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Comment by Cu3PO42 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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 :-)

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

That's what I'm seeing :-)

Greets from America.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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

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!"

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).

> 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.

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