With the whole world being unstable, it is easy for people to feel a need to prepare for things to get bad. We are facing rising gas prices, soaring interest rates, a new made up variant of Covid, and an ongoing war in Ukraine. This is all evidence of an upcoming recession that could really hurt our country. It is easy to understand why people are getting concerned about the future. However, there is much more to being prepared than just storing gas, ammo, and MREs. I would say it is time to make realistic priorities based on history. Since most people live in or near a city, I figured I would talk about security in the suburbs. PRINCIPLES OF SECURITY For many outside the city, like myself, it may be smarter to just stay put when things go bad. Most call this bugging in, but I call it DIGGING IN. This is because it mostly relies on you fortifying your home or neighborhood and then setting up early warning systems like listening and observation posts, conducting recon patrols, etc. While this is being done, you still must deceive your untrustworthy neighbors or outside groups to prevent them from knowing how prepared you are. If you do have a potential for conflict with your neighbors or outside groups, avoidance or mitigation will be key. This may be as big as fleeing your home temporarily while a roving group turns the place inside out, or as small as not communicating with certain people who aren't trustworthy. If you can't avoid conflict, you will have to be flexible and judicious with your use of force against another person. Suburban security is so difficult to discuss because it is completely reliant on your neighbors forming a network of trustworthiness and self-reliance. For some it can be asking a lot to have neighbors that will work with them, so you may be pretty much alone. RINGS OF PROTECTION In this article I will be covering three rings of security. These rings of security are tailored to give us what we need in order to avoid as much trouble as we can, but still give us time to prepare for an effective defense or counterattack. Each home and neighborhood is going to be different, so take what works for your situation and discard the rest. The first and last ring of security is your home or rather the inside of your home. This should be sufficiently barricaded to delay or at least alert you when entry is attempted. This is your last line of defense if you are not capable of escape, so have a plan to strongpoint an area in the home. The second ring is the area surrounding your home such as your property. There should be adequate early warning systems in place when someone attempts to enter this ring. The second ring can delay an attacker or even deter less committed attackers. However, I would merely consider the second ring to be a final warning and last chance to escape. The last/third ring is your neighborhood. This ring should have early warning devices and even sentries with radioes watching outside the neighborhood to act as an early warning as far out as is practical for the situation and threats being faced. This ring is not meant as a fighting line, but rather as the first line of defense. It serves as an early warning to give time for further observation to determine the level of threat and possible intent. These variables will dictate whether you use avoidance or force to defend yourself and neighborhood. OBSERVE & REPORT The military prioritizes security above all other things because without it, nothing else can survive conflict. This is just as true for the civilian world, even now with home invasions and burglary. Awareness is extremely important because without it, we wouldn't know what is happening around us or see danger coming or brewing. Without awareness, there is no security. Awareness can be established with observation. While the grid is up, we have cameras and if the grid goes down, we will simply have our eyes. Now we are to act as observers in order to be aware of any incoming or existing threats. Observing and reporting or observing and documenting should be your limit of involvement with persons or events. If you are surrounded by hostile neighbors, observe and document from your home. If you have a neighborhood network, observe and document events outside your neighborhood. Do not try to help or interfere with things that do not concern you. If it is not a direct threat to yourself, a family member, or a neighbor you are providing mutual support for, stay out of it. Learn NOW how to document things that are happening around you and even things that you do. When things go bad, you would be smart to document things that happen. Paint a picture with your words in case your written document is the only thing that can be used to visually ID a suspect who attacked you, especially if you had to use force to defend yourself. Dates, times, locations, individual descriptions (height, weight, race, gender, age, iconography, clothing, unique identifiers, etc.), mannerisms, pre-event indicators (posturing, clenching fists, fidgetting), iconography (Gang tattoos/clothing colors, clothing logos, jewelry, headwear, footwear), actions & times of actions & order of actions, etc. Eventually the world will re-establish order, and when that happens, your actions and the actions of others will have to be answered for. Documentation and reporting are a key to observing because we cannot remember everything and a well written record will serve us well in the future for recollection and even pattern recognition for future threats and lessons. Also keep in mind that EVENTUALLY the world will stabilize and people will begin trying to pick up the pieces. Good old pen and paper documentation of sightings and activities can help sort things out immensely. Be an observant asset, not a blind liability. AVOIDANCE/DELAY Whether you are alone or with a group of neighbors, you need to prepare your home to provide early warning so you can enact a plan to escape or at least try to delay the attacker(s). One option for early warning is having motion activated lighting, preferably solar powered, around your house for when you are not able to be outside watching your property. These lights must be able to be turned off or covered when you are up and moving around at night to avoid ringing the visual dinner bell for large groups outside your neighborhood. Light means power and power means resources to anyone who can fog a window. If power is out in the city, there will be little light pollution to conceal the illumination of your property. The house lights should only be on/uncovered if you are staying inside