Complacency Kills.
We’ve all let complacency get the better of us at times. After performing a task repeatedly with the same result, it’s natural to develop a complacent attitude. We take the outcome for granted. From there, we begin to develop patterns. These patterns turn into predictable behaviors. And we begin relying on these behaviors to exist in our day-to-day lives.
For the most part, these complacent behaviors are benign and not overtly harmful. Complacency can occur at home, at work, in relationships and in performing daily activities. Sometimes it leads to decreased productivity in the workplace. Sometimes it leads to taking a spouse for granted. And sometimes it leads to the inability to act or react in a life-or-death situation. The bottom line is that complacency never leads to anything good. But if you live a life of violence or work in high-risk environments, complacency can kill.
The special operations community attracts OCD individuals. We are obsessed with winning and know that the path to victory is laid in preparedness. Yes, a good plan never hurts. But plans go right out the window at first enemy contact. So we prepare for all sorts of possibilities with intensive training. Knowing that a plan cannot account for everything, we need to rely on a high level of training to react to problems.
For instance, what if we trained to hit a target and built a perfect mock-up of every floor of a structure based on architectural floorplans, only to encounter a wall where there should have been a door during the actual op? A remodeling update could stop the train for an unprepared team. A team that has rigorously trained and challenged itself by purposely adding “uh-ohs” to the thousands of hours in kill houses, helicopters, boats and so on will be able to flow right around the problem. But teams that have grown complacent by training only in their comfort zones are going to fall apart at the first sign of a problem.
Everybody likes to feel good about themselves. Winning feels great. But nobody ever learns anything from winning, because winning breeds complacency. If the team is used to winning in the shoot house because it stops at force-on-roleplayer and never moves to force-on-force, team members will become complacent in their tactics because they are not used to facing an opponent who wants to win. Winning every training day leads to a loss of critical and creative thinking that results in getting men chewed up because they never faced that particular problem.
Alternatively, the same thing can happen when a team is so highly trained and prepared for the battlefield that it stacks up win after win. After all, it is exhilarating to engage in mortal combat with a determined foe and win. The high can keep compounding with every successive win until it becomes almost unfathomable to think you could lose.
My team fell into this trap once upon a time. In retaliation for several attacks that left many civilians dead and hundreds more wounded (many maimed for life), my unit was green-lit to go after the perpetrators and bring them to justice. We began launching nightly raids in some of the sketchiest of sketchy areas.
My team and others like us were on the hunt. We would launch after dark and descend on the target like avenging angels. The hits were hyper-fast and violent, often meeting stiff resistance in the form of terrorists who were prepared to die. And being the highly trained commandos that we were, we were happy to oblige.
In the beginning, the fighting was savage and every target yielded bad guys to kill and intel to capture. In fact, some intel was immediately actionable and we would find ourselves back on helicopters en route to secondary or even tertiary targets. And our superior training and preparedness led to win after win. In fact, two weeks in an operation that had us killing bad dudes nightly six days a week caused us to become even more full of ourselves than we already were.
But after a few weeks, the hardcore bad guys realized their losses were quite disproportionate to ours. And they started running when they heard us coming instead of standing and fighting. Within a week our gunfights tapered off. The enemy started amping up their attacks on civilian centers but stopped sticking around to fight warriors. Our raids started becoming dry holes (a target that yields no bad guys to fight or capture). And whatever intelligence items that were seized on-target were of little value.
One of the most important assets a warrior must possess is a professional mindset. Every target needs to be hit with the same level of professionalism and perfection regardless of the presence of bad guys. Perfect performance on demand. But even SOF units can fall victim to complacency based on situations. Raid after raid produced nobody to fight and the high op temp meant little downtime to rest. I started noticing little things after about two weeks of dry holes. It could be a sloppy entry or sector scan. We had been on a roll, crushing bad guys every night.
And now suddenly we were lucky to find anything with a pulse on a hit. We started getting bored. And even my highly trained SOF team started getting complacent. We were on a razor’s edge for so many nights in a row, and now it seemed there was nobody that wanted to fight us anymore. Regardless, our operational tempo did not slow down. The higher-ups kept sending us out on dry-hole hits. Whether or not the bad guys were intentionally trying to lull us into a false sense of security, we started expecting to find nothing. And, unfortunately, it would take the worst possible thing to snap us out of our complacency.
On one particular raid, we walked through a structure and found the same empty rooms we were now accustomed to finding. First floor clear. Moving up to the second floor, we started taking down rooms as we moved down the hallway. And suddenly the silence was shattered by the unmistakable sound of an AKM firing full auto in an enclosed space. I was toward the back of the train and still in the narrow hallway.
I knew we had two guys in the room on the right because I was passing the doorway and could see them in my dim peripheral vision around my NODs, starting to move to come back out and get behind me. Short room. So, I immediately knew the fire was happening in the room we were approaching on the left. Holes were appearing in the wall just ahead as rounds crashed through the plaster and cinder block construction, looking like little sparks of light. The staccato of the AK mag dump practically drowned out the sound of the good guys’ suppressed M4s. Several long seconds later and it was over.
