Honestly it explains so much about Lightning's character when you realize that most of her combat experience was procured by fighting dangerous wildlife with little to no intel. The portion of the datalog that talks about the Bodhum Security Regiment is short, but it does say this:
Public security issues rarely arose in the sleepy seaside town, and with little trouble from the local fauna, the regiment was one of the least active units of the Corps. During long spans of downtime, BSR troops were often sent to aid in exterminating dangerous wildlife in frontier regions.
We know that the Vile Peaks were at least one of these regions; she mentions to Hope that she's "been here on missions before." And the Vile Peaks are swarming with Pulsian armaments and other creatures dragged up from the lowerworld after the War of Transgression.
Later in chapter four, the Dreadnought makes a sudden appearance, and Lightning isn't the least bit rattled by this. Once it's taken down, she and Sazh have this to say:
Sazh: Pulse is crawling with things like that, isn't it? Lightning: Got me. Not even the Corps has access to intel on Pulse. Soldiers in the field fight blind. Sazh: Yeah, I noticed that. But don't you need to know exactly what you're up against? Lightning: Target's a target.
Nothing on Gran Pulse seems to bother her much, not even the fal'Cie. And why would they? Her job trained her to deal with uncertainties and unknowns with the same amount of confidence as anything else.
Lightning responds to Sazh’s queries with a maddening amount of nonchalance, though. You gotta wonder if the Sanctum really is that paranoid about intel on Pulse breaching containment, or if the rivalry between PSICOM and the GC is just that petty. I would wager that it's some amount of both, but either way, this mentality is so entrenched within their forces and has likely been the norm for the past six hundred years or so that even BSR soldiers don’t bat an eye at it.
