risk,” among surviving family members, said Dr. Alan L. Berman, Ph.D., executive director of the American Association of Suicidology. The organization strives to better understand and prevent suicide.

“It’s understood that risk, in part, is biological," Berman said, given that disorders like depression have a genetic component. 

“But it’s also based on social modeling behavior: The suicide of a parent presents a model (for children in that family) of how to deal with problems, and that’s no less true for a spouse.”

Added Van Dahlen: "The closer that family member is to you, the greater risk you’re at. We believe, psychologically, it opens the possibility and ends a taboo."

“The thousands of service members who have killed themselves,” she added, “they leave in their wake thousands of family members who are now at risk for that same kind of decision."

'I completely lost myself'
The cascade of Velez family tragedies began with pure valor.

On Nov. 13, 2004, Army Cpl. Jose “Freddy” Velez, 23, sprayed bullets at insurgent forces — covering fire to allow other U.S. soldiers time to retreat from an enemy strong point in Fallujah, Iraq. After his ammo ran dry, Freddy Velez was shot and killed. The Army awarded him the Bronze Star and Silver Star.

Courtesy Monica Velez

"There are days I'm still overwhelmed. And if I sit and think about it, I feel like I wouldn't have to live through all this pain if I just let myself go," said Monica Velez, who shared family photos of brothers Freddy and Andrew.

Andrew, then serving with another unit in Iraq, told Monica of escorting his brother’s body home to Lubbock, Texas — a job, he said, that required unzipping his brother’s body bag at every stop to re-verify Freddy’s identity.

During the trip, Andrew called his sister repeatedly while en route home and screamed into the phone for nearly two consecutive hours, “like somebody was killing him,” she said.

“There was nothing I could do,” Monica Velez recalled. “The operator kept cutting in (to request additional payment for the call) and I just said, ‘Add it to my credit card.’ He just wailed. That travel home, I think is what eventually broke him.”

Weeks later, Monica broke.

She doesn’t know how close she came to death the first time she tried to end her life. She never was told how slow her pulse became that night. She just remembers regaining consciousness at a hospital in Killeen, Texas — home to Fort Hood, where Freddy was based. She awoke with an IV plugged into her arm. A doctor handed her a list of local psychiatrists then discharged her.

Velez tried, she said, to seek help for her deepening depression but was told that her health insurance would not cover counseling.

Her grief was rooted in a difficult childhood, she said, that forged "tighter than tight" emotional bonds between Velez and her two brothers, turning the siblings into a mutual support group.

“When Freddy passed away, I went through a really hard depression,” she said. “I went to the emergency room for anxiety attacks. I couldn’t breathe. But nobody knew how to deal with me so they just gave me Ativan (an anti-anxiety drug) and Hydrocodone (a pain killer).

“I started drinking heavily and taking the prescriptions. And one day, I just felt it would be better off if I wasn’t around and decided to take all of the pills. Grief can bring you to that breaking moment.”

Soon after, in February 2005, Andrew sent his older sister (then 25) an email: “We need to be stronger. We need to protect each other.”

Though he was the youngest of the siblings, Andrew always was “the strong one,” his sister said. “But he and Freddy were inseparable.” Near the end of 2005, Andrew told his sister he was redeploying to Afghanistan because, she said, “I think he felt closer to Freddy there.”

From March through July of 2006, the two swapped calls and emails. In Afghanistan, Andrew grew increasingly despondent, she said, over the unraveling of his marriage and family in Lubbock. He had three children. But he worried, too, about his sister’s state of mind.

“We could both hear it in each other’s voices. He was scared I was going to do something. I was scared he was going to do something.”

He did. Andrew’s suicide on July 25, 2006, drove Monica, at first, into 20-hour workdays at a domestic violence shelter. She wasn’t sleeping or eating. Eventually, she was drinking again, “from the morning until I passed out,” she said. “Then, doing it again the next day.

“I completely lost myself. I resigned my job. I stopped paying my bills. I got evicted. I was prescribed anti-depressants. I noticed taking the pills and drinking got me out of the emotions. So I found myself in a dangerous place very quickly.

“Again — several trips to the ER (for overdoses). I’m not sure why I wasn’t ever held there. In my down periods, I would tell myself it would just be better off if I was gone.”

In 2008, a friend at Fort Hood, Texas, connected Velez with the Tragedy Assistance Program For Survivors (TAPS), a resource for anyone who suffers the loss of a military loved one.

“That was the first time anybody had offered to help me with the depression and the grief.” she said.

'Family units breaking down'
Kaufmann, who lost three Army-spouse friends to suicide, argues that military-family suicides should be tracked and researched by the Department of Defense to help mental-health experts begin to slow or stop the problem. She knows, however, such an accounting is not likely. 

“I get the sense that people in the military think that by including families into this kind of discussion — particularly when you’re talking about the (broader) mental-health impacts on family members — they look at that as something that will only add to the problem. Whereas, we believe that it would prove to be a solution,” Kauffman said.

