From the Archives: The Doorstep Problem

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Inspired by the drama on last night's episode of the Walking Dead, here's an old-but-goody from the archives talking about the dilemma of friends & family showing up on your doorstep after troubles have hit. I've gone through and added a bit here and there to help get across some of the points - so we'll call this a director's cut.

"If the world ends, I'm coming to your place!"

We've probably all heard some variation of the above before. Family and friends who plan to show up on your doorstep when the stuff splatters on the fan. I like to call this the "doorstep problem."

In some ways, I suppose having this problem is a compliment--family/friends recognize that we're prepared, they aren't, and they'll need to rely on you in a bad situation. But really, how to respond to this? Let them use up your limited supplies, eat you out of house and home? Turn them away?

Well, we're all about being prepared before trouble hits, so the doorstep problem something we need to think through and prepare before hard times. If TSHTF and your lazy, unprepared extended family member X shows up on your doorstep, you should have your course of action thought through and prepared beforehand.

The way I see it, there are three possible strategies for address the doorstep problem: leave them hanging, plan to support them or convert them to the survivalist way.

Stealth vs. Open Defense in a TEOTWAWKI Scenario

The Two Strategies
At a high level, there are two different strategies that one can take when trying to survive aggressors when TEOTWAWKI rolls around.
 
On one hand, you can lay low and try to remain unnoticed/hidden, or at least be so elusive that an aggressor can't mount a direct attack against you. You operate from concealment and have, generally, a run/hide mentality when trouble runs around. If you engage the enemy, it's going to be using sniper or guerrilla tactics; you won't survive a standup fight. But mostly, you hunker down, stay hidden and survive.

On the other hand, you can maintain an open defensive posture, where you directly confront aggressors. In this case, you would have things like open patrols, check points and other obvious defensive measures. Your organization would have ability to project obvious power and control within your area of operations, allowing you to maintain some level of law/order. When trouble comes around, you stand up and fight.

These two different strategies go back to the natural instincts of fight versus flight--sometimes, it makes sense to stand and fight, other times it makes sense to run and hide. You can see these play out in conflicts today and throughout history--the U.S. against insurgents/Al Queda, the DEA against drug smugglers, Anne Frank and the Nazis and so on.

Open Defense
This is the defensive posture we'd all like to take -- no one wants to live in secrecy and in constant fear of attack or discovery. You want to stand up for yourself, your family and what is yours. Unfortunately, it takes a good amount of power to be able to live this way. You've got to be strong enough to scare away potential attackers and defeat any who are brave enough to test their luck. That means that you need manpower and firepower.

A small survival group is not going to be able to take this stance--you'd need a larger group--a neighborhood or a small town, most likely. The community would form some kind of neighborhood watch or town militia for mutual defense, probably with the aid of intact law enforcement or military personnel. With the bodies and some fire power, a community could defend their homes and maintain order.

In survival fiction, the towns in One Second After and the neighborhood in Lights Out take an open defense posture. The town in Jericho does, too.

In a collapse scenario, I think this would be the response of most communities. When a larger community breaks down (nation, state, city, etc.), it's a somewhat natural transition to fall back onto a more immediate community--the people next door and across the street. There's huge advantages to community--it's civilization and safety. A sustainable community would provide the best quality of life, post-TEOTWAWKI--but it would have to be sustainable. That means things like local water, food, probably some kind of fuel, and decent people who don't already hate each other.

Problems come when things like food and water run out, internal strife tears the community apart, the community runs into an aggressor they can't contend with, or if disaster renders the community unlivable. How fast that will happen is going to vary wildly based on your location.

The Stealth Approach
If you can't beat aggressors in a stand-up fight, then it's run and hide or become subject to the aggressor's will. In general, this survival strategy means, surprise, a lot of hiding out and going unnoticed. If fighting must be done, it's using sniper and guerrilla tactics. If movement must be done, its probably at night or at least in thick cover and well camouflaged. If your hide site is located and threatened by a superior force, then you bug out to somewhere safe, maybe with a sniper or guerrilla attack to slow the baddies down and allow you some breathing room. You get the picture.

