Hypothetical Wednesday December 28, 2016 – What Would You Do?

December 28, 2016 By M.D. Creekmore

You … are a ‘City Prepper’. Your household is in good condition. You have a secure water source. Your Meds and food preps are at about 50%. Fuel / markets / City services are non-existent other than one… Law Enforcement.

The assumed die off and flight from the city by the ‘Golden Hordes’ has not happened. FEMA / State and City relief efforts are slowing as surrounding resources are exhausted.

New Federal Executive orders have been in effect for only a few days. There is the sporadic crackle of gunfire in the distance but that is coming from way downtown.. miles away. All in all, this major event has not panned out as most Hollywood zombie flicks and Doom blogs have pushed on the public.

LEO in your area are stopping all moving vehicles and searching for ‘contraband’ fuel, food, arms, cash or PMs and medications of any kind Rx or OTC. Those stopped are advised to return home and hunker down as a p.m. curfew will be enforced at any time and anyone with a vehicle and fuel will have both ‘surrendered’ to the local relief efforts.

This local LEO also warns you that it is not certain but it is expected that within two weeks all food, medications, fuel sources, cash or PMs that are considered to be over a 3-day allowance will be collected on a block by block basis. She ( the LEO) also hints that shortly anyone found with a semi-automatic firearm of any caliber or gauge will have it taken without a receipt.

You have one ‘tank load’ of fuel in reserve for each of your vehicles.

You have plotted out exit routes and visited each route on foot and bicycle. What are YOU … going to do? Hunker down and hide your resources or exit the city with no location to go to and escape .. with .. your left over preps as the only option. Staying put will mean a fight of one nature or another. Bugging out may save your resources but where could you hope to ‘land’?

It looks like bugging out would be a losing proposition. If the government doesn't stop you, roving gangs of thieves will. It looks like I would have to stay put.

That means I would have to take steps to hide my food and other resources. Here's where I would like some intel on how they're conducting their searches. Are they just checking the drawers and cabinets, or are they checking the attics, basements, and spaces behind the walls? What equipment are they using? I may have to bury my wheat and rice underground.

How often is electricity and the internet available? Can the internet be accessed anonymously from libraries or other places? If so, having some money in Bitcoin would probably be a good idea. it looks like official government currencies are worthless - but people will still trade over the internet for Bitcoin (see Venezuela).

Looking at it economically, the reason food is not available is because no one has anything to pay for it. People who have it would accept silver for it, but it's not even in the city because no one can pay to transport it (except maybe the government). Desperate people do desperate things (again, see Venezuela), and if anyone knows you have a stash of food, they're going to come knocking. Never tell anyone what you have.

Onward and upward,
airforce

I would gather a whole lot more information.

Is the Internet still up?

What are the radio nets saying? Anything wildly different from what is on the net?

How many people am I really responsible for?

Regardless of who owns the supplies, what supplies remain in the area?

What supplies are available outside of the area?

Is the immediate surrounding area hostile, ambivalent or friendly?

Questions to the intact police organizations:

Are the officials corruptible?
Can they be intimidated?
Are they ideologically secure or are they simply self serving hypocrites regardless of the stated ideology?
How has the crisis affected their lifestyle? Are their own families and interests in secure areas or dependent on the same economic system as everybody else? How engaged are they with the community?

Are there active police auxiliaries? If so, are they alliances of circumstance, ideology or corruption?

How strong are they?

Are the hostile, corrupt, permissive or friendly?

Topography:
Is this a coastal city with waterway access?

Is it a city situated on or near any major rivers with waterway to Ocean access?

As it is, I would hunker down, gather information and fortify the location. In a relatively permissive environment, that means occupation of a tactically sound building that you can defend with conventional weapons. These may be overwhelmed by large force, such as the CIA and embassy complexes in Benghazi, but such actions are incredibly rare. That's still pretty much the way things get done.

