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Juice should be worth the squeeze

  • Published
  • By Lt. Col. Michael Paston
  • 305th Aeromedical Squadron commander
MCGUIRE AIR FORCE BASE, NJ. --  I find it inspiring to read about Airmen serving and succeeding at taking risks while exemplifying the highest standards and traditions of bravery and courage. This is an essential ingredient distinguishing others from Airmen. However, teaching risk taking must be balanced by an ability of all Airmen to accurately calculate the amount of bravery or courage required. In other words, they must calculate the cost of failing. In fact, many examples exist today of Airmen succeeding through calculated risks. 

General T. Michael Moseley recently started the "CSAF's Portraits in Courage -- Airmen in the Fight" series. This series highlighted 15 Airmen displaying valor, honor, devotion and selfless sacrifice. They all showed bravery and determination, against formidable odds, and as the CSAF said, "At our core, we realize that while technology distinguishes our service, it does not define our service. Courage defines our service." 

Because courage defines our service, we must educate Airmen on how to accurately balance and calculate realistically the real chance harm may result. I realize many believe courage is a virtue one is born with, but I believe courage is like health. You can be born with it, but with exercising you can strengthen it. As suggested by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way -- "you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions." 

Teaching others courage means teaching them to take risks that threaten harm physically, emotionally -- or when one volunteers for a job with more responsibilities. Because risk is everywhere, if we as leaders teach our Airmen to take risk, we need to carefully consider what allows one to properly calculate risk and to ask if it is always worth the cost to reduce the risks we face. Why? If we reduce risks completely, how can courage and bravery be taught? As a physician, I have counseled what kind of diet would make a patient healthier, but most patients refuse to eat that way. It's easy to see that people are notoriously bad at risk assessments. Much research has been done to learn why people are bad risk assessors. Researchers have discovered many reasons why people skew the ability to assess the likelihood of a successful course of action. Two of the most common ones are when you have a sense of control over an event and when the choice can have a dramatic outcome. 

A sense of control over the event gives the impression an event is not risky. For example, it's much harder to get a teenager than an older person to take long-term dangers like smoking seriously. We go skiing and skydiving, but fear asbestos. This sense of control lowers our appreciation for the risk, quickly turning a brave act into a bold act of stupidity. 

The more vivid, dramatic or exotic the risk the more dangerous it seems compared to the more familiar ones. This second reason also leads to miscalculated bravery. 

Imagine for a second, cigarettes are not harmful -- with the exception of an occasional one that has been packed with explosives instead of tobacco. These dynamite-stuffed cigarettes look just like normal ones. There's only one hidden away in every 18,000 packs -- not a grave risk. The only catch is, if you smoke one of those explosive cigarettes, it will blow your head off. Given such a situation, cigarettes would surely be banned outright. After all, if 30 million packs of cigarettes are sold each day, an average of 1,600 people a day would die in gruesome explosions. Yet the number of deaths is the same to be expected from normal smoking. The total expected loss of life or health to smokers using dynamite-loaded (but otherwise harmless) cigarettes over 40 years would not be as great as with ordinary filtered cigarettes. 

Every Airman is expected to act with courage and bravery and think in terms of the danger, but also to accurately calculate the risks. That's character. Each of the highlighted 15 Airmen in the CSAF's Portraits in Courage exemplify this balance, a balance adhered to by all Airman who acted with courage. This character is what President George Bush referred to at the Air Force Memorial Dedication, "Victory in this war depends on the one thing that has not changed since the founding of the Air Force six decades ago -- the courage of the men and women who wear the Air Force Blue."