Companies dealing with confidential information generally have data disposal policies in place, why do government organisations dealing with World security not have tight policies regarding disposal of decommissioned hardware?”

Well in the 1st place, I used to work directly with a similar project. The entity isn’t government at all and the only oversight is 1 to a few Military (i.e. air force) officers who generally don’t have anymore knowledge of security then the average ground slug. Their primary mission is SAC and are thrown into other “related” programs based on their job/skill. These jobs, in this case related missile test technology really isn’t their forte’ so there isn’t a miiltary oversight.

This being the case, this incident actually happened with Lockheed Martin…a “PRIMARY” missile defense contractor..but it could have just as easily been any other contract company since they’re all about the same (Raytheon, Boeing, CACI you name it). They have a few guys (in their mis-management structure) that are overseeing several million to multi-billion dollar projects and have teams that work in the field, on the actual mission/facility or location where this work is conducted, this could be 100s to 1000’s of miles of way from any kind of oversight from management or any other corporate staff. In this case, Kwajelein is 1000’s of miles away from the mainland U.S. where everyone knows now they tested THAAD.

They might be, in this case, This group tasked with doing the removal of equipment and disposing of it, MOST lack the proper equipment and procedures (nearly non-existant) to conduct it properly.