I would then send reconnaissance teams everywhere of relevance. Now that's not necessarily commanding them, but here is the deal, if someone can't or won't go to a given fixed point, make relevant observations of requested data, then report that back to me, they are going to be impossible to work with on just about anything else. This is absolutely critical. Any refusal to report or hesitation in reporting is worse than stepping off on the wrong foot in boot camp or turning right when someone is supposed to turn left. There is to be no stupid games played on either side, no trick questions, no ambiguity. No or very little psychology on the debrief. We simply fact check their information against other sources.

Black markets always exist and you cannot be in business without being in business. You demonstrate what you have for sale (the glass case), not necessarily what you have in the back room or on request. In the various black markets, they have ways of signalling their clientele what is available. If there are not walls around the city, then stuff is available and can be transported, it's just a matter of what it takes to get things moving again.

If for whatever reason, there are refusals to do business, then we would have to determine why and address that. I seriously don't think anybody in Venezuela or even Aleppo right now is refusing payment in bullion. In fact they probably are taking US dollars.

Show me any reasonably priced lunch counter type place that is accepting bitcoin.

The video game "The Division" is pretty well thought out on the scenario end even though level based game play positively sucks, the backstory and scenarios are pretty solid. The Survival guide they have on Amazon is absolutely amazing and very well thought out. I would suggest getting it even if you don't play the game.

One thing they mention in that is food trucks. Some areas have them more than others, but chances are, someone will keep some running and street food vendors are everywhere in one form or another. They often go back and forth between the fast food business and involve many of the same people. For example, successful food Kart operators frequently get corporate offers to manage a fast food joint. Likewise, fast food joint managers often just want to leave the corporate world and want independence to make their own menu and be more connected with the customers so they build and set up a food kart. I have personally seen that scenario plenty of times. Some guy who is just tired of all the headache of running a big joint pays me to build his dream food kart and he spends the next few years servicing his own customers directly. He wants to be the chef at the never ending barbeque and handing off his smoked ribs and chicken off to smiling customers. Another one, a Subway employee was scraping all of her meager savings together and borrowing money from her family to build a custom food truck out of a small school bus. By the time it was getting closer to done, her boss called with a promotion offer. She took the offer and sold the food truck for what she had into it.

I traveled in Central America in the 1980s when there were Communist revolutions going on, and all of the middle class families owned some sort of storefront operation. Even the lower class but aspiring middle class people did. I remember Indigenous people straight from the bush who would set up a roadside stand selling fresh squeeze pineapple juice.

There is also a whole series of meanings from the Spanish phrase and Latin concept of "Plato o Plomo" or "silver or lead". Or shall we say, "the offer which ought not be refused".

In the event of ANY of these world hotspots, there tend to be hotels and services available, although at "white man prices". That is where the commerce happens, and if it comes time to be trading supplies, sell out, close shop and move on, then it's time to do just that.

If you can organize anything, or be part of a larger organization which actually gets stuff accomplished, and it is getting done on terms acceptable to you, then that opens up other options, but lacking more information, I don't see bringing those options to the table.

I don't know of a single one. But people in Venezuela are buying food and medicine with it, often from neighboring countries, and having it shipped to them. If they're fortunate enough to have a computer in an industrial zone - where electricity and internet service is more reliable - their lives are relatively normal.

Onward and upward,
airforce

Breacher, can you please post a link to this Survival Guide on Amazon you mentioned or tell us more about it? Is it just about the game?

Here is the link. I will try to do a video in the next couple days.

https://www.amazon.com/Tom-Clancys-...eywords=division+new+york+co llapse

There is also a lot of side material on the game.

In the game, the organization CERA is actually FEMA, the "Division" is an actual agency, which I think in the real world is a subdivision of FEMA, staffed mainly by retired military and auxiliary federal agents. The directive 51 I think it is, is actually a real thing.

The agents are trained, equipped, and then re-embedded back into society in case needed. In the real world, they are like a reserve of the reserve federal forces under a pretty restrictive mandate. Basically the "me too" crowd in the alphabet agency rosters. They have no authority until an emergency is declared then are placed under some emergency government.

