Risk, Fear, and Radios

hello again everyone and welcome back to the under today I wanted to take a little bit of a departure from the standard way of doing things and just have kind of an informal chat about a very very important topic or at least something that I think is very important and that is the idea of fear and risk management looking around the world today there is there's a lot of fear there's a lot of people scared about a lot of things and whether we want to realize it or not it's really hard to escape and it's more than just like being afraid of spiders or being afraid of Heights or something you know that causes a more physical response a lot of the fear that we live in today manifests itself in very very subtle ways ways of impacting things like Risk Management when it comes to letting fear kind of cloud your judgment so to speak when it comes to risk management you'd be hardpressed to find a situation that where this is more the case than with radios so when it comes to Communications the concept of risk management really kind of goes out the window window in favor of trust me bro and a lot of backyard science which is not always a bad thing uh we always have to remember that when it comes to biases a lot of times biases are not necessarily a bad thing but they are representations of our own experiences so we must remember that when someone tells you about their experiences that may not necessarily be a bad thing even though it may look like what all the academics tell you is bias but despite this when it comes to radios specifically there's a lot of talk on things that will get you killed and you absolutely must not do this or if you're doing this wrong you are uh you're you're just going to die right and you're not going to find that in a lot of other communities maybe the gun world but really when it comes to you know radios this is where we see a lot of the dissenting opinion and because a lot of this Doctrine has to be developed for the civilian world uh mostly by guys who were probably in the Army at some point and they're taking and and and cutting and pasting that logic they used in the Army into the civilian world where it doesn't necessarily fit 100% a lot of the time this is a problem because it skews our concept of risk management and it allows fear to get a foothold into what we're doing and that's a problem because even though we may not want to admit it being absolutely convinced that a radio or a tactic is going to get you killed is probably not the best way to look at things because let's face it war is a pretty dangerous place this is why the concept of risk management is so important because we have to be able to mitigate these risks and be able to take risk that is acceptable and we have to understand that it's not just about one radio or one tactic it's about a blend of everything because War rarely waits for the prepared and a lot of times in fact most of the time you're going to have to make doe with what you got sometimes this means you're going to have to accept an unacceptable level of risk so we're caught in kind of a quandry aren't we if if we work through the basic risk management process assessing the risk judging what mitigation efforts we can undertake to make things a little bit better and to reduce the overall risk going through the very very basics of this process sometimes when we do this we find out that there's really no way to mitigate any of the risk uh Sometimes the best we can do is just hope for the best and that's really no good plan right but a lot of times we we let fear impact the assessment part and we let fear downplay the mitigating part in fact if we were to use the risk management Matrix to kind of assess our risk and to try to mitigate some of that risk that we you know assume based on the choice of radio that we have I guarantee you that your risk management Matrix chart is going to tell you that you can't use a radio at all that you might as well use an Amish Communications plan nothing that takes a battery no signal whatsoever take your watch off right every single signal is going to kill you right that's exactly what your risk management Matrix is going to lead you to believe but as a leader and if you're taking on a leadership role you cannot accept this you have to accept the risk at some point you're going to have to do dangerous things if I had a comm's guy on my team and his solution to everything would be to just not use radios at all go back to smoke signals or something then obviously that's not a that's not a good solution right if I have a comms guy on my team and he is correct about every single possible thing he's saying if he has gone to all the courses he's read all the books he's an engineer he understands how all of this works and yet his solution to everything is just don't use radios don't communicate at all just be absolute you know River City right absolute no signals whatsoever then even if he is correct as a leader I'm going to look at him and say this dude's too risk averse to get the mission done and I'm going to replace him that's just a fact of the matter even though he was correct he's going to get fired because that's not how the real world works I spent a good part of my professional career trying to bridge the gap between the engineers who have no people skills and Leadership who doesn't understand that certain things will actually probably be very bad for them to do so you have to remember and this is something the radio guys forget a lot of times personality matters your conduct your professionalism matters a lot too I have never met more condescending people than in the radio world and this is something that turns off a lot of new guys to the field of ham radio but it's also a huge problem in the Tactical radio world too condescension is going to get people to not listen to you especially in a field where the average person has to rely on Experts to be able to break things down for for them and help them understand what this actually means because radios are not easy for the average L person to understand and this is really really hard for a lot of people to understand and it doesn't make it right it doesn't make it ethical it doesn't make it you know a Kumbaya moment right when you're right and you're right in every possible way but because you cannot convey that in a way that makes people want to listen to you it's all for not right you can be the most correct person in the