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Training Safety

A Leadership Imperative

 

Maj. Dylan Lee, Singapore Army

 

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Of the 19,378 deaths suffered by the U.S. military from 2006 to 2021, 76 percent occurred outside combat scenarios during non-overseas contingency operations and 32 percent of total deaths were due to accidents.¹ As the U.S. Army prepares for large-scale combat operations, the rising scale, complexity, and tempo of operations across the globe are expected to further surge training demands and increase training safety risks.² Whereas most scholarly and professional military attention focuses on analyzing how new operational concepts and military modernization efforts meet these demands, the role of peacetime training safety as “a form of force protection, and an enabler for mission success” is often neglected.³ Indeed, militaries and their leaders not only have the moral obligation to uphold peacetime training safety but must also regard it as a key imperative that impacts operational readiness, given its outsized influence on any military’s ability and will to train effectively.⁴ Yet, leadership is the most vital but the least researched of the numerous factors that influence training safety, ranging from individual “operator errors” to system failures at the organizational level.⁵ As such, this article will explain why leadership is the critical factor in promoting peacetime training safety, which is essential for militaries to achieve both safe training and operational readiness simultaneously.

Definition and Literature Review

To set the foundations for this article, we must first define training safety and provide an overview of existing research. “Safety” is often defined as the “absence of harm.”⁶ However, because only the complete absence of risks can guarantee absolute safety, such definitions are less useful in the military context, which is inherently risky given that militaries wield lethal force in training and operations.⁷ Rather, it is more useful to regard training safety not as a static standard but as a constantly calibrated goal pursued by military leaders who exercise professional judgment. In pursuing training safety, military leaders aim to maximize the operational benefits of training while minimizing the inherent risks of doing so.⁸

Existing literature on training safety provides a useful starting point for understanding the relationships between training safety and training realism, and how best to balance both seemingly antithetical imperatives. For instance, the bulk of military training-related literature focuses on the need for training to be realistic, since training serves to prepare soldiers for combat. Accordingly, professional organizations like the U.S. Army’s Combined Arms Center and scholars like Bernard Loo correctly advocate for military training to closely replicate the realities of prospective combat environments, thus ensuring that soldiers can train to be as technically and tactically proficient as possible.⁹ That said, Nick Turner and Sarah Tennant posit that routine training usually entails militaries accepting lower levels of risk, given reduced urgency during peacetime to subject soldiers to the inherently dangerous conditions of war.¹⁰ Making a broader point, Dov Zohar and Orly Tenne-Gazit frame the need to balance risks with realism and readiness as a tension between safety and mission accomplishment, which they argue are “competing operational demands.”¹¹ While existing literature is certainly helpful in highlighting the popular dilemma between training safety and realism, this article will refute this dichotomy because it is a counterproductive way for leaders to frame and achieve both training safety and operational readiness.

This raises the question, what can leaders do to attain both imperatives simultaneously? Literature that links military leadership to training safety exists, but only two studies explore this relationship in depth. The first study, authored by Mats Börjesson, Johan Österberg, and Ann Enander, explicitly discusses the role of leadership in training safety, which explains the need for leaders to model their personal commitment to safety, make judicious decisions on how to prioritize safety and risk, and engender positive attitudes toward safety through coaching.¹² The second was by Paul Cheak, who raised three points of note. First, he argues that leaders are instrumental in enforcing systems that uphold safety standards. For example, leaders implement systems of punishments and rewards to mitigate what Trent Lythgoe terms the “normalization of deviance,” thus preventing militaries from entrenching poor safety practices as an acceptable pattern of behavior.¹³ Second, Cheak argues that leaders must constantly review safety management processes in an exercise of double-loop learning to ensure that these regulations’ underlying “assumptions, norms, policies, and goals” remain fit-for-purpose.¹⁴ Interrogating the premises of safety practices prevents safety standards from devolving into blindly followed checklists.¹⁵ Third, Cheak advocates for leaders to inculcate a safety culture that encourages each team member to understand how best to strike the balance between “risk-taking and safety.”¹⁶ This provides a more lasting method of ensuring training safety in dynamic environments that lack prescribed formulas to manage unpredictable situations.¹⁷ Indeed, these studies provide valuable recommendations for military leaders and contextualize the findings of broader workplace safety-related studies to the military context.