Game play is basically a test of sorts for division candidates and skewed in several ways that screw up the application of conventional infantry tactics. My biggest beef being the level based game play which belies the level based mission assignment protocols of FEMA. For example, lower level agents are tasked with taking down rogue criminals and street gangs at first, then a few survivalists, then rogue lower level municipal employees called "The Cleaners". Then rival "first wave" agents who went rogue begin showing up in the storyline, usually hostile. The next bigger threat are the hardened criminals who broke out of Rikers Island (known as the "Rikers" in the game) and then finally, the "Last Man Battalion", a paramilitary contract organization modeled on a bigger badder version of Blackwater. The scenario planners place the tactical threat posed by survivalists to be above that of common street gangs, below that of organized rogue municipal employees or the more hardened criminal convicts who break out of prison in the lead up to the game scenario. The Survivalist are not even remotely in the league of the Blackwater-like force. I would also note, that due to that treatment in the scenario, I peg the survivalists as being most capable of success if they can keep their presence in a particular area helpful and low key. There are many closed doors in the scenario which are neither open nor meant to be open, and we are led to assume there are pockets of survivors who are not part of the scenario during the time period the scenario is taking place, and the only people on the streets are people desperate enough to venture out for desperately needed items, or representatives of any of the faction gangs. Interesting to note, in the "dark zone" where government monitoring is extremely limited and high value loot is more common, all factions fight each other and it is not uncommon for agents to create mini-alliances which backstab other agents to take their loot. I would go out on a limb and guess that the game monitors who does that sort of thing on a regular basis vs those who stick to their missions and collect loot just from bad guys and not by attacking friendlies.

The problem with the game engineering is that if you are tactically competent and get good usable weapons, you can't just pick who you are going to go after, like ignoring lower level threats and going after who you want. That's the real masonic key to the game design (done by the same people who did Assassins Creed and took over the Tom Clancy franchises). If you are a low level guy and sneak over to the high level area with a sniper rifle, and decide to take out a high level enemy leader, you can't. You shoot the guy in the head, he spits back at you and his guys all come after you, and happen to be bulletproof unless you have worked up to that level. Kind of understand the mentality right? Another bad example on the game play is you get a bunch of enemies lined up in a hallway, cut loose with an M60, and the guy at the front decides you are not high enough level and just blasts you with a pistol.

At higher levels, you eventually run into what is called "agent hunters" but they are not addressed in the survival guide. These are people with a vendetta against agents and are particularly skilled at killing agents.

Foreign nationals are welcome to play the game as it is based in New York, the defacto world capitol. Part of the game scenario is to massacre the Blackwater guys who have taken over UN headquarters and aligned themselves with a few surviving UN delegates to declare a new political order, but nobody is listening. Your real orders come from some secret organization through a commanding officer who was severely wounded during the deployment and never leaves the command center. She maintains communication with higher command, as an agent, you never do. You eventually learn that the main bad guy is a fellow agent who was activated a few months before you and went rogue, taking control of a bioweapon which he plans on using as leverage to exert control over the world. His allies are unknown, but eventually you learn his identity as "Asher". "Asher", knowing the secretive nature of the real command had been inserting his own commands into the communications flow in order to get new agents to wipe out his rivals.

The entire series is educational in nature to the up and coming generation. Very carefully researched and thought out on a no-holds-barred budget. It is THE scenario the government is bringing their people up for. Not zombies, not aliens, not so much civil war at this point. It is the scenario that the combined resources of the government and the gaming industry poured billions of dollars into studying. The game release itself is a case study in the sociology and behavior of the players under various circumstances, except that it is skewed by limited options in on a lot of stuff. You basically have to complete the entire game before it becomes a true open world game. It also has some limits on play progression so once it plays out, it plays out and your new play is only a question of how different groups of people run the same scenarios. I am guessing that's where the mass study goes in and little tweaks are made in the later releases.

My take on it is with the amount of money and production value that went into the game, it is important to become familiar with all things Division in order to even communicate comprehensively with the incoming generation. Not so much on the game play, but many of the concepts in the game. Quest givers for example, mission completion chains, group dynamics, establishment of safehouses. It's all there. Some of the zombie games put that together, but this is the one which was engineered to put it together in a playable realistic scenario.

