Combat Credible Safety
By Col John B. Kelley, Air Mobility Command Director of Safety
When you consider the discipline of safety among all the other specialty codes and skills in the Air Force, how would you classify it? Is it a front-line operational skill like bomb loading, airbase air defense, or flying? Or is it a vital support function like food preparation, ground transportation, or finance? Is it tactical or administrative, forward or rear echelon?
I would humbly submit that safety fits in all those categories, especially on the front lines in combat. Safety professionals posit that proactive safety, reactive safety, and risk management are tremendous assets in wartime—preserving combat capability and capacity while aiding commanders in making risk-informed decisions. I would even go so far as to say a combat force well trained in safety and risk management may be as crucial to victory as discipline or experience.
Bold statements, I know. I wager many of you just let out an audible “huh!” and decided I have finally been to one too many safety conferences and are considering drafting a sharply worded retort calling into question everything from my logic to my choice of font. I am glad we don’t have a “Letters to the Editor” section.
To many Airmen, safety measures, such as personal protective equipment and fall-protection protocols, are, at best, a good idea but one that adds steps and slows execution. Those same Airmen may even admit to thinking some safety measures detract from morale and decrease the combat capability of the force. For these reasons, they say safety has a small and limited role in forward-combat areas. I can understand their skepticism. In fact, I shared some of their sentiments for years being deployed for OPERATIONS ENDURING FREEDOM and IRAQI FREEDOM. Some of the safety policies for living and operating in the deployed tent cities and forward-operating bases left me confused and questioning their efficacy.
The problem of employing safety or risk management principles and policies in the combat arena is part of the fundamental challenge in warfare: communicating the commander’s intent and understanding. If the Airmen do not know the “why” of a safety policy and understand the magnitude and severity of the risk, it is easy for the policy to be met with skepticism and applied in arbitrary or counterproductive ways. To illustrate this point, follow me on an expedition into the recent past (using your preferred time travel method: DeLorean, TARDIS, Time-Turner, or magic hot tub) to examine the troubled history of the venerable reflective belt.
The reflective belt we all love and collect is a fascinating product of both ancient and contemporary technology. The shiny bits that announce your presence to traffic and ruin flash photos are made from a material called retroreflective tape. Its unique properties congeal a half-century of advanced research and advanced computer-aided materials by American companies 3M and Avery-Dennison Corporation with light-reflecting principles developed by gem-cutters and jewelers over thousands of years to create the modern marvel we have today. The belts using this technology became inexpensive and widespread in the 1990s, when they caught the attention of military safety professionals attempting to lower the pedestrian mishap rate on installations. Historically, five Soldiers and one Airman were killed every year due to pedestrians being struck by vehicles. Further, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration found that nearly eighty percent of pedestrian fatalities occurred between dusk and dawn due to a lack of visibility.[1] It didn’t take long for service safety personnel to recommend the need for reflective belts for pedestrians near roadways after sundown to leadership. Your favorite risk-assessment matrix (the one you memorized to impress other safety folks) would certainly support the low-cost measure. Thus, it became policy for those Airmen and Soldiers out for a pre-dawn run on base to don reflective belts.
Then came 9/11 and the rapid force deployment to Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kyrgyzstan, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The use of reflective belts still made sense for Airmen running on roads at poorly lit locations “inside-the-wire” or at rear-echelon bases. You see, our safety and medical brethren at the time knew from the historical records of OPERATION DESERT SHIELD/DESERT STORM that injuries were more likely to occur from non-battle injuries (NBI) than combat injuries. And the leading cause of those NBIs was—you guessed it—automotive accidents in the combat theater.[2] Unfortunately, somewhere in the transition to combat operations, the common-sense recommendation for reflective belts while running on roadways after dusk became “Wear your reflective belt forever, always, everywhere, even indoors in the DFAC, your bunk, and the latrine!” Given the natural “saltiness” of deployed Airmen, the belts quickly became the subject of derision and mockery and spawned a culture of animosity across the internet (just search for “military reflective belts” or “belt of obedience” and marvel at the creative excoriation).
What went wrong? How did a common-sense safety recommendation designed to protect Airmen and ultimately preserve combat capability become a much-hated symbol of a leadership disconnect? Although a full answer might take a whole magazine to explain, my hunch is it comes down to a few things: safety/risk management’s relationship to the commander, the Airmen, and the mission. The severity of the risk, the specific mitigation, and the focus on maintaining combat-ready Airmen free from NBIs were lost in translation from safety professionals to commanders to Airmen.
To improve our approach as we collectively face the novel, pacing challenges in the Pacific, safety personnel must be mission-focused—using the language of warfighters to talk about using specific mitigations to reduce a hazard’s likelihood. The deployed safety team must be clear about risks and the specific recommendations to the command team. They should disabuse leaders at all levels so that risk mitigation can eliminate the risk. The execution of airpower has inherent risks; attempting to create a “perfect” environment or zero-risk culture leads to misapplication of recommendations and mitigations. Combat-minded safety professionals must also help leaders communicate the “why” to Airmen and teach them to think about risk mitigation for themselves and use that knowledge as a combat enabler.
A combat safety professional’s job is difficult, balancing the needs of preserving the force from non-combat losses, assisting commanders in understanding the non-combat risks to the force, and putting in place safety policies and mitigations that lower risk. When done right, Airmen know the value of the risk mitigations because they know “why” they are doing them. Furthermore, commanders know and trust safety personnel to advise them on preserving combat forces while acknowledging the danger of zero-risk thinking. At the end of the day, the deployed combat safety enterprise must be focused on the mission by keeping the force combat-ready through smart risk management and making all Airmen their own best risk-informed decision-makers. When we have done this, we have earned our place on the front lines. Aim high!
[1] NHTSA. n.d. “Pedestrian Safety.” https://www.nhtsa.gov/book/countermeasures-that-work/pedestrian-safety.
[2] Writer, James V., Robert F. DeFraites, and Lisa W. Keep. 2000. “Non-Battle Injury Casualties During the Persian Gulf War and Other Deployments,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 18 (3): 64–70.