“We’ve approached this very myopically. More than half of soldiers are married. Soldiers come with families. And the military has a maddening way of both dismissing families and holding them accountable at the same time. It’s frustrating for us, not only when we’re trying to get our husbands help, but also when you have the family units breaking down,” she added. 

NBC News requested to speak with officials at the newly formed Department of Defense suicide-prevention office about the issue of suicides within military families and whether tracking is needed. A DOD spokeswoman said, however, that the office is only working to address active-duty suicides. The interview request was not granted.

Van Dahlen, meanwhile, believes that asking DOD to track military families is an unreasonable expectation to place on the agency when it already is facing budget cuts.

Even if the DOD wants to — and many of my colleagues there desperately would want to devote resources to this — those resources are not going to be there,” she said. Rather than putting "the screws to DOD" and doing "even more with even less," Van Dahlen believes public-private partnerships should be encouraged "to figure out how we can (address) this together."

'Like an airborne disease'
More than eight years after Freddy’s combat death, and more than six years removed from Andrew’s suicide, Monica Velez annually runs the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C., in honor of her fallen brothers.

Matt Slocum / AP file

Monica Velez cleans her brother's name, engraved in a memorial at Fort Hood, Texas.

But, now living in Austin, she acknowledges she still struggles with what she calls, “those thoughts.”

“There are days I’m still overwhelmed. And if I sit and think about it, I feel like I wouldn’t have to live through all this pain if I just let myself go. It doesn’t just go away. But you learn how to cope. You learn better coping skills,” she said, adding she gained those tools from TAPS.

Army officers at Fort Hood have occasionally asked her, she said, for ideas to help them prevent the rising military suicide rate. She watches that tally, too.

“The numbers take my breath away. I know it can be overwhelming for the Army generals on the other end of the table trying to figure this problem out. Because it’s like an airborne disease going through the building and you’re trying to figure out how to stop it before it gets to you," she said. 

“But it’s coming at a really fast rate, and it’s inevitable.”

Related stories:
Military suicide rate set record high in 2012
The enemy within: Soldier suicides outpace combat deaths in 2012
Some wounded vets shine on 'Alive Day,' others wear black 

A worldwide inspection of U.S. Air Force facilities uncovered more than 631 pornographic movies, videos, DVDs, posters, magazines and other material that were either stored on computer servers or displayed in common areas at bases, according to a report released Friday. The hunt also found 31,585  other instances of "unprofessional" and "offensive" material -- including some that was racially insensitive, it said.

The  search and report come on the heels of allegations that sexual misconduct is rampant within the Air Force and mounting complaints from Congress and women's groups that the service has tolerated a "culture"  of disrespect for women. Other branches of the U.S. military have been the subject of similar complaints.  

Maj. Joel Harper, an Air Force spokesman,  confirmed that criminal investigations have been launched into some of those responsible for the material and said that some personnel may be subject to possible court martials. All the pornography and offensive material has been either removed or destroyed, Harper said.

The purpose of the inspection was "to send a message that this type of stuff is not acceptable in this day and age," Harper said. "Some of this was clearly inappropriate."

Mattel

The 'offensive' material seized at Air Force bases around the world ran the gamut from hard-core pornography to a 'Ken' doll clad only in swimming trunks.

An especially high number of improper materials were found at the Air Education and Training Command in Texas, which includes Lackland Air Force Base, the report said.  More than 30 instructors there are already under investigation for sexual misconduct—including allegedly sexually assaulting trainees --  and the issue will be a subject of a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee next week. Among the material found at the command on common computer drives, according to the report, were 144 pornographic posters and graphics -- including some "glorifying suicide" and "racial" in nature -- and 13 videos at showing "sexual images" as well as "killings and torture." Another video removed from the command was entitled "Achmed the Dead Terrorist."

Material found and removed at other bases included Maxim magazines "with scantily clad women in provocative poses"  and photos of a "clothed lady performing oral sex" and a "female in tank top with beer bottle between breasts," it said. Other less explicit material, deemed less serious but still inappropriate,  included a shirtless photo of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and a “Ken' Doll dressed only in swim trunks."

The worldwide inspection of all Air Force bases was ordered last month by Gen. Mark Welsh, the service’s Chief of Staff, who directed commanders to “document and remove as contraband” any material they deemed “unprofessional or inappropriate” – defined as “detrimental  to a professional working environment” as well as “lewd, obscene or pornographic images or publications.” Harper said it was up to individual commanders to determine what constituted “inappropriate” materials.

Welsh acted after Jennifer Smith, a technical sergeant at Shaw Air Force Base, filed an administrative complaint alleging "systemic and intentional sexual discrimination" against women in the Air Force. Smith, a 17 year veteran of the Air Force, told NBC News that she found highly offensive and "disgusting" pornography stored on computer servers and in songbooks at the base -- as well as some that she said were stored in classified vaults.  

"I have served just as long and just as hard as any male has and for them to put that type of pornography out there was degrading," she said.  

As the numbers  of women serving in the military has increased over the years, it has led to mounting complaints of rapes, sexual assaults and other misconduct. The Pentagon estimated that there had been as many as 19,000 sexual assaults against members of the military in 2011, and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta vowed  vigorous action to attack the problem. 

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