This kind of existence is difficult to sustain long term. Survival is hard enough without having to worry about doing everything in secrecy. For example, how do you farm or raise a vegetable garden in secrecy? How do you cook or keep from freezing to death without drawing attention? How do you deal with waste? Now compound these problems with multiple families. Very difficult.

Living way out in the hinter-boonies would offer some advantages, but in a collapse scenario, every remote farmhouse or cabin will have a good number of visitors looking for a place to hole up or scavenge. If there's a road, people will find it. And yes, you can make a house look abandoned or burnt out, but desperate and curious people will still check it out. Crowds certainly will be smaller way out in the middle of nowhere, but your chances of having backup from neighbors/the community are also going to be lower. If your group can't deal with whoever comes knocking, then you've got a problem.

A real hide site is going to be, well, really difficult for anyone to find. Hard to access and hidden. In a rural setting, a remote and well-camouflaged camp that's not accessible by road; maybe a cave or excavated hide. In a more populated setting, a concealed bunker or hidden safe room. Spider holes and hideouts, that kind of thing.

As mentioned, a hide is going to be very difficult to sustain long term, so it will probably need to be a temporary situation. You will need to emerge and resupply eventually, whether that is through pre positioned caches, barter, hunting/gathering, farming or relocating to another area entirely.

In survival fiction, the man and his son in The Road generally follow a stealthy approach to survival, avoiding contact and hiding when trouble comes around. They have it best when they find the concealed and well-stocked underground bunker. In Patriots, the Group adopts this strategy when confronted by the evil U.N./black helicopter invaders and retreat to their wilderness hide and begin their guerrilla war. In the Survivalist series, John Rourke's concealed retreat/cave complex is an elaborate and well-stocked hide.

Use Both
It would be narrow-minded to only think through one strategy or the other. An open, community or large group-based approach to defense and security is going to be preferential for most of us, but it may or may not work out. The back-up plan in that case would be a stealthy approach--if the community is done for, you bug out to somewhere safe and hunker down until things blow over.

In more common prepper terms, if your local neighborhood/community is a viable option, then an open, community based approach may make sense. If that fails, then you still have the opportunity to bug out and hide. Consider and plan for either possibility and I think you'll be better off.

Solo vs. Group Survival

Having a group of survival-minded friends/family to help weather the end of the world is probably the single most important prep that you can have. Let's consider for a moment some of the challenges of trying to survive entirely on your own:

• Limited defense ability--the bad guys will come at you in gangs and groups
• You have to do everything--no ability to specialize or share the workload
• Limited skillset to draw from
• What happens when you get injured or sick?

Surviving on your own and even in a small group will be a challenge. There is a reason that humans tend to form tribes, clans and gangs--there is safety and viability in numbers.

That isn't to say that surviving on your own is entirely foolish or hopeless. The strategy, however, must be one focused on stealth and avoidance. You can't win a conflict of any major size, so you have to escape the notice of any potential aggressors--stay hidden. Operate mostly at night. If you do make contact with an enemy force, you lay down some suppressing fire and run for it.

Your preps should also be planned with stealth in mind. Any kind of decent-scale farming or gardening is out--you will need stored foods that can be prepare easily. Water is another thing to keep in mind--you will want to avoid leaving your hide site for water collection, so stored water, low-profile rain water catchment or a source of water at your hide site will be important. Camouflage is a must--personal camo and camo for your hide site and gear. Your rifle should probably be of a sniper type, outfitted with magnified optics and able to observe and engage threats from distance. Night vision gear, suppressed weapons and security equipment would be of extra value to the solo survivor. You will also want to be able to bug out quickly and quietly--gear caches and multiple hides sites will give you options if your primary hide site is compromised.

If you're going to pursue a group survival strategy, you have the ability to rely on others (at least to an extent). Types and sizes of groups vary--a small retreat group, neighborhood militia, an entire town or even an entire region. Whatever the size, you will need to contribute to your group in a substantial way, so having an area of survival specialization will be valuable. A unique skill that makes you valuable, even essential to the survival of the group. If the group is of decent size, you will see the emergence of a local, barter-based economy, so barter goods may also be valuable. With the ability to share workload and with multiple mouths to feed, food production will be important. There may also be an opportunity for local production and specialization in other areas.