world you could have every document backing you up in your opinion but if people don't want to listen to you because you're an then there's no real reason for having any of that knowledge if you can't convey it so as we can see everything from personalities to actual leadership skills and or at least leadership attempts can play a direct role in Risk Management it's really really easy to sit back on a high horse and say I Told You So when you made no effort whatsoever to help prevent a bad situation from happening man we talk about it all the time right we talk about leadership not listening to you know warning signs and things like that but if you actually read things like investigation reports you realize that the person who issued all the warnings no one liked and they were constantly crying wolf about some risk that was mitigated as best as it could be then the accident happens or somebody gets killed because of something trivial people look back at the investigation say ah they were warned well were they really did anyone listen to them because they had been such a jerk the entire deployment so far they may have been right but were they able to have even the basic fundamental skills of being able to convey an idea to another person in a non-condescending way personalities matter and it really really is a huge problem the radio world faces today and unfortunately it's a great illustration of how risk management can sometimes be very challenging so what do we do I mean what's the what's the whole point of this right I guess the bottom line is to take things in stride do the best you can and realize that you just cannot you cannot eliminate all risk living as a prepared citizen today in America you can't even really mitigate most risk the things you can do are very few and far between in a grand sense right especially if you're trying to be decently capable no matter what the situation is times are pretty tough and uh it's only going to get crazier as we get into the 2024 season and we have to really really really have to get out of this influencer style culture of you must do this you must purchase this or you're going to die we have to get out of that mentality because it's just not true okay the Ukraine war the Afghan crisis what's going on in Israel and Gaza right now this stuff is disproving an awful lot of those Warfare manuals that uh We've we've really just treated as as the gospel for so long it turns out the Warfare is pretty nasty it really is and I don't think that anyone should openly wish for it because it's some pretty horrible stuff all the way around and we should also be very very very cautious in using a lot of the doctrine that was developed by a nation state to Target a largely civilian populace right that's what most of our counter Insurgency Doctrine is is meant to to take on right it's meant to be a a counterinsurgency style of warfare we've talked about this before you know um whether or not you believe we're in a fifth generation Warfare space or if we're still in you know like a a fourth generation counterinsurgency mindset it's up to you I don't really care how you define it what's quite obvious though is a lot of the uh Warfare Doctrine and and Publications and and ways of doing things are just not there we can talk about small unit tactics all day long right we can talk about comms and radios and we can talk about even things like risk assessment we're really in Uncharted Territory a lot of the time I myself am absolutely ecstatic when I see a lot of the development and a lot of the work that's being done in the prepared citizenry space if we want to call it that to help rewrite a lot of this ideology and a lot of this Doctrine when it comes to stuff like even basic Warfare stuff to the concerns that we might have moving forward it's not all always about war right getting food and water is challenging enough keeping your job is even harder and on top of that I would be absolutely thrilled to be disproven on something by a prepared citizen or a group of prepared citizens who can come together to provide you know some empirical data that we can sink our teeth into and form like a you know citizen-based DARPA kind of thing that is great when I see that happening in in certain fields like field of radio man that's just that's just awesome but on the other hand it's also really disheartening when people say look you know you're wrong based on a textbook that was written 50 years ago on a different topic written for a different population and funded by the military industrial complex it's easy to get on the internet and say ah everybody's wrong but me it's easy to get on the internet and say oh well the Army is just stupid and everything they did was Dumb and I am the true warlord of you know making that's not real either you know that's not really the case you know egos get in the way most of the time anyway and uh it's really hard to convey and I'm really struggling these days to kind of put into words what I really think which is that everything is a balance that's the easiest way I can think to say it that's why I say it so often we have to stop going from one extreme to the other it's so so frustrating to see that and I'm honestly ashamed at at any misconstruing of what I've said in the past that may have contributed to this because look man it's not as simple as use a bow Fang and you're G to die likewise it also doesn't mean that buy a $5,000 radio doesn't mean you're going to survive either we've got evidence on either side right we've got Russian generals using battle F thingss in Ukraine you know is this a good idea well probably not like I mentioned generally speaking probably not because well just for just a tiniest bit more funding you can actually get a you know a lot more capab abilities you know a lot more bang for your buck but at the risk of going down the radio and comm's rabbit hole too much it's just super frustrating because this is just a perfect exemplification of how risk management has gone ay a lot of times and a lot of times it's just the it's just the way that people react to things everyone seems to fall into their little camps and their little ideology like pigeon holes and I see so few people so few people trying to take a strategic view of things right how much small unit tactics content is on YouTube it's a lot a lot of it almost every guy who was an infantry guy at some point has done some kind of small unit tactics or weapons