and will not be able to be out. If you are up and alert, you won't want a bright light to go off if someone approaches from the avenue of approach you are covering. You would be better served to challenge that approach from a point of dominance and maybe with a handheld/weapon light. Just use proper light discipline. Motion activated lights are handy for illuminating threats or activity in the immediate area for your second ring of security, but can also serve as an indicator for your third ring of security, depending on angles, lumens/candela, light pollution, etc. However, for these lights to work in your favor, you have to have eyes on the perimeter, which means someone has to do night time sentry duty. Even then, this is just to show that motion was detected. It could have been a racoon that set it off or a large group. The only way to confirm a threat is to go look or have it posted in an avenue of approach you can see clearly with binoculars from your roof or some other spot in your neighborhood. Even then, the light will just buy you time to enact a plan to avoid the threat by temporarily leaving the house, draw the threat away through contact and fleeing in another direction, or delay their attack with ambushes in depth. The downside to lights is that they only work at night and are almost guaranteed to draw people from surrounding neighborhoods to the general area to search for the possible cache of resources. Options for daytime advanced warning in the third ring of security are things like trip flares, flare guns rigged to tripwires, etc. Get creative with advanced warning methods, but remember you will still need someone to sound the alarm when they are tripped. It will be hard to cover 360 degrees but you can at least try to cover the most likely avenues of approach. Start with lighting around your house, your second ring of security. Have tripwires leading to audible alarms around your fences, battery powered window alarms, etc. In extreme cases, razor wire can be installed on your fencing as well. Lighting is about exposing the attacker and stealing their element of surprise. However, if the attacker is committed, you will need to have barriers and indicators in place to help you defend your home/property for your first and final ring of security. Everyone has to sleep some time. Weigh the risks and make your own choice on this. For the interior, you can mitigate threats and delay entry by boarding up windows. Id recommend you to leave closable view ports to block light from escaping but also for responding to an attack. You can put in window bars and install antiburglary door locks and braces at the base of the door. Just keep in mind that someone who really wants to get in WILL. It is just a question of time and this is why early warnings are important, because they can give you time to act. Even if you are digging in, the better part of valor would be to leave your house temporarily and covertly until the threat has passed instead of fighting it out in your first ring of defense. Early warnings can give you the time you need to grab your family, grab your gear, and scoot to a predetermined rendezvous point where you hopefully have some cached supplies and weapons for at least 3-5 days. This is avoidance and it will give you a better shot at survival over playing ALAMO in your house. DECEPTION If you are alone and the only one who is prepared in your neighborhood, you may have to enact some severe deception. One way to enact deception is to have caches of supplies spread out. This way if your neighbors are really nosey, or they actually get inside your house, they will see limited supplies because you have only what you need at that time. I would personally go to the extreme of fasting and only eating at my cache site at night. This prevents even having a suspicious crumb for your neighbors to see. Just be sure you are not being followed by anyone on your way to or from your feeding hole. If you are successful, your neighbors will see your setup of dirt soup and worm noodles and they will be none the wiser that you have months worth of supplies to work with. Just be aware that not having supplies will be half the struggle. You are actually gonna have to lose weight and at least look slightly malnourished in order to be convincing. This may also mean some acting. The idea behind this type of deception is plausible deniability. We humans believe what we see and visual indicators carry more weight than saying you're hungry yet having a beer belly that continues growing. Deception may not be required to this extreme degree if you establish a good network of trustworthy neighbors. I would still recommend not showing off your stash, but perhaps setup a mutual bartering agreement or reciprocal caching agreement with each other. But this will require you to have a neighborhood presence and a certain level of influence and value. PRESENCE & INFLUENCE As far as presence is concerned, it would be helpful to provide a physical presence and contact your neighbors somewhat frequently just to get a feel for their situation and status. This is not for you to find out who to give supplies to like a FEMA representative. This is simply for you to provide an uplifting and positive presence and get advanced warning when they show signs of desperation. Desperation can lead to you being a target for any number of reasons. Prior to being in a state of desperation, I would encourage you to be open to helping your neighbors plant/maintain a garden, clean clothes, etc. Physical assistance can go a long way to improving rapport with people and can give you greater influence to encourage them to help themselves. If you want to build a strong sense of community, teaching basic skills like water collection/treatment, shelter building, and first aid can go a long way. I would say that the best time to do this is NOW and establish this pattern prior to being in a desperate societal situation. Just be aware that the last thing you should do is let people try to make you solely responsible for any of the skills you try to teach. You must make it clear that you WILL NOT collect water for everyone, garden for everyone, provide security for all, or be the neighborhood medic. You will be so exhausted from serving everyone instead of teaching them to serve themselves. Expect and be on the lookout for people who are trying to use you as this is a sign of them being a future threat since they prefer to be served and get things rather than work for them. THREATS There will be many families that refused to learn skills or store supplies