Ramstein air base in Germany experiences potential incoming missile scare | Hacker News Reader

Ramstein air base in Germany experiences potential incoming missile scare

thedrive.com

146 pointsSEJeff85 comments

I live in Kaiserslautern, which is right next to Ramstein Air Base. I just want to say I find it somewhat strange—unsettling even—that I hear about this for the first time from an article I happened to find on HN, but not the German national alert app, local news or even social media.

I wonder if that means, that, well, the system works. There wasn't an incoming missile strike: part of the early-alert system sounded and another part -- a much more human part -- interrogated the data further and decided to not declare a loud alarm that could have potentially severe consequences. And, well, no missile strike came.

No, the article recounts the base sending out a live warning to base personnel.

If you've sent an alert to the soldiers on the base, you've decided the warning is genuine, so the conclusion must be that they don't inform the surrounding areas as soon as they've accepted a warning as accurate.

> No, the article recounts the base sending out a live warning to base personnel.

More precisely, it said "After the strike never materialized, the sprawling installation's command post put out a notice stating that "the missile launch was then assessed to be part of a training exercise" and wasn't deemed a threat to the base"

> If you've sent an alert to the soldiers on the base, you've decided the warning is genuine

Or that you are checking. It may be a false alarm, in which case you will at least get a test of your readiness drills, which may find bugs in the process. Sometimes better to start getting ready while there is still time, and then stand down. Rather than wait until it is too late.

Look, you got to read the whole thing, and don't ignore the bit that says: "The Command Post followed proper procedure and provided timely and accurate notifications to personnel in the Kaiserslautern Military Community"

Why does everything have to be about pointing fingers and blame? The fact still stands: There wasn't a public alert. Your comment adds nothing more to the discussion than writing "RTFM!"

Idk if it's different abroad, but some bases send out alerts for silly reasons. I used to visit a base that required everyone who was logged in on a computer to confirm they were still save every time there was a lightning strike near base. So during thunderstorms you'd have to confirm multiple times per day that you haven't been zapped to death

I don't think it's clear in the article if the initial alert was sent out manually or by an automated system. The first mention of it sounds manual, but then later it sounds like it may have been automated, since they're trying to move the blame down one level to whoever initiated the training exercise that caused the alert.

I don't think the training exercise refers to one executed by the US (or its allies).

> If you've sent an alert to the soldiers on the base, you've decided the warning is genuine,

Or you potentially decided that the threshold for warning the base is much lower. Because in the worst case, you've just had an unannounced missile drill that's good for response times anyways. If you're on a military base, having a few such alarms per year seems like reasonable training.

If you do this to civilians, by the second alarm of this sort they'll start figuring out how to make the alarms stop.

> Or you potentially decided that the threshold for warning the base is much lower.

This is really the correct point of view for this. In the military, being horribly inconvenienced and having your plans ruined is normal life. We often had unplanned drills of various types in Japan, with no forewarning. You do your job, wait a while, then they announce the all clear and you go back to life.

However, the one or two times people messed up and alerted the local Japanese government, it was a HUGE deal. Heads rolled, people got punished, and apologies had to be written.

> However, the one or two times people messed up and alerted the local Japanese government, it was a HUGE deal. Heads rolled, people got punished, and apologies had to be written.

That's absolutely correct in my experience. The cover-ups extend to things like accidents involving nuclear weapons, of which there have been many.

It's fair to say that the host countries play along in most cases. If there's no public disclosure of problems the host country government does not have to do anything about them.

To be fair, there is a significant delta between “we saw a radar blip and went to high alert” and “we lost a nuke for a while”. I’d only call one of those a “coverup” if they didn’t tell anyone.

Clearly, though there have been many more nuclear-related accidents than public records show. False alerts were also pretty sensitive back when I was in the military. Most of them were not even shared internally at the time.