something on YouTube and that's perfectly fine we need a lot of that content but how many generals how many Colonels how many full birds have gotten out of the military and said you know what I'm going to do a series on leadership for the average person yeah sure there are a few and I'm grateful for everyone that we can get but yeah sure every Colonel and every General out there has written their own book but to be honest they all mostly read like Mad Dog mattis's Ghost riter got a hold of it so it's not really geared towards a prepared citizen but geared towards another General putting it on a boot Lieutenant's reading list and pissing off some Sergeant somewhere because a lieutenant read a new book and now they have to deal with that for the next month at the end of the day fear is not always a bad thing right fear is what keeps Us Alive sometimes keeps us from uh making some mistakes it keeps us on our toes it keeps us situationally aware on a primal level right if we remember basically every leadership book that has ever existed we know that courage is not the absence of fear but the ability to operate with it and to overcome it and do it anyway even though you were scared right this is easier said in the pages of a book than it is done in real life I can assure you but as we move forward as we come into very strange times we're going to have to start realizing that the solution of there are no Solutions is not a solution if that makes any sense whatsoever someone who comes up to me and tells me all right there's no way of doing this safely well guess what we still have to do it now we still have to do the best we can and this is not a license to just go willy-nilly and do risky things because you know S2 said so that's not the way this is that's not what I'm saying what I am saying is do your best assess the risk as best you can mitigate it if you can you know in retrospect I realize that a lot of people are going to be quite confused as to why this matters so much so much so that I've made an entire video dedicated to it but really I'm just trying to head off a lot of issues that are probably going to come up in the very near future not just with me but with others as well man I can tell you as we start to get into more doctrinally questionable things because there's really no evidence to back up a lot of this stuff that not just myself not not even really me it's just other people I see you know getting stomped on because somebody read an army manual 50 years ago and they think that they're an expert this is garbage this is trash and unfortunately people don't see through it a lot of times they just don't they think that because someone's got a pedigree in the US military or even the you know Special Forces Community dare I dare to criticize them they think that they're the experts and they think that they are better than everyone else and that their opinions on things are the only things that matters this seems Petty doesn't it it seems very just trivial and it seems like just some internet-based garbage but here's the problem when you're trying to build a community people are watching these videos they're reading these books they're W they're reading this content and the average citizen out there who doesn't really have a community around them starts to feel a certain way about things I didn't want to talk about this stuff I really didn't but it's become a problem and I can see it becoming more of a problem in the future so I'm trying to use things like risk assessment and risk management as a way of encouraging people to think about what they're doing and to who they listen to I know a lot of people out there consume our content who are alone or with a very very small group and because of that that's always in the back of my mind when I'm either writing something or the team here is helping me record something or I'm trying to get to the bottom of some kind of doctrinal quandry you know and I think about that a lot I think about that every day about the people out there who are who email me and say look man I'm I it's just me it's just me maybe maybe one family member but by and large it's just me what can I do in this situation you know and because I I really do feel for a lot of people in this situation uh I really do feel like it's my mission to help these people out a little bit more than everybody else you know what I mean because I think we've all been there at some point and um it's not fun it really isn't and I think that people who don't have a group of people to bounce ideas off of sometimes sometimes not always but sometimes fall prey to the internet Logic on a lot of things and it's just perhaps not the best way of of going about doing things teach a man to fish and all that right instead of going under Reddit and hoping for the best so hopefully this has been helpful for some of you out there I knew that I have a really really bad habit I guess of talking about issues that either one nobody really cares about or only appeal to very small group of people but uh and I know that these days I'm not as ConEd as I used to be and I'm a lot more verbose at times most of the time but hey you know we're doing the best we can I guess um even I myself I'm struggling dayto day just to make sense of what the heck is going on out there I guess my main point is really just to set expectations for the future and hopefully encourage some outside the box thinking because I can tell you no one can debate this that we're going to need the outside the box Solutions for a lot of the problems that we face not just in the United States but around the world and I have great hope I have great hope that we can meet these meet these demands I have great great hope and I'm very optimistic that we can actually overcome a lot of these issues as we move forward into the next few years it's going to be tough and uh a lot of us aren't going to make it but I feel very confident in the age-old phrase that you can do anything you set your mind to and if the man who says he can and the man who says he can't well they're both right so let's get after it let's keep our heads on straight let's if we have to get outside take a look at the sky take a look at the grass look at some trees and maybe you'll find that uh you get a new perspective on things sometimes so thank you all for watching thank you all for putting up with my random ramblings and we will see you next time and as always fight in the shade