to prepare for famine. They may already be in your neighborhood or will squat around it in hopes of getting a handout. They may seem pleasant and even sweet at first, but this is certainly and historically a ruse. Their irresponsibility is a key indicator of a reliance on the current societal conveniences. Once those conveniences cease, that friendly character they may have had goes with it. If you give support to that irresponsible family, you will be feeding an insatiable leech. If they were irresponsible and dependent on the illusion of Utopia to begin with, they will not change their ways and they may even spread the word to other hungry irresponsible people that you are loaded with food. For them it will become about having their fair share even though they didn't do anything to earn it. People talk, and talk gets people hurt or killed when things go bad. This is why it is best to deceive these types of people and avoid them entirely if possible. When it comes to seeing other people being harmed or in pain, that does not automatically mean you should intervene. In fact, history has shown that being a bleeding heart for people and children is the number one thing that will get you killed. It is called the lure and ambush. The hot chick in distress on the side of the road will likely be a lure for a group in the trees or in the building to ambush you. She may very well just slit your or your families throats herself. It has happened here in Alaska with innocent looking hitch hikers and people pretending to have a broken down vehicle. Feign distress and kill those who come and take their stuff. Same goes for children. Africa is a great example of children being soldiers and great bait and information gatherers for warlords. The best thing you can do for those who appear to be in distress is to observe and document it. Your responsibility and supplies are for your family, not strangers or neighbors you can't trust to help you. Sounds harsh but it is about survival, not charity. Your preparedness means nothing if you become the victim. While we are on the subject of children, giving food to a child can have a bad outcome. That child will continue returning for more, and if you refuse to give up the goods, what do you think that child will do to retaliate? Even if it looked like children wandering alone, they made it that far, and you can bet there is a reason such as I described in the previous paragraph. As harsh as it sounds, history from other countries has shown us that the best way to survive, when others are suffering, is to avoid strangers and people who refuse to learn. These people and children are merely societies weak links and leeches you MUST avoid. This means you may witness people die slowly from malnutrition, to include whole families. You must ask yourself now, how much does your families survival mean to you? If other people are hungry, they will go to great lengths to include killing you for a can of spam. That is just human nature that few know when they are sitting on their couch and stuffing their face while watching TV. Previously I was speaking about outside families and people you do not know or people that try to just leech off you. If you are in a good neighborhood that works together well, you should feel obligated to support each other and take care of each other. I am not against families and children in crisis. I am only against strangers that appear in a crisis. History is a great teacher for those that pay attention, and history is filled with people outside of a group being used as scouts for a large raiding force. They do this by feeling for their security setup, supply locations and quantities, and numbers of possible opposition. Think about this before helping those in need that just show up. Illusion or not, your best bet is to avoid them all. JUDICIOUS USE OF FORCE Some of you may be reading this and thinking that if people knock on your door to beg, you will have them looking down the barrel of your gun. I would say that is the last thing you want to have happen. Even if the law becomes unenforceable for a time, it will eventually be restored and the survivors and witnesses of your actions will make sure you are held accountable. On the other hand, it could lead to retaliation by bringing outside groups down on your head. History is filled with this type of thing happening, so if you truly value your family and their safety, you will not try to recreate the battle of Thermopylae in your neighborhood. I suggest you get familiar with less lethal options for use of force. Security and police officers are taught to use only the necessary level of force to stop the threat. This may sound a bit liberal, but can bet that eventually you will have to answer for your actions. Therefore, you better be able to articulate your level of force, how it was used, and why. "They knocked on my door and wouldn't go away" is probably not going to be good enough to satisfy a jury of your peers. I would suggest looking into alternative less lethal alternatives for use of force if avoidance cannot be achieved. No matter what kind of force you use on someone, it is best that you only use force necessary to stop the threat and not continue pressing the attack. This can not only backfire in court, but can have an immediate affect on your standing in your neighborhood. Having a temper that flares up and causes you to torture people or things that annoy you can definitely segregate you from your other neighbors that you spent years setting up a network with. Patience and judicious use of force is not only going to help you in the long run, but also in the eyes of your neighbors. Also, after every use of force, I recommend documenting the event and even getting supporting statements from neighbors who witnessed it if possible. SO MUCH MORE t is so easy to go down the rabbit hole with what ifs and other scenario brainstorming. This article was just supposed to get your brain in gear to encourage you to think about the variables involved in defending yourself and having a neighborhood willing to work together to defend each other. In the end, the lone wolf dies alone so it is always gonna be better to not be alone when things go bad. I don't recommend isolating, but if you do, there are a few things you can do to increase your survivability. I hope you all stay safe and stay prepared. Be an asset to your neighborhood and support each other. Have barbeques, teach basic skills, help with yardwork. It will all pay off if you put the work in beforehand.
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