The missile world has, historically, had a strong tendency to discourage questioning of the status quo. Someone questions whether we really need to do things a certain way, and they get told some variation of "it's that way because it's always been that way" or "stop complaining and suck it up, you're in the military" and now they've got a reputation for being a troublemaker. Point in case: a few years ago at the club, someone raised a concern to a local commander about a certain new policy that had been implemented, that was widely seen as unnecessary and cumbersome to the crewforce. Rather than address the concern, his response to this was to ask everyone at the table how long they'd been in the Air Force, then told all of us that he had more time in the AF than all of us combined and that he thought it was a good idea, so deal with it.
And, over time, the people who have bought into the status quo get promoted, get command, and perpetuate the cycle, and the people who questioned it get disillusioned and get out. (There's exceptions, but that is largely the way it goes.) As a result, we have numerous leaders that don't listen to or address our concerns, but instead tell us to shut up and color and report up the chain that everything is fine. So if I were LtGen Wilson and I really wanted to know what was going on with the ICBM crewforce... I'd be bypassing the chain too, because nobody's going to say anything honest if they think there's any chance their commander will find out they said anything negative to a higher-up.
It's going to be interesting to see what people end up saying when the fear of retribution is removed. When the CSAF/SECAF were making the rounds a couple weeks ago, they met with the junior CGOs separately from our leadership - and from what I've heard, the junior CGOs gave them some very candid opinions about certain commanders and the cultures they promulgated.