Broader discourse on the relationship between leadership and safety is typically nonmilitary related, as part of the overarching operational health and safety field. For example, Earl Blair argues that a compelling leadership vision that prioritizes safety is key to engendering a strong organizational safety culture; in contrast, Tsung-Chih Wu, Chi-Hsiang Chen, and Chin-Chung Li advocate coaching as a key instrument to enhancing safety climate and performance.¹⁸ However, even when taken collectively, current literature inadequately explains the role of military leadership in training safety. Operational health and safety-centered recommendations are helpful but are not contextualized to a unique military environment that deals with lethal force. While the studies by Cheak and Börjesson, Österberg, and Enander explain what leaders can do to improve training safety, they do not sufficiently explain why leadership is the foundational factor for safe and realistic training. Military leaders cannot fully appreciate why they are decisive in balancing the complementary desired outcomes of training safety and operational readiness without understanding deeper rationales underpinning their roles in training safety. To address the gap, this article posits that military leaders must understand their pivotal roles in providing “direction” and “purpose”—two key elements in the U.S. Army’s definition of leadership—to guide the pursuit of peacetime training safety.¹⁹

Leaders Must Explain What Training Safety Is

The first imperative is for leaders to create a shared understanding of what training safety is. Army Doctrine Publication 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession, states that leadership requires leaders to provide “direction,” which communicates a leader’s desired end state to align efforts toward a common mission.²⁰ Because training safety remains a poorly understood concept, leaders must first define what training safety as a desired outcome actually entails before explaining why training safety is important. As Turner and Tennant argue, there is a difference between the acceptable risks during routine training maneuvers vis-à-vis combat.²¹ While most practitioners accept this, there nevertheless lacks an established method to analyze and understand the relationship between training realism and safety risks. Given this, the figure proposes a novel safety taxonomy for leaders to align their and their teams’ understandings of training safety. This establishes the foundation for leaders to build lasting commitment toward shared training safety outcomes.

Referencing the figure, which is a risk (above the horizontal axis) versus realism (below the horizontal axis) scale, risk decreases from left to right, as does the realism of one’s training experience. The rightmost limit of the scale represents the absence of risk, which Cheak explains as an untenable—and undesirable—possibility for operationally ready militaries, since militaries can only achieve zero risk without training.²² Instead, leaders should focus on differentiating among the remaining three distinct but often confusing terms: (1) operational realism, (2) operational safety, and (3) training safety. Indeed, leaders who fail to differentiate the three terms are more likely to encourage their teams to pursue counterproductive outcomes while distracting their teams from focusing on the critical factor they should weigh their effort toward: training safety.

First, operational realism describes real-world combat environments that entail engagements with a live opponent and therefore begets highest risk. During peacetime training, an example of operational realism is a force-on-force live-fire exercise against an opposing force outfit that reciprocates with live rounds. While unavoidable in conflict and combat, such levels of realism are unacceptable in peacetime. After all, no leader should place their soldiers in life-threatening situations unless absolutely necessary. Yet, inexperienced and less reflective leaders often misinterpret well-intentioned studies that enumerate the virtues of conducting training in as realistic an operational environment as possible. Often, these leaders emerge with the expectation that pushing training close to such extremes is desirable. Hence, leaders must understand that training should never aspire to reach the limit of operational realism. This ensures that military leaders set appropriate goals and thus avoid the potentially deadly consequences of pushing training realism too far.

Second, operational safety differs from operational realism as it discounts the effect of enemy action. Operational safety stands for the operational standards that all soldiers are expected to execute in combat. A peacetime training example is to destroy a moving tank with an antitank weapon while accounting for risk factors like weapon backblast and vehicle blast radius in a tactical environment, albeit without retaliatory fire from the opposing force vehicle. It is the theoretical limit of live training realism without incurring the risks of force-on-force action, given that it is the standard we expect soldiers to safely execute their mission essential task list. Yet, would the above scenario also not entail too much risk? Should soldiers really be allowed to fire live antitank weapons at moving (albeit unmanned) tanks at night in poor visibility without any external intervention from training controllers while other troops are in close proximity to them? Indeed, while operational safety exemplifies a desirable level of soldiering proficiency, it entails unacceptably high risks in peacetime. This renders it an unrealistic training goal that leaders should avoid pursuing unless an urgent operational need calls for it, and even so, only if robust risk mitigations are put in place.