Having worked on a military base for years, they will go into a state of high alert over next to nothing. I think installation commanders simply figure that since everyone affected has already agreed to be part of a military installation with the ups and downs that brings, it's fine to err on the side of caution and activate security procedures for anything that comes up. It can be mildly annoying when you find out you're locked in because someone found something suspicious somewhere, but hey, you're working with the military. For the military, behaving as if they are under attack is part and parcel of the organization.

You don't alert the press until you're pretty damn sure, though. Military bases can already have stressed relationships with their communities and they don't need to be starting a panic over every change in the FPCON.

That, and military bases only work if they’re capable of coming online and responding effectively, quickly. Having a hair trigger to go on high alert is also a deterrence measure, since any potential opponents know you’re likely to respond at the first sign of trouble.

There actually was a very loud alarm. From memory it was about 9:30am this morning (technically yesterday). One can hear the alarms on the base from Kaiserslautern fairly easily, though normally they are just drills.

I don’t know about you but the alarm I’m hearing is that Kaiserslautern needs its own hacker news meet-up :-)

That's what I'm seeing :-)

Greets from America.

There's a lot of us here due to the University. I know some of them personally.

Interesting. Are you on the west side of town? I was stationed on Ramstein and lived in downtown Kaiserslautern. My place was about 15 km from the main base, which is pretty far to pick up sounds. I don't recall hearing many aircraft, even though we were only 12km from the east end of the runway.

I'm on the west yes. But you don't hear planes? It's a constant conveyor belt, even across the city!

Not sure why we didn't hear them--maybe just tuned them out at some point because it was already so loud on base. What I do remember is seeing lots of C-5s landing at night. I used to ride my bike home via Einsiedlerhof, and the road goes right under the flight path. It was like seeing a lit-up piece of the sky break off and and return to earth.

> but not the German national alert app

You are in a way complaining about not getting a false positive. Surely, if you had received an alert when nothing happened, you would take the next alert less seriously.

But if they don't get that false positive, it'd not be weird to assume they also wouldn't get the true positive (or at least not as early as the people living on the base).

Of course not, it means that there was an additional check before sending out a massive alert which prevented a false positive.

If it's a nuclear attack, I'd rather not be warned. It's not going to be single missile, so let's get it over with. Plus, it's almost guaranteed to be a false alarm.

If it's conventional, it's not going to be targeted at the entirely unimportant city but at the base. Even if it hits the city, it won't affect more than a small fraction of it.

You didn’t happen upon someone on an island playing with a remote controlled Pterosaur did you?

They might be able to get you a helicopter ride to NORAD, so you can stop it.

US defence planners: "Attacking with all nukes as soon as we get a warning of an enemy launch is the only rational way to use these weapons"

US missileers: "I'ma wait a bit to see if maybe it's just Joyce that forgot to update the spreadsheet today before destroying the world"

Fortunately this sort of common sense was shared by Russian soldiers too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...

There are rumours about automatic Russian system Dead Hand which is supposed to launch hidden nuclear missiles automatically if everything is lost. It’s horrifying to think about bugs in that system.

From what we know, supposedly Dead Hand is usually switched off except in times of crisis, and it has humans in the loop that turn the launch keys, along with repeated attempts to contact the Kremlin.

In my mind it makes things safer because there's less pressure to launch a counterattack before any missiles actually hit - revenge will be had.

Which also shows the danger of escalation: If the other side is on high alert because there's an ongoing crisis, the risk of civilization-ending mistakes are much higher.

While in the US, there are people furiously arguing for having ICMBs in silos that you have to launch as soon as you have a warning because if the nukes are coming for the silos the nukes will be "wasted".

But this fact that the silos will be targeted and destroyed is actually a feature because it means it's North Dakota that gets to become a wasteland and that's not really a bit of the US you care about, or so the reasoning goes. The nuclear sponge they call it (the ICBMs silos needing to be targeted by enemy nukes, not North Dakota proper).

This line of reasoning (which is absolutely logical) is why hard target capability for nuclear weapons has a lot of dramatic consequences.