It seems like free market anarchism is at work!

What I would bring to the table is my knowledge of free market economics. My only project would be to privatize the city services (police, fire, roads, sanitation, etc.). There are a few ways to go about doing this, the challenge would be to find the most workable solution.

Onward and upward,
airforce

A whole lot of the obvious. Construction and power generation resources. My plan is to maintain mobility with an ad-hoc trade convoy that can roll in and do small scale infrastructure repair and enhancement. Basically the semi-retirement phase of combat engineers is to move over to the Seabee type units (you can move from combat engineers to Seabees fairly easily since they use the same school as Army and Marines and I have both anyway). Hardly any are in their 30s, most are in their 40s and up. Not unusual to see Seabees on multiple age waivers.

We would probably be going around scavenging solar panels off unused buildings and infrastructure and setting up power generation in the zones that remain populated. Distributed production micro-grids in public areas for common usage. We would produce educational seminars on power rationing and utilization of public power charging resources. For example, battery exchange programs where people gather up and bank charged batteries, recondition batteries, exchange batteries and rebuild lithium ion cell packs from old power tool and computer batteries.

It would be important to build a distributed non-grid power system. That means independent battery charging power stations all over the place and they need to generally be public access. Anybody can walk up to one and charge or battery exchange whatever they carry. Kind of like local tool libraries, but for micro power stations built from scavenged batteries and solar panels. Chances are there would be a shortage of inverters and charge controllers, but charge controllers are fairly simple electronics and not always necessary. We ran a fairly large power generation system at the Diaxris project without charge controllers for a little while but it eventually blew out one of the inverters. We never knew if that was from age or overcharging (it was over 25 years old when it blew). Anyway, running that stuff would keep us busy and valued with any community we come into contact with.

What Would You Do?
January 11, 2017 By M.D. Creekmore

There has been a major event that has shut the power grid down resulting in a WROL (without rule of law) situation. It’s been three months and the power still hasn’t been restored and your supplies are running low and you and your family are having to do without basic necessities such as food and medicine.

You had just started prepping a few months before this disaster struck, and had been putting back food supplies and other essentials but had not yet managed to build up a sufficient stockpile to see you and your family through a prolonged disaster such as the one you’re now facing…

But you do have weapons and ammo… and you know that your neighbor is a prepper and has plenty of food, medications and other gear stockpiled for their family… Their group consists of three men, their wives, and several children including two teenagers.

Altogether they have eight shooters in their group and are well trained and well armed with each being armed with an M4 and Glock 19. Also, their property may be boobytrapped and they may have IE devices but you’re not sure.

What would you do? Why?

Leave the group alone. You have nothing to offer them, it would be immoral to steal what they have, and you are unlikely to succeed anyway.

Now would be a good time to hone your trapping skills. What animals are walking, swimming, or flying around your area (yes, this includes dogs and cats)? Who else, if anyone, is hunting or trapping them?

Sparrows and starlings aren't the best eating around, and it takes a few of them to make a meal. But they are abundant, and they are protein. And in most areas you can hunt and trap them now, without restriction. You can bet they will be going in my stew pot.

With no power for three months, the mortality rate is already quite high, possibly 50% or more. (I've seen estimates that only 10% of the population would survive a power outage lasting a year.) There would be few gas generators still in operation, but some generators can be adapted to run wood gas. The scenario didn't say if you had any solar panels, so I assume not.

Can you identify medicinal plants? How did the Native Americans in your area treat illnesses a couple hundred years ago?

What job skills do you have, that you can put to use now? What needs do people have, that you can fill? The free market exists, you just have to make use of it.

Onward and upward,
airforce

Anybody in good enough shape to fight is in good enough shape to work. If you are in good enough shape to work, then you are probably at least worth the labor it takes to feed you in whatever economy rises out of the disaster. Even if it is just the economy of who has to wait for the food aid delivery truck to arrive and get help unloading it.

