Acceptable Risks and Risks Which Must be Accepted

The Army, along with the rest of American society, is continuing to grow progressively more risk-averse with every passing year. In a military environment, of course, a certain amount of risk must necessarily be accommodated in order to achieve the mission, whether it be in a combat environment or the more controlled context of a training base. Certainly nobody likes the idea of losing soldiers to accidents during training, but there comes a point when obsession with safety in training leads soldiers into more danger on the battlefield, if their coddled training fails to adequately prepare them for real dangers. We've certainly come a long way from our grandparents' generation, when hundreds of soldiers died in what were widely considered successful training exercises in preparation for the D-Day invasions.

I say all this as a sort of pre-musing leading up to some field training exercises I'll be participating in a few weeks from now, and which I rather expect to be something of a dog-and-pony show. I guess we'll find out.