Nukes, Rifles, and Spies: Assessing Risk

there's nothing quite like opening up your email one morning to find a calendar invite for mandatory training after breathing a sigh of relief that it's not on diversity it's still one of the most boring subjects that the modern workplace is required to drone on about risk management but despite pretty much every workplace being required to read from some HR pamphlet risk management is a pretty useful topic to understand these days but instead of using the example of Timmy and his forklift incident let's start by talking about nuclear weapons the detonation of a nuclear weapon is generally considered to be the worst thing Humanity can experience allegedly and this situation helps us understand this here chart I know that this image may be traumatic for some of you but for those who have not yet been exposed to this chart this is basically risk management in a nutshell along the top we have consequence and along the side we have likelihood depending on the company or agency you might see these be expressed as severity and probability here's how this works you think of an event and think about How likely that event is to happen on a scale of 1 to 5 then you think about if that event does happen how bad will it really be again on a scale of 1 to five you plug that into the chart and find your risk level this chart here assigns a number to each block but that's not really necessary to understand the basic concept of how this works so let's work through an example being killed by a vending machine the chances of being killed by a purveyor of delicious snacks is extremely low but never zero however if you do get killed by a vending machine you will be well dead so on our chart here the likelihood is way down at the bottom but the severity is way over to the right resulting in an overall risk assessment of medium now the corporate world is really about stressing risk mitigation for instance if you are a brick layer the chances of a brick falling and hitting you on the head might be like a three but the severity the damage it will do to you is a five because it might kill you so based on the chart does this mean that we shouldn't ever become a stonemason no because we can mitigate this risk by wearing a hard hat which reduces the severity and means that the brick might not kill you outright which reduces the overall risk let's try another example suffering the gastrointestinal distress that comes from eating Taco Bell if you eat Taco Bell the chances of this happening are extremely high but in a grand scheme of things the consequence of this decision is pretty low this is pretty important to think about and highlights the importance of getting the analysis right when you are begging for death a few hours later it's going to seem pretty severe however we must be careful to see things as they really are otherwise Taco Bell will have a higher risk factor than global thermonuclear war and speaking of the end of the world as we know it let's talk about this block over here this is where most of the prepping Community lives and breathes over the past couple of years the prepping Community has gotten a lot better by stressing the importance of the everyday emergencies that are are a bit more likely but for the most part the bulk of the prepping and gun communities reside here I myself like to think of this by what I call the 99% 1% rule which I would like to claim as my own idea but I'm fairly certain someone else thought of this first but I can't remember where I read it anyway here's what I mean if an event is astronomically unlikely but not impossible I am minimally prepared for the 1% chance that that thing might happen but if there is a more than 1% chance of something happening I will take deliberate preparedness measures this is really my own way of thinking about incidents and events that are going to really just reside in this block only most of the scenarios that we prepare for in the prepping Community fall in this category things like global thermonuclear war or a chemical weapons attack is extremely unlikely but the severity of the event when or if it does happen is extremely high when you get to some of the more Fringe events that might appear on this risk management chart you really kind of have to think about them not in terms of the chart itself but you have to add in something like the 99% 1% rule that I mentioned to more accurately explain what's going on and to really more accurately think about and prepare for some of these events this is why many people carry guns most people are not going to be involved in a gunfight but they concealed carry for that 1% chance that they might be however if I'm going into a situation where the chance of being involved in a gunfight is over 1% I'm going to be carrying a rifle and plates not just a concealed carry pistol in this example there are very few situations where I might need to quote plus up my defensive weapons capabilities without going to a full combat load if I lived in Ukraine perhaps that wouldn't be a bad option Ed seeing a rifle and a couple of mags if Society allowed that sort of how Israeli troops operated before current events if we set aside the man-made Horrors and atrocities Beyond comprehension and just look at the doctrine and facts I've always personally kind of liked the idea of carrying around a full-size rifle with one or two mags just in case this is the kind of plusy up of defensive tools that isn't really possible in the US at the moment we've seen what happens when you decide to go out to an event and say you know what maybe I need to carry my AR because it's going to be a little bit more dangerous we've seen how these events play out and it doesn't end up very well for the person who makes that decision on most days we're prepared for the one % of situations by concealed carrying but for me if there is a situation that is going to require me to start EDC a rifle everywhere in America's culture climate my risk assessment chart tells me that we're talking some apocalyptic level event that's going to require a whole lot more than just a rifle and I'm really not going to be so concerned about social norms anymore War gaming scenarios in your head is fun and all but this risk management Matrix stuff seems pretty boring right well it turns out this process is really useful in the world of military intelligence and spycraft in general some of you might have recognized that this is basically the core of the Carver technique which we have talked about before the Carver technique helps us to look at our position or organization and determine what Vector of attack is most likely what stuff is the most vulnerable coupled with How likely it is for an enemy to know about that vulnerability it's a bit more complicated than the standard risk management Matrix but it's a quick and dirty