Are you making house or rent payments? No, Car insurance? No, Health insurance? No. Paying the utility bills? Maybe. Cutting firewood and trading it for basic barter supplies? Maybe. Who the hell would accept someone cutting a cord of wood for them and then expect them to go starve?

Then there is likely to be pubic or big scale corporate stuff to loot or scavenge. Yeah, continuity of government and all, but who OWNS that shit? I'll tell you who, the people who it got STOLEN from. That's who. The government has stolen so much from me that I am unlikely to ever break even unless I start hijacking ships and that's not likely to happen. My personal take on it, is if things get that bad, I am out to settle things with those who ripped me off first, even if it is going to prove more difficult than taking from easier innocent targets.

If you are talking about someone having an economy that is on boycott/embargo mode against people willing to work and earn their way, then that's a different animal. You pile that on with a boycott/embargo economy against those who they ripped off and who really paid for all the preps the "winners" have...Something that I am not up for discussing openly. I play fair, moral, and usually legal. I won't do it to the point of family suicide.

Forgiveness and walking away from losses is said to have the best dividend in the long run, but if long run survival is not an option because those shitheads did what they did, lets just say that I have my own criteria for scoping out who would be "contributing" to my survival, willing or not. That's probably not going to be a neighbor who I get along with, even if they may fit the target demographic, and my first, second, third and fourth options are all about getting along and doing fair trade with people.

From the outset of the event, even before, I am constantly on the recruitment mode for allies. If shit goes down, first thing is we start obtaining and sharing supplies and resources together. Whoever proves best at that rises up in importance, and I don't really have a problem with someone else being boss as long as it is being done better than I could run things. The boss is not the one who "has" the gold, but the one who is handing it out. Hence I get critical of those who base their situation on loot sharing, but there goes to a bunch of gray areas too. The reality is, those who are bringing stuff around to share, they get to either be the boss or represent the boss. You share/pay/provide for us, you get to be called boss. If I am the one who came up with the stuff and am handing it out, and I am not the boss, then guess what, I am down the road looking for a better deal for myself and whoever goes with me. That's just the way the stuff works in the world, shit on the fan or not.

Hypothetical Wednesday January 18, 2017 – What Would You Do?

January 25, 2017 By M.D. Creekmore

It’s several months into the collapse and you’ve worked hard planting and tending your garden and it’s almost harvest time. In fact, you’ve already been harvesting and canning some early produce and it’s delightful.

It’s three o’clock in the morning when you hear your dogs barking near your garden area and you get up and use your Flir Scout II 240 Thermal Imager and discreetly view the area and you see three figures that look to be small children.

You have your wife/husband/partner watch your six from a secure location armed with a bolt action 308 while you arm up with an AR-15 and ease down to see what is going on and confront the trespassers.

You get close and speak and they drop the vegetables that they were planning to take and “freeze in their tracks” they all look to be less than 14 years old and you can tell that they have been starving.

You start talking to them and they tell you that their parents were killed by a gang of home invaders a few days before. Now you have two problems – you have three hungry children with no place to go and you also just found out that there are a gang of home invaders in the area and that you might be their next target.

What do you do and why?

I'd put the kids to work in the garden. It looks like us adults are going to have to sleep in shifts, watching for the intruders.

Onward and upward,
airforce

Agreed. Not much of a choice unless you are a sociopath.

I feed them and turn them into a force multiplier.

Agreed, and the first task is to gain intelligence while vetting their story. It could be what it is at face value or a sophisticated ruse. In either event, providing a meal and raising your security posture makes sense.

Saying it all checks out, put out word on the situation and that there is a home invasion crew around.

I would most likely begin to actively hunt the home invasion robbers with or without support, but discreet inquiries with whoever is acting as the area authority sets the ground rules on how that will take place because such operations are vastly different depending on whether it is a permissive or non permissive area.

Non permissive and unfriendly areas being the most difficult to function in. In permissive and friendly areas, it is a simple matter of backing up the nominal authorities.