In the past I have given people my opinion of what size a survival group needs to be. It’s hard to come up with a specific number, as that often depends on what your goals are and how you would like your group to function in your AO. I generally prefer to keep a survival group down to a number of people dependent on facilitating a fireteam of anywhere from 4-10 able-bodied shooters. Having that number of shooters allows you to run a scout group of 3-6 guys, similar to the ones we used to run when I was attached to a long range surveillance unit in Afghanistan (We ran eight guys.) in 2013-2014. You won’t need to have all of your shooters running out at one time, leaving your home base without some firepower.
My reasons for that number are based mostly on recruiting difficulties and openings for infiltration of your group. The larger groups are much easier for what we in the intelligence community referred to as “ADVINT”, or adversarial intelligence, to infiltrate.
Another major factor when it comes to group size, is that those 4-10 gunslingers will be bringing their families.
Let me tell you about my own affiliated group. I’ll use it as an example of how this can potentially become a big logistical burden.
Let’s say you’ve got me, my dad and my two brothers in-law. So that’s four shooters with appropriate rifles, pistols, shooting capabilities, diverse experiences that give me a pretty nice little fireteam for a small AO in the environment we are working in. When the shit hits the fan, we have agreed that my rural location with modest acreage will be our rally point. So the call will go out using our primary, secondary or emergency commo channels, and everyone will drop in to our little HQ to get ready to fight off the Chinese or the AntiFa thugs, or whoever is playing the villain in our movie. But that’s not going to be the whole group. I’ve got my wife and children, of course. My dad obviously has my mom with him. My two brothers in-law would be bringing their wives of course, my sisters. They would all need to bring their children, which adds their combined four children.
Then my wife has her parents, and there is no way I can deny my wife’s parents a safe haven, nor could I deny her siblings, if she had any (she does not). That’s out of the question. One of my brothers in-law has another son (another able-bodied shooter) that I wouldn’t think of ever turning away. My grandmother is elderly and lives in the next town over. Do I tell her that she is on her own at almost 90 years old? My brother in-law has a parent who lives alone too. Is she the odd one out? I could lose one of my gunslingers (who is a former corpsman) if I decide that his mother is just out of luck.
Am I beginning to make my point clear? These are the kinds of decisions that will have to be made in these situations, and you’re going to have to make potentially dozens and dozens of these difficult decisions if you’ve got an entire platoon of 30 gunslingers in your group.
The example above is loosely based on my reality, and could have me trying to manage upwards of 30 people at our location, with some elderly, some toddlers and some sick. All of those people require food, water, shelter, sanitation, etc., and you’ve got to keep them in a cooperative mood. This is assuming that our group has to maintain at a single location. Being able to continue maintaining safely in multiple locations makes managing a group easier in some ways and harder in others, but once you are forced to activate your group, these people still have to be taken into full account wherever they are. That group has swelled to over 30 people for just a four-man fireteam…
I understand that there are going to be a lot of people who will say “you’re just going to have to make the hard decisions and turn people away…”, and I do hear you, and you’re correct. But we will all have a short list of people who we will never turn away, and when you’re putting a group together and you’ve decided that a particular person is too much of an asset not to have with you, you will have to take on their short list of essential people as well, or they will not join your group.
This was a mental exercise on my part to try to get you thinking of a survival group differently. Many of us once thought about this concept and imagined our group of rifle carriers meeting together to hash out tactics and training exercises and barbecues, and the group we imagined was neatly split into three or four squads of eight or ten people, all forming a nice tight platoon of 30-40 dudes with uniforms and ranks and matching kit. It’s time to consider that a better option for a lot of people is going to look a lot more like a scout team of three or four guys, or a squad of eight or ten split into twin fireteams. From this soldier’s perspective, that may be the most practical size logistically, and also for the previously mentioned counter-infiltration purposes.
Dissident American 