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AP: Air Force military and civilian chiefs sacked.
Updated: Wired's Noah Shachtman has the backstory:
... Despite reports you may be reading elsewhere, this firing was not about nukes or missiles, well-placed sources say. "Far and away the biggest issue was the budget stuff, not the nuclear stuff. The UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] fight, the F-22 deal... Gates really didn't appreciate it," one of those sources tells Danger Room. Now, with the botched missile and nuke shipments, "the SecDef [Secretary of Defense] has good cover to do something that suits him bureaucratically."
"The problem seems to be a philosophical difference between Gates and the USAF [U.S. Air Force], not anything to do with nuclear weapons," another adds. And Moseley and Wynne may not be the last to go. Rumors are swirling of more top-level Air Force officers getting the axe. Stay tuned.
Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin said in a statement: “Secretary Gates’ focus on accountability is essential and had been absent from the Office of the Secretary of Defense for too long. The safety and security of America’s nuclear weapons must receive the highest priority, just as it must in other countries. The Secretary took appropriate action following the reports of the Defense Science Board, the Air Force’s own internal review, and now most recently, the report of Admiral Donald showing that the underlying security of our nuclear weapons has been degraded."
Update II: A former senior Air Force officer comments:
The firings of the senior USAF leadership are long overdue, and are the direct result of its senior leaders having betrayed the Core Values that they had hypocritically instituted and reinforced in the post-Cold War era.
Ironically, as the Air Force's operational capability has increased exponentially since 1991, the ethics of the USAF leadership have simultaneously 'gone down in flames.' The nuclear safeguard firings are just the latest in a series of USAF scandals that included the dismissal and demotion of the top Air Force JAG for serial adultery; the Boeing tanker lease scandal; officially sanctioned fundamentalist Christian zealotry at the Air Force Academy; and one of the top colonel JAGs in the Air Force having served for 20 years as a disbarred attorney.
Sadly, while the USAF's line airmen have delivered excellence, its senior leaders have repeatedly betrayed the institution and their subordinates. The now-fired General Moseley was made Chief of Staff only after having been protected from accountability for a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan in which two USAF F-16s mistakenly bombed Canadian soldiers, largely due to command and control failure at Moseley's headquarters. Moseley threw a USAF colonel commander who tried to defend the pilots under the bus in order to save his own career.
The USAF leadership debacle is the end result of having shifted from "To Fly and to Fight" to Madison Avenue hype.