The two guys in front of me in the train were now in the room and I led another teammate into the last room at the end of the hall, expecting to walk into another AK burst but finding nothing. And then a voice on the radio said we had two men down; one KIA and one critically wounded. Our wounded brother would die in hospital three days later. Miraculously, he wanted to give a statement for the AAR and was able to tell us what happened when they first entered the room.
When he and his partner entered the left side corner-fed room they saw a small cot, a desk, and some rolled up rugs in the far corner. After establishing their initial points of domination, his partner moved to clear behind the rugs and was immediately shot in the face by a terrorist lying in wait. Our wounded man caught several rounds before the bad guy ran out of ammunition.
The two in front of me in the hall aborted their plans to go into the room at the end of the hall where I ended up, stormed into the left side room and shot the terrorist dead. Our wounded man said they had lazily cleared the room because (at this point) they weren’t expecting to find anything. His partner went to knock down the rolled-up rugs in the corner while he was flipping the cot. They—we—were complacent, and they—we—fucked up. Things had been going so well for so long that we stopped even thinking they could go the other way. Complacency kills.
That was a very painful time. We lost two brothers in a matter of seconds and all of us felt responsible. We knew we had grown complacent. We figured that the long string of victorious nightly gunfights had taken the fight out of the enemy and we were unstoppable. It took a long time for us as a team to get past that night. As an individual, I don’t know if I ever will be past it. The lesson of complacency kills was seared into our souls. Nothing was taken for granted after that.
I usually don’t tell war stories. Those events are sacred to me and my brothers. But I will sometimes sterilize these events and use them to illustrate lessons I hope to pass on to others who go into harm’s way.
You don’t need to be a special operator on some distant battlefield for this lesson apply to you. Juxtapose this story with your own life at the micro and macro levels.
You could be a SWAT officer doing a routine clearing of a suspect’s house after taking him into custody. You’ve done these back-clears hundreds of times and not once been shot at. Why should this one be any different? You’ve just wrapped up a six-hour standoff with this guy before he finally surrendered. You’re tired, cold, hungry, and anxious to go home. Not to mention you’ve had to take a shit for the past hour. You just need to wrap up this house clear so you can turn the scene over to narcotics and the team can leave. You don’t even notice that you entered a room on the second story alone and don’t even have your gun up while reaching for the sliding door of the closet in the bedroom…
You could be a patrol cop doing your tenth traffic stop of the night, approaching shift change, and already thinking about beers later while watching the game. You’ve made hundreds of stops and the worst you’ve gotten was being cursed out. You’ve had a long week and are looking forward to end of shift. It would be easy to let your guard down on this last stop of the night. Nothing has ever happened before, after all. As you approach the car, you don’t get a good look in the back with your flashlight to notice the person lying across the seat under a blanket…
You could be coming home from a fun range trip and doing a quick field strip, wipe-down and lube of your empty weapons before putting them away in the safe. The wife is telling you to hurry up because you both need to shower and get dressed because you’re meeting friends for dinner in an hour. You’ve done this countless times before and never had a negligent discharge. In fact, the thought of the possibility doesn’t even cross your mind anymore. That sort of thing happens to other people anyway. You know you’re pressed for time and not thinking about the task at hand when, intent on stripping your G19, you press the trigger…
Complacency is certainly not relegated to the tactical and gun community. Have you been on the road lately? Drivers have seemingly done the impossible and become even more distracted or zoned-out in the past couple years. How many of you look at your phone while driving? You’re just glancing at a text message; it’s not like you’re going to text them back. That would be dangerous. Just glancing at a text message while behind the wheel isn’t a big deal, right? Your eyes are off the road for a couple seconds at worst. You’ve never hit anyone before. Hell, you’ve never even had a close call. What could go wrong?
One of my friends has a scary parenting story that I’m sure many average Earth-people can relate to. She was FaceTiming her husband from a hotel room while traveling for work. They were catching up, enjoying the conversation, when all of a sudden she sees their toddler waddling past the camera behind her husband with a paring knife in his hand. Holy shit! Thank God, hubby was able to get the knife away before tragedy could strike. It turns out that the little guy got it out of the dishwasher while looking for spoons he could use as drumsticks. Dad got a little complacent by not hand-washing a sharp knife and putting it away.
Our daily lives are filled with routines, and it is impossible to devote 100% concentration 100% of the time to 100% of our activities. Some things are OK to go on autopilot. But many others require us to be constantly present and understanding of the consequences. 99% of people reading this have probably become complacent at one time or another while handling guns or driving a vehicle. You certainly don’t need to be on a two-way range to be injured or killed, and driving is an even more frequent danger. Chances are you drive every day.
All it takes is a few seconds of complacency to drive into a ditch, hit a deer, swerve into oncoming traffic, or get T-boned at an intersection. The world is dangerous enough even without working a dangerous job. But if you choose to work in military, law enforcement, firefighting, industrial, and on and on, you are taking on a whole universe of danger. Just remember—complacency kills. Images by the author & Basecamp Creative Group