This leads to the third concept—training safety. As defined earlier, training safety is the ever-shifting balance between training risks and acceptable levels of training realism during peacetime. On the one hand, it can shift leftward along the risk-realism scale toward operational safety, thus making for more realistic but riskier training. On the other hand, it can slide rightward toward minimal or no training, which is less risky but counterproductive for operational readiness. Numerous factors result in the level of acceptable training safety fluctuating, ranging from individual leaders’ risk acceptance levels to political guidance and public pressure. Yet, far from being challenging to influence, the level of training risk that a military accepts and the level of training realism it achieves is often a direct consequence of leaders’ tactical actions. This includes whether leaders enforce adherence to training safety standards, decide to take unnecessary risks, or inculcate too much gung ho in their teams’ cultures that jeopardizes the balance between risk-taking and safety. The more leaders build strong safety systems and cultures to enable the safer conduct of risky training, the more likely militaries can gradually shift training safety leftward toward increasing training realism while preserving training safety. As such, leaders must understand training safety as the only variable in the risk-realism scale they can influence at all echelons to promote a more optimal balance between training safety and operational readiness.

For completeness, it is important to acknowledge that technology allows troops to train at a level of force-on-force realism beyond the theoretical limit of training safety (i.e., operational safety). This includes training in live, virtual, constructive, and gaming environments and using simulations to preserve training outcomes while reducing risks.²³ Nonetheless, the point holds—without understanding training safety as the primary variable in the risk-realism scale that leaders can influence, leaders will likely continue shaping their teams toward undesirable outcomes (operational realism) or unrealistic goals (operational safety). Leadership is an irreplaceable cog in training safety because only leaders who are clear of the desired end states can align their teams toward desirable training safety goals. To do so, leaders must first clarify misconceptions among the three aforementioned concepts before inspiring their teams to pursue shared training safety outcomes. In turn, this allows leaders to engender lasting buy-in by explaining why training safety is important as operational and strategic imperatives.

Leaders Must Explain Why Training Safety Is Important

After establishing a common understanding of what training safety is, the second imperative is for leaders to “provide clear purpose for their subordinates” and create commitment to the shared goal of promoting training safety.²⁴ Without understanding why training safety is critical, shared goals will only last as long as leaders prescribe they do, without which individuals may revert to poor entrenched safety practices. Leaders must therefore explain the importance of training safety to create what Gene Klann described as a lasting, proactive, and intrinsic dedication to this shared goal within their teams.²⁵ Specifically, to inspire a long-term and organization-wide embrace of training safety, as Alan Deutschman explained, leaders must understand how to frame the impetus for change in a manner that resonates with their teams.²⁶ In this case, leaders are critical because only they can stimulate a shift in their teams’ mindsets to one that embraces training safety as both an operational enabler and a strategic necessity.

The first way for leaders to reframe training safety is by presenting it as an operational enabler rather than an impediment to operational readiness. Often, a false dichotomy exists between training safety and operational readiness, where pursuing one is deemed to diminish the other.²⁷ As the figure suggests, the real trade-off is between risk and realism, where lower levels of realism may not degrade training effectiveness if the training is well-designed (e.g., deliberate after action reviews to codify lessons learned). Making a broader point about safety, Luis Andrade explained that “safety and mission do not have to pose a conflict of interest.”²⁸ Singapore’s former chief of the Army, Maj. Gen. Goh Si Hou, advocated a similar mindset and framed safety as an “operational capability” that allows units to preserve combat power if prioritized as a planning factor akin to force protection.²⁹ In peacetime, safety also increases “soldiers’ will to fight” and train, since prioritizing safety allows them to focus their efforts on training hard without worrying that self-created safety breaches may potentially jeopardize their survival or cause injury.³⁰ Leaders who frame training safety positively encourage their teams to regard the habits accrued through safe training as a desirable mission enabler allowing them to perform dangerous and lethal military tasks more safely and confidently. Conversely, leaders who frame safety as an operational impediment condemn their teams to aspire toward undesirable or unrealistic training outcomes. Given these, leaders are key in framing training safety as an operational imperative that can enable mission success.

The second way for leaders to reframe training safety is by presenting it as a strategic necessity for all militaries in peacetime, all-volunteer and conscript-based ones alike. Conscript-based militaries are understandably sensitive to affective public and political support for conscription. Without popular support, conscription—and defense—is compromised. For example, public support for the South Korean and Taiwanese militaries declined after several high-profile training-related military deaths in the past decade. They became at risk of feeding their adversaries’ perceptions that they are militarily unwilling and unable to defend themselves.³¹ Even in all-volunteer militaries, public trust and adversary perceptions of a military’s ability to conduct operations effectively also depend on their ability to conduct it safely and without incident in lower-risk peacetime environments.³² As Louis Hicks aptly states, “Families, communities, and the military itself seem to find accidental casualties even more horrifying than the more ordinary, enemy-inflicted variety.”³³ Hence, safety (or lack thereof) is strategic as it can rapidly erode public trust in the military.

