I can see being cautious on the approach and asking them out of the vehicle while you and your guys figure out what’s going on, but there’s an awful lot of “mights” and “coulds” in there to be immediately treating them as violent criminals. I’ve been in their shoes before, in far more dangerous grounds than Wright-Patterson AFB, and I’m not understanding why there’s apparently zero on-site judgment being used. It sounds like they reverted to some battle drill and didn’t bother analyzing the situation beyond what some database told them.
Anyone in the military who’s had to sit through getting their paperwork updated in S1 should know you can’t trust a database any farther than you can throw the SAN that hosts its data.
If they were being treated as violent criminals, there would be a passage in there about how they were thrown to the ground, a knee placed on their back, were cuffed behind the back, and held down until the matter was resolved. If that had happened, I think the poster would have chosen to excerpt those parts of the article.
It sounds to me like a lot of discretion was used here, and this family was treated a lot better than somebody would have been if they looked more like your typical violent criminal. But discretion only goes so far. If you are on a military base in what is presumed to be a stolen vehicle, you can expect to be handcuffed.