It is legitimate to stockpile weapons and ammunition in SECURE stockpiles (not the gun cabinet in the living room or obvious safe in the garage). These items are what become extremely difficult and risky to obtain in the early stages of a conflict when initial waves of enemy action have neutralized the stockpiles and sources of easy to obtain hardware.

As for food, fuel, batteries, vehicles. All of those things tend to continue to exist into the outset of a conflict. There are some other items of interest to stock and familiarize with before they are needed, like decent quality two way radios and such, but larger stockpiles of food, fuel and batteries and such may be obtained through such mundane sources that in some cases, they can be more of a burden than benefit to maintain stockpiles, especially when we are talking about pre-conflict bad economy lifestyles.

I know guys right now basically bouncing from place to place, living mostly out of their vehicles. Some have stashes of stuff here and there and are building those up, but we already ran into some serious integrity issues when items were "stored" with people who were thought to be trustworthy. In two instances regular legal firearms were simply given to the batfags when they showed up to question the people. In others, vehicles got driven more than they should have and found with nearly bald tires when they were checked up on, or not driven at all and all messed up from not being run or in the worst instance scavenged for parts, MREs used as snacks by a family member too lazy to cook and taking advantage of a directive to "check and taste test samples".

Fuel stockpiles have turned out to be a hassle, but I still think the fuel storage situation was a sound investment. My problem with having it readily accessible in the past retreats was too many people deciding they were having the "emergency need for fuel" and not enough figuring out they could afford to go to the gas station get some fuel cans filled up and then bring them back to refill the fuel storage cells. That was more of a "quality of people" issue than logistics issue though.

One of the very worst circumstances was a former Navy medic entrusted with organizing and maintaining clinic supplies went straight into the pharmaceuticals we had gone through considerable effort to obtain and stockpile and in his fucking addiction cleaned out the hardest to replace painkillers, then got so mad about us not restocking him that he turned fed snitch as revenge.

A realistic option is to establish some sort of action plan for at least periodically gaining control of needed stockpiles of the types of supplies that would be needed in a conflict but are a lower priority to pre-stage. Stores, food warehouses, establishments which maintain what would be needed. Having your people in control of a basic interstate highway truck stop would pretty much supply a decent operations group with what can be siphoned off of the commerce that would have to go through there no matter what.

If you are putting together an enclave of some sort, it is necessary to run enough retail business out of it that you can stock and rotate your survival supplies through the retail business, running it with an extensive surplus of "merchandise" which is really a stockpile and not just an on-time delivery model of convenience store type merchandising model which is engineered to save storage resources and only keep the place profitable.

There are guys who have figured this out with their gun and gear businesses, but fewer branched out into owning some convenience store/gas station type places although it is a very valid direction to go into.

Another thing is to have a realistic view of what sorts of conflict operations you are willing to run and support. Currently, just about nobody is running the types of "kill people and blow shit up" types of resistance operations, but are doing some things like the citizen border patrols, security operations for ranches, protests, watchdog type stuff and research, and not too many of those operations are very well financially supported. In fact, the people watching the border watchers managed to get more grant money faster as soon as publicity of the border watch people started to hit the mainstream media.

One thing I notice about the survivalists in general is the ones with retreats almost always need help with labor and are rarely in a position to pay any prevailing wages for it. If you have a roving "militia engineer" unit that can go around and help do work on people's survival retreats in return for at least room and board and goodwill toward operations groups needing a hideout from time to time, then it can probably help, but then in the current legal climate you probably would only be running a 20% success rate for them being willing and able to follow through with paying you back the favors when it is of any risk to them.