If your silos can largely survive an enemy missile, and retain the ability to launch, you can wait for more information to come in.

If you silos are expected to be wiped out, say, because the US re-fused their warheads [0] to increase the probability of a silo kill, then it's use-it-or-lose-it with a 15 minute decision time.

[0] https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni...

Nuclear subs on the other hand will continue to exist and can launch. Why you’d want to us another matter - so your country has just been turned to glass. Why bother retaliations, it’s not going to get your country back, it’s just going to make it worse for any of your citizens that survived.

The enemy has to know you will launch no matter what or you don't have a deterrent.

Vengeance is one of the basic human behaviours. It does not have to be rational.

Yes. There's a lot to be said for that.

The USSR's later leadership didn't want to give the Premier the authority to start WWIII. That authority belonged to the Politburo, and, having gotten rid of Stalin, those who had power after him didn't want that much power in one person again.

Hence the Dead Hand system. The Premier could activate that in an emergency. All it really did was, if Moscow was destroyed, and the Premier's bunker wasn't communicating, and the General Staff bunker wasn't communicating, was start a timer of several hours. If nobody in authority checked in during that time, it released the launch codes to regional commanders, who could then decide on their own what to do. So a lot of people could stop a retaliatory strike, and no one person could start it.

The USAF's SAC had the actual info needed to launch missiles in the hands of SAC commanders, a much weaker system. While General Power was head of SAC, the arming codes for the missiles themselves were set to all zeros. This was not known by the civilians supposedly overseeing the US military.

It is probably airgapped, running on vacuum tubes and sprayed with DEET as part of regular maintanance.

Cool, now I figured where Dune 2's Death Hand [1] got its inspiration from.

[1] https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Hand

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort

I want to read one of these...

must be a hefty paper shredder on those subs given the revolving door at 10 Downing last few years...

It's not rumors, I saw it from official sources a few months ago that they upgraded it to version 2.0

I don't remember much, just that there need a lot of unresponsive sites before the dead hand would be activated (don't quote me, but the Kremlin, submarines, satellites and a few bases stations should all be unresponsive for it to trigger).

I've thought a lot about this and I am pretty sure this is propaganda to further the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine, and that no nation would launch nukes except when directed by the highest authority. There would be no difference in efficiency of MAD, since it's all about what the adversary thinks. I am sure people smarter than me have gamed this out and evaluated the risks of launch under false premise vs risk of non-effective deterrant.

It’s much worse. You should read the book “The Doomsday Machine; Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.”

Funny how every once in a while a great fraction of our lives is saved by some individual's second thoughts LOL

Theres a buch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls

And seems to one missing where there was a test message sent as a real one to a US commander.

And likely more than here we'll never hear of.

There's a great 1995 movie called Crimson Tide which explores this further.

I heard Russian missiles in Kaliningrad can reach any place in Poland and Lithuania. I wonder how did they managed to keep that piece of land surrounded by ex-soviet republics that are basically not very fond of Russia to say the least.

Very easy, Baltic republics were in no way capable of waging war right after the independence, let alone get out with any hope of territorial gains.

And historically, USSR always been placing military members from ethnic minorities into weakest, and most "cannon-fodderry" military units, predominantly foot infantry, and motorised.

Even ethnic Russians from more far away places were likely never to see any advanced military hardware.

Thanks. That was an honest question. No idea why I got downvoted multiple times.

Depends on the ethnic minority - the USSR had very fine-grained distinctions between "reliable" and "unreliable" ethnic groups. For example, Armenians (because of their hostility to NATO-member Turkey) were very much allowed into combat units, which gave them their enormous advantage against Azerbaijan in the early-90s wars. Ukrainians and Belarusians were also considered part of the "core" USSR ethnic groups.

Whereas the Baltic states were only conquered in 1940, and were considered extremely unreliable.

