Brief thoughts on what to train on.

I’ve been extremely busy with finishing up my four-year degree and with getting myself into good shape with dieting, martial arts and weights. It’s going well. I’ve been watching a lot of the videos on YouTube of the latest tactical folks talking about gear and guns and training and all that. Some are good and some are just so-so. Most of them are saying the same things as all the others. I’m not knocking them at all. I think they do a good job. I like Pat McNamara and Jocko and several others. Mike Glover is good. One YouTube page called “Garand Thumb” is good too. I do admire these guys who have that experience and also are naturally good at being on camera and teaching. I think I could teach to small groups decently well but I just don’t think I am very good on camera. Writing is easier for me.

I do get asked from time to time what I think people should be doing and training for. Some people want to know about what to expect and how to prep their homes and property. Others want to know the more tactical stuff. Gear and guns. But one thing I don’t get asked a lot about is how to train and what sort of skills will be useful when it comes to tactics and shooting engagements. Patrols and that sort of thing.

I think this depends on what you want to do, but it also depends on how many fit riflemen you’re going to have on a regular basis. Most people, most groups and most families are not going to have more than a handful. What you can do and what you want to do and what you need to do depend on what type of unit you can set up. You want to take over the town? You need a battalion of riflemen minimum. 500+ guys. Want to secure your block? You probably need a platoon of 30 guys. Even 30 men is going to be more than what the vast majority of groups will have.

More likely you’re going to have 10 or less, and in a SHTF scenario, you’re not going to be marching down the open road doing patrols in full battle rattle. The objective needs to be intelligence collection so you know what’s coming your way. Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR). That’s what I was doing for part of my time in the Army with 2-38 Cav long range surveillance (LRS) attached to 7th SFG.

I’m not going to break it all down here, but what I’m saying is that putting together one or two fireteams to run quiet, ISR missions in your AO. Laying low and not looking for a fight. Any LRS team that your survival group can put together should be no more than four people, no less than two. They need to be able to travel long distances from your home base, stay out for up to three days if needed, and come back. They need to be able to hit man-sized targets with their primary weapon out to 300 yards. They need long range viewing gear and commo gear that will keep them in touch with each other and with home base. They need a minimum level of medical skills, to include the ability to treat gunshot wounds and cuts of various sizes. They need to be able to travel quickly and hide quietly, and they need to be able to fight with the intent to break contact and make it back alive.

I believe this is the best group to put together if you can. Essentially it’s a two, three or four man long range surveillance, sniper/spotter, cavalry scout type team for forward information gathering. If you have five guys, that’s bordering on too many for this, but you can make that work, as long as you’re not leaving your home base undefended. Never leave your home undefended. Six men means you get to have two teams trading out.

Good luck. Happy training.

Some things to think about when you build your survival group.

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.

MDT on basic Army infantry skills that every survivalist should know.

Mason Dixon Tactical has gone through the book and highlighted for our benefit the common US Army infantry skills and tasks that every survivalist who plans to go into harm’s way should have a basic understanding of.

This post may be dated, but it’s still going to be 100% applicable in 2021.

The skills we learned the hard way in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, etc. will unfortunately come in handy here, soon.

Please click the link and read. Then learn and do, and pass it along to your hardhearted friends.

AntiFa tactics – A must read from American Partisan.

AntiFa Reality Check

Bad news from back in September. You may have already seen this before. Our side is still being forced to keep our sidearms holstered just to keep ourselves out of prison.

Expect more of this come January, no matter who the White House resident is. It was never about Trump. It’s always been about us.

On the importance of the Scout Team.

Absolutely required reading from NCScout at the Brushbeater blog.

Why is this absolutely required reading? Well here’s my opinion on it, and keep in mind that I spent some time downrange with a Long Range Surveillance unit. You’ll notice that he mentions “LRS” in the linked article.

In the post-SHTF situation, reality is that most of us are not going to have the ability to activate and operate with a company (roughly 90-120 dudes) or platoon-sized (about 30 or so dudes) element. The majority of us are going to be struggling to gather even a squad (8-10 dudes) that has the proper variation of skills and equipment when needed, while having the uniformity of equipment in other areas, experience, mindset, physical skills… You get my point.

In my opinion, your most important “fighting” teams are two: One is your actual defensive perimeter team, or if you have enough people to form a neighborhood protection team (NPF). Basically, these are your people guarding the home base. It’s whoever you can find with the gear they can find and the weapons they have. Most of us aren’t going to have rotating guard duties divided up among former Rangers and other operators.

The other important team is the team that NCScout discusses. The scout team. In the military, as he states, it’s about six people. When I was in Afghanistan, 2-38 Cav was running eight. In your case, it probably does need to be about three. If you actually do have the people, the skills, the gear, the goals, the need and the AO to facilitate it, then go right ahead and do six. He goes into detail about what kind of skills are ideal, such as bow hunting, radio operation, the ability to hit long range targets in less-than-ideal conditions.

I would add a little bit of medical skills in there, though I’m not so sure that if you’ve just got a three-man team, that you’d want to burden anyone into a full on combat medic role with all of the associated gear seeing as this is not a direct action weapons squad. It’s still a scout team, sent out to assess the operating environment surrounding your home base.

Required reading. Get on it.

From American Partisan – One Hundred and Fifty Questions to a Guerrilla

This post from American Partisan is solid gold on your screen. Make a hard copy or two and study it. Pass it along to trusted friends.

This is where we are. Get used to it.