Balancing the safety and hazard risk of military protection systems

This paper considers the challenge of balancing safety and hazard risks for protective systems in hostile military environments. Current military standards and risk of death statistics from operations are compared against the civil standards and risks. As military protection systems may introduce new hazards the paper looks at how the additional risk is balanced by the decrease in risk in the hostile military environment (e.g. improved survivability). The paper proposes a rescaling of the generic risk matrix to aid decisions on balancing the hazard risk introduced by the system against the additional protection provided in a hostile environment. The rescaling is based on the different peacetime and hostile environment risks. The dangers and overuse issues of risk matrices are also discussed.