way to assign a number to risk and figure out where you should allocate defensive resources pretty handy if you were given the task of Defending a position but only have limited resources to do so that's right by changing the chart slightly we can take that boring HR presentation and use it to help us predict when and where a terrorist attack will occur that's a bit more useful than using it to fill out paperwork correctly the major differences between human resources and the world of intelligence lies with risk mitigation in the real world of kinetic situations we cannot really mitigate all risk sometimes we cannot mitigate the risk very much at all this is why the dudes who took a beach trip in 1944 have a whole day to remember them if those dudes had to fill out a risk management Matrix before that ramp dropped no one would have ever left the boat in the world of corporate HR if we ever get close to that black box over here we probably won't be allowed to do whatever we're proposing but for the average citizen living in our modern times sometimes we have to take extreme risks anyway knowing that it might be fatal coming back to the everyday prepping world we can also use risk management to help us determine what gear to buy instead of posting to Reddit and hoping for the best you can determine what your highest risks are and if you use the Carver technique as well you can get a better idea of your own vulnerabilities for me I like to use the risk management chart the Carver technique and the whole 99% rule thing to determine how much to spend on a battle rifle setup if I were to just shout my opinion on the internet most people probably wouldn't care but if we do some science my own personal decisions make a lot more sense so let's theorize for a minute and take the whole budget rifle debate there has been a lot of talk about companies like PSA who serve as the people's Armory offering okay rifles at rock bottom prices there's the same debate with basically every piece of tactical gear should I go with the budget option or should I buy once cry once what gear is worth going with a budget option and what gear should you never compromise on at the risk of having things thrown at me I think the general consensus is that things like night vision and body armor are some of those don't compromise options as of right now in 2023 there are really not any budget night vision options that are worth buying for serious use body armor is a bit more debatable I guess but the ultimate debate lies with rifle should I get a budget rifle optic light laser whatever or should I save up and get the best of the best for me my own risk management data results in me nearly always going with the budget rifle options to a degree and here's what my data indicates I will put this on the screen so there is no confusion if a defensive situation arises that would require me to use a rifle instead of just a concealed carry pistol the chances of me surviving long enough to reap the benefits of a top tier rifle setup are astronomically low what is far more likely is my rifle to be required to function for a low round count before being confiscated afterwards for investigative purposes therefore my own risk assessment indicates I should not prioritize a top tier rifle and instead go with a more budget but still moderately capable setup to be even more clear this doesn't mean that I should go with options that are so cheap as to be unsafe however it does mean that you will probably never see me rocking Daniel Defense I would like to but my own data suggests it's not worth it but again this is just me this is my own analysis I work behind a desk most days I am not a gunfighter by profession and even within my community if I am relied upon to strengthen the north wall things have gone spectacularly wrong so wrong in fact that it's unlikely that I will be returning to that desk job and will instead become an infantryman for what will probably be a very short time sometimes or rather most of the time the prepping or tactical world doesn't really take into account Doctrine or thought processes like this most of the time you'll have anecdotal evidence or a general theory to work from when choosing gear but most of the idiots on Reddit don't really know the why behind certain gear choices and really only repeat what they've heard anecdotally before usually from the context of a US military experience and not anything from the International Community risk management the Carver process and other structured analytic techniques change the way you think about a problem and allow you to challenge pre-existing ideas this gets you out of a rut of just copying what the latest influencer was paid to endorse look at the Ukrainian War and the hundreds of case studies that conflict has given us look at domestic US legal statistics engage your own chance of success in the American legal system these days and finally think about your preparedness efforts and all those survivalist post-apocalyptic fantasies you have floating around in your head and use a process like Risk Management to figure out what is really just a fantasy and what is actually a genuine Real World Concern most Espionage work in the real world is indistinguishable from boring paperwork most case officers are basically HR reps this is why a lot of the boring paperwork stuff that is done in many white collar jobs fits so well within the world of spycraft 99% of the time it's filling out risk assessment paperwork but 1% of the time it's death defying acts of sheer Terror and most of the time it's the boring stuff like risk assessment that turns the tide for or against the clandestine tacticool operator for the rest of us who are not so cool this process also helps you really think about those really rare preps like should I buy a gas mask or should I dig a bunker in my backyard it really helps to bring a bit of structure and objectivity to what has previously been just a cheap version of a tactical role-playing game that doesn't factor in enough data to be useful and creates one heck of a case of tunnel vision by limiting decisions to just a handful of parameters it's 2023 and self-improvement is the name of the game Risk Management can be really helpful for keeping on the right track and it's a great way to make sure you're not just going down the bottomless money pit of jumping from one tactical fad to the next so give it a try and think outside the box taking into consideration modern events that have become Trends you can apply more structured techniques and really challenge some long- held beliefs in a constructive way this helps us focus on what really matters having capabilities when others do not and using alternatives to fighting that will help us survive another day in today's world we need every little Advantage we can get that will help us to fight in the shade