I guess Ukrainians could be named "core" USSR ethnic group but Ukrainian Insurgent Army had an ongoing war against Soviets actively during 1942–1949 and sporadically up until 1956.

Sure. But the Red Army certainly trusted most Ukrainians enough to integrate them into elite combat units.

Because they likely would have pulled a 'Ukraine' on Lithuania if it came to that.

although Lithuania is both in the EU and NATO which would make it a very different proposition

It is now, but it wasn't always so.

Well the fact that Kaliningrad is part of the Russian federations means that they did pulled an Ukraine on Poland and/or Lithuania.

I'm not an expert and by any means I'm giving opinions here but I thought Crimea, South Ossetia and Abkhazia were territories were Russia at least has an historical or cultural excuse to claim. Again, not that I agree on those claims. On the other hand Kaliningrad was never part of Russia. It belonged to Poland and then to Germany. It was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1945.

I guess the reason Kaliningrad exists is that Poland and the Baltiks were in no means to fight for territory and Germany doesn't care.

It was directly annexed into Russia during the war when the various states didn’t exist in a meaningful way, and was ethnically cleansed.

The other territories vary... iirc Crimea was subject to a treaty in the 90s, etc. End of The day the relative power imbalances and international interest tend to rule the day.

It was never part of Poland, unless you're going waaaay back to the Teutonic knights. Even then, it was controlled by an ethnically-German ruling dynasty with its power base outside of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, similar to Normandy in late medieval France.

In the aftermath of WWII, Germans in East Prussia were expelled, and the territory was split 50/50 between the USSR and Poland. No state other than Germany has a pre-WW2 claim, and they formally renounced that claim in the final peace treaty around 1990.

Kaliningrad's original population was German. After WW 2 the red army displaced them, and Stalin settled ethnic Russians in the city. So unlike the areas around it, it's truly made up of Russians.

After the collapse of the USSR, none of the states around Russia were in any condition to confront the Russian Federation itself. All of the little post-Soviet wars were among the smaller Republics.

"Anywhere in Poland or Lithuania" is a 500km range. Probably half the world's militaries could launch missiles that far, plus some non-state actors - of course it's in range for Russia.

The land originally belonged to Germany, who made a vow to never expand their borders beyond a certain eastern point after reunification. So only Russia really had a claim to it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Final_Settlement...

Kaliningrad was annexed into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic ie. Russia proper end of WW II. Any surrounding countries literally would have had to start a war with Russia to occupy it.

Possible technical question: how do people detect missile launches? Do they scan the skies? Do they have sound/vibration pattern detection? Satellites?

Update: In the article I see: "Still, we have no idea what early warning system triggered the alert. America's infrared early warning space-based sensing layer stares at the earth from many vantage points in orbit day and night. Historically, it provides the initial warning of a ballistic missile launch via detection of the missile's hot boost-phase plume. These satellites, especially the newer ones, can also detect a greater variety of infrared events, as well, including artillery fire, aircraft crashes, smaller missile shots, and even the launches of cruise missiles. "

I was wondering the same. Still not sure how they detect whether that is incoming or just flying to a different destination?

I guess once you detect a launch you start tracking systems and making guesses, if you see it heading towards a particular direction, alert anyone in that direction. Once you get a decent trajectory, alert more specifically.

According to reddit (1), it was part of an exercise and there was a mistake with accidentally issuing a non-exercise alert.

(1) https://www.reddit.com/r/AirForce/comments/kblzkx/only_at_ra...

For a detailed video describing the Aegis Ashore missile defense system that protects Ramstein go here: https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/aegis-combat-s...

And some deployment history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegis_Ballistic_Missile_Defens...

This reminds me of when Hawaii had that "false alert" of an incoming nuclear missile and it was supposedly just a user error.

False alarm due to Geminids?

These are all Russians hackers who compromised a control panel on the base! Russians have an agreement with Trump to srart a local nuclear war in EU, to postpone Biden's inauguration in January.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com