Beyond diminished perceptions of operational readiness, eroding political and public trust in one’s own military also compromises strategic national resilience, a deterrence strategy adopted by large and small states alike. For instance, the 2022 U.S. National Defense Strategy defined resilience as a whole-of-nation “ability to withstand, fight through, and recover quickly from disruption.”³⁴ Singapore’s Total Defence strategy seeks to deal with threats and deter aggression by demonstrating the entire nation’s capability to withstand and defeat pressure in six domains—military, social, psychological, economic, civil, and digital defense.³⁵ Both the U.S. and Singapore’s strategies require the nation to rally around their respective militaries to project a more holistic defense posture, which is critical in a threat environment where adversaries increasingly target states using multiple instruments of national power (e.g., information campaigns and sabotage of key infrastructure before a military invasion).³⁶ In such circumstances, militaries should add to national resilience rather than diminish it through safety-related erosions of public trust. In turn, leadership is critical because only leaders can effectively inspire their teams not only to safeguard trust in the military but also continue to strengthen it by training realistically and safely at the same time. Leaders play an irreplaceable role in training safety because only leaders can frame safety as an operational and strategic necessity, thus promoting ownership of training safety at all echelons as an individual responsibility that every soldier must own and uphold.

Conclusion

Training safety is a constantly calibrated balance between risk and realism, and it seeks to maximize the operational benefits of training while minimizing its risks. A common refrain is that militaries’ risk tolerances swing to opposite extremes of the risk-realism scale like a pendulum whenever safety incidents occur and whenever anxieties have abated, with the cycle repeating itself in perpetuity. Strong leadership is required to break this pattern because only leaders can effectively create a shared understanding and appreciation of what training safety really is and why it is operationally and strategically critical to all militaries. Leadership provides direction and purpose for a well-informed and constructive safety culture to percolate through the military, thus explaining why it is the critical factor in promoting peacetime training safety.

 

