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.