There was an existing grass fire, and the range safety officer just decided it was fine to train right beside it, in a famously windy and unpredictable climate.

I’m aware. There is some important context here that the public reporting really doesn’t talk about though; if you’re doing weapon handling of any sort, grass fires are very nearly a daily occurrence. A few times a week, for sure. They are so common that if units had to stop training every time there was a fire, they would literally never train.

Though we won’t know for sure until the investigation is done, it’s entirely possible - likely, even - that the range safety officer followed established protocol to the letter. The way the CAF handles range fires, by necessity, is you report it, and you make sure no one is in immediate danger. And then you get on with your work.

Now, either protocol wasn’t followed in this case, or the protocol needs to be updated. That’s clear. But I think a lot of people are reading the reporting on this and thinking “Oh my God, how could you let people train next to a raging inferno??!!” and not understanding that, in this context, that’s literally just an average day on the job. The policies have to draw a very fine line between “acceptably dangerous” and “too risky” and that’s not easy to get right.

If it sounds like I’m being callous here, believe me, I’m not. I have loved ones in the military. That’s why I know so much about this. There are people I care very deeply about whose lives are on the line here. But those same people have to live with the reality of these difficult choices, and they very much want the average civilian to understand that this is a much more complex situation than it sounds.