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Notes

1. Hannah Fischer, Trends in Active-Duty Military Deaths from 2006 Through 2021 (Congressional Research Service, September 2022), https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF10899.
2. Jeffrey Farnsworth and Matthew Lewis, “Evaluating the State of Army Safety,” Army Aviation, accessed 2 July 2025, https://armyaviationmagazine.com/evaluating-the-state-of-army-safety/.
3. Paul S. F. Cheak, “Safety in the Singapore Armed Forces – A Study of Publicly Reported Incidents from 1965 to 2020” (PhD diss., Capitol Technology University, 2022), 112, ProQuest (29061777), https://www.proquest.com/docview/2662752459?%20Theses&fromunauthdoc=true&sourcetype=Dissertations%20.
4. Dylan McDonald, Robin M. Orr, and Rodney Pope, “A Comparison of Work Health and Safety Incidents and Injuries in Part-Time and Full-Time Australian Army Personnel,” Journal of Athletic Training 51, no. 11 (2015): 880, https://doi.org/10.4085/1062-6050-51.10.12; Cheak, “Safety in the Singapore Armed Forces,” 111–12.
5. Louis Hicks, “Normal Accidents in Military Operations,” Sociological Perspectives 36, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 378, 380, https://doi.org/10.2307/1389394.
6. Cheak, “Safety in the Singapore Armed Forces,” 105; Steffen Kaspers et al., “How Does Aviation Industry Measure Safety Performance? Current Practice and Limitations,” International Journal of Aviation Management 4, no. 3 (2019): 229, https://doi.org/10.1504/ijam.2019.10019874.
7. Cheak, “Safety in the Singapore Armed Forces,” 107, 110.
8. Cheak, “Safety in the Singapore Armed Forces,” 107.
9. U.S. Army Combined Arms Center (CAC), Enhancing Realistic Training White Paper: Delivering Training Capabilities for Operations in a Complex World (U.S. Army CAC, January 2016), 3, https://api.army.mil/e2/c/downloads/426271.pdf; Bernard Loo Fook Weng, “Responding to the Tragedy of Military Training-Related Death” (S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, June 2008), 2, https://rsis.edu.sg/rsis-publication/rsis/1085-responding-to-the-tragedy-of-m/.
10. Nick Turner and Sarah J. Tennant, “‘As Far as Is Reasonably Practicable’: Socially Constructing Risk, Safety, and Accidents in Military Operations,” Journal of Business Ethics 91, no. 1 (January 2010): 25–26, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27749775.
11. Dov Zohar and Orly Tenne-Gazit, “Transformational Leadership and Group Interaction as Climate Antecedents: A Social Network Analysis,” Journal of Applied Psychology 93, no. 4 (2008): 745, https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.93.4.744.
12. Mats Börjesson, Johan Österberg, and Ann Enander, “Risk and Safety Attitudes Among Conscripts During Compulsory Military Training,” Military Psychology 23, no. 6 (November 2011): 660–62, 675, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08995605.2011.616815.
13. Cheak, “Safety in the Singapore Armed Forces,” 113–14; Trent J. Lythgoe, “Future Proof: How to Build a Learning Organization,” Military Review Online Exclusive, 14 November 2024, 3–4, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/military-review/Archives/English/Online-Exclusive/2024/Future-Proof/Future-Proof-UA1.pdf.
14. Cheak, “Safety in the Singapore Armed Forces,” 114; Lythgoe, “Future Proof,” 4.
15. Cheak, “Safety in the Singapore Armed Forces,” 114.
16. Cheak, “Safety in the Singapore Armed Forces,” 168.
17. Cheak, “Safety in the Singapore Armed Forces,” 168.
18. Earl Blair, “Culture & Leadership: Seven Key Points for Improved Safety Performance,” Professional Safety (June 2003): 20, https://aeasseincludes.assp.org/professionalsafety/pastissues/048/06/010603as.pdf; Tsung-Chih Wu, Chi-Hsiang Chen, and Chin-Chung Li, “A Correlation Among Safety Leadership, Safety Climate and Safety Performance,” Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries 21, no. 3 (May 2008): 309, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jlp.2007.11.001.
19. Army Doctrine Publication (ADP) 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession, 1-13.
20. ADP 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession, 1-13.
21. Turner and Tennant, “‘As Far as Is Reasonably Practicable,’” 25.
22. Cheak, “Safety in the Singapore Armed Forces,” 107, 110.
23. Cheak, “Safety in the Singapore Armed Forces,” 173; U.S. Army CAC, Enhancing Realistic Training White Paper, 9.
24. ADP 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession, 1-13.
25. Gene Klann, “The Application of Power and Influence in Organizational Leadership,” in L100: Developing Leaders and Organizations (U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 2024), 104.
26. Alan Deutschman, “Change or Die,” in L100, 173–74.
27. Dov and Tenne-Gazit, “Transformational Leadership,” 745.
28. Luis M. Andrade, “The Mission vs. Safety Struggle,” Risk Management Magazine, 4 February 2024, https://safety.army.mil/MEDIA/Risk-Management-Magazine/ArtMID/7428/ArticleID/7691/The-Mission-vs-Safety-Struggle.
29. The Singapore Army (@oursingaporearmy), “In his keynote address, COA spoke about six core ideas to strengthen safety in Our Army …,” Facebook, 6 March 2019, https://www.facebook.com/oursingaporearmy/posts/pfbid0vijGSrJSgU6vQAgYk7etK6tCPjM24WiSuhoEexxU7raXMsupvUDoQ1rUowSKxYvyl/.
30. The Singapore Army (@oursingaporearmy), Facebook, 6 March 2019.
31. Cheak, “Safety in the Singapore Armed Forces,” 161.
32. Hicks, “Normal Accidents in Military Operations,” 389.
33. Hicks, “Normal Accidents in Military Operations,” 389.
34. U.S. Department of Defense, 2022 National Defense Strategy (U.S. Department of Defense, 2022), 8, https://media.defense.gov/2022/Oct/27/2003103845/-1/-1/1/2022-NATIONAL-DEFENSE-STRATEGY-NPR-MDR.pdf.
35. Derek da Cunha, “Sociological Aspects of the Singapore Armed Forces,” Armed Forces & Society 25, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 460, https://www.jstor.org/stable/45346317.
36. Tim Prior, “Resilience: The ‘Fifth Wave’ in the Evolution of Deterrence,” in Strategic Trendes 2018: Key Developments in Global Affairs, ed. Oliver Thränert and Martin Zapfe (Center for Security Studies, 2018), 70, https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/317733.

 

 

 

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