Doctrine on Risk: When is the juice worth the squeeze? Are we risk adverse? Does risk adversion kill?

Aversion to risk is the enemy of initiative. If you don't have initiative, you are on the defensive, and probably losing. Risk aversion breeds timidity, indecisiveness, and complacency.

Most people think of assuming risk as a factor of safety. Safety in the military is a relative thing. But risk also boils down to where a leader commits manpower, scarce resources, training dollars, and perhaps most importantly, the leader's time. He can take steps to stretch a dollar or delegate tasks, but ultimately it comes down to risk taking in order to focus his effort on critical functions that his staff and subordinates can't do.

My own example:
When I was a new 1SG, I had very specific ideas for how my company should be trained. So the first Annual Training I led, I controlled nearly all aspects of training, planning each task, resourcing, and reviewing training plans in detail. Not to mention all of the stuff in my traditional role as First Sergeant. It went pretty well, but I was smoked. There was no way I could have sustained that level of involvement more than a few days.
The next year, I implemented a collective model where I would give one team at a time a collective task such as ECP operations, and the Sr NCO would develop a plan to train and evaluate all the individual and sub-collective tasks for that event. I would supervise the rehearsal and receive their back brief, offering suggestions for enhancements and offering resources as needed. It was a spectacular success. The NCOs on the team got quality experience planning and executing complex and realistic training, and I got to supervise with repeated excellent opportunities to develop my Soldiers.
I just had to learn to let go. When I learned that, my unit grew in confidence and competence in leaps and bounds.

The cycle for Risk Management is part of the problem. We are risk adverse to the point where we are not will to accept moderate risks in training and end up accepting catastrophic risk in combat if we are to accomplish the mission.

IMHO, the greatest risk reducer is proper training. Because of the volatile nature of combat, being able to cope with surprises is one of the most effective combat multipliers that exists. Thinking through a process from start to finish also provides us the tools to adapt when things change, best laid plans of mice and men... We train resiliency, initiative, and cognition. After that, everything falls into place and we trust our small group leaders to get the job done.

Ike put it best: "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of "emergency" is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning."

We, as military professionals, need to weigh risk vs. benefit. But it's our job to ensure we do the appropriate level of planning to give the decisionmakers, whether O-6, flag, or political, the levels of risk a certain plan may have.

The problem, IMHO, is that there has become a politicization of what we do to such an extent, that particularly after a decade + of ops downrange, we are creating leaders who are risk averse. Averse to having the rose pinned on us as "having made a bad decision," averse to potentially being fired by our superiors, and worse yet, averse to having to stand up to the court of public opinion and the press, whether or not it is warranted, or even has an ounce of truth.

It's a commander's (or any supervisor's) job to make those hard decisions. The right decision, while difficult, is never wrong. While it may meet with resistance or "institutional inertia," you can never go wrong for making the right decision for the right reasons. THAT, my friends, is how you can go to sleep every night and not have a worry on your mind.