Preps-wise, a group-based survivor will lean more towards barter, handouts and preps for helping a large group or community--things like comms gear, gardening/food production, other local production gear, medical supplies and so on. Stuff that the average family (or group member) won't have and that can't be easily improvised. After TEOTWAWKI, you will be acting as a leader and mentor to your group, helping equip them with the skills and gear necessary for their survival and to enable them to help you survive. Where a solo survivor will focus on stealth, evasion, etc., the group survivor will lean towards people skills, leadership and teaching ability. 

Having a group is not a magic bullet to survival, of course--you've got to be realistic. You won't be able to take on a force larger and/or better equipped than you are, and with several dozen or hundred people, your ability to run and hide is limited. The group itself can also end up turning against you--confiscating what you have or putting you in a situation that gets you killed.

Either strategy can work in a rural or urban area, though rural does traditionally have the advantage. The sheer competition present in a heavily populated area makes survival challenging--lots of big groups competing for survival. Either approach can work with bug in plans or bug out plans, too.

You can also certainly hedge your bets and plan for both--plan to work with a group and then fall back to a small group/stealth approach if that fails.

I'm interested in seeing what everyone's current plans are? Do you have an organized "survival" group? Tentative plans to join forces with family and friends? Anyone planning to take a solo/small group stealth approach? Let us know in the comments section below!

The Doorstep Problem

"If the world ends, I'm coming to your place!"

We've probably all heard some variation of the above before. Family and friends who plan to show up on your doorstep when the stuff splatters on the fan. I like to call this the "doorstep problem."

In some ways, I suppose having this problem is a compliment--family/friends recognize that we're prepared, they aren't, and they'll need to rely on you in a bad situation. But really, how to respond to this? Let them use up your limited preps, eat you out of house and home? Turn them away?

Well, we're all about being prepared before trouble hits, so the doorstep problem something we need to think through and prepare before trouble hits. If TSHTF and your lazy, unprepared extended family member X shows up on your doorstep, you should have your course of action thought through and prepared beforehand.

The way I see it, there are three possible strategies for address the doorstep problem: leave them hanging, plan to support them or convert them to prepping.

Leave 'em Hanging
This is a pretty cold way to be, and likely to not be viable unless you're a cold heart or particularly dislike your relatives/friends. Basically, you plan, on purpose, NOT to help anyone out when TEOTWAWKI strikes. Not just the random refugees, but even your family, friends--anyone. You've got preps for your family and that's it.

Some survivalists "soften" this approach by flying under the radar. They pretend to be just as unprepared as everyone else and prep in secrecy -  generally a wise strategy anyways - and keep everyone not in your immediate family or survival group oblivious to your supplies. They avoid the "I'm coming to your place!" but will face the same decisions in the end--to help or not.

Others let friends/family know about their preps but make it very clear that they've only stored away enough for your family and there will be NO handouts after TEOTWAWKI. They say things like "I don't care who it is, I'm not going to give away my limited resources  to people who were too foolish to prepare for themselves."

Either way, you'll be confronted with the problem of helping these people out if TSHTF. It could be they show up on your doorstep after TEOTWAWKI, despite the warnings that you've got nothing for them. Or, if you've managed to keep your preps a secret--and can keep them a secret during a disaster-- you will have to sit by, doing nothing while your friends/family suffer, starve, remain in danger, or whatever. Both are pretty cold hearted, and you might be able to live with it, but you need to make sure your immediate family is on the same page. Will your wife be able to turn away her brother, sister, best friend--parents? Will you? Probably not.

And hey, if things are desperate, they probably won't leave. You're a starving refugee on your brother's or best friend's doorstep, and you know they've got food, water, guns and ammo, etc. Are you going to give up and head to the Superdome, or bang on the door, shout, complain--heck, maybe try to force your way in and try to talk some sense into 'em? As the prepared person in this scenario, looking to turn your unprepared loved one away, you may need to be ready to do so at gunpoint.

Aside from taking a cold heart, turning away friends and family is just not the smart strategic choice. With a few exceptions, friends and family are an important asset - more manpower, experience, expertise, skills, and people to watch your back and look out for you in a fight. You can't be everywhere at once, stay awake 24/7 and have every possible skill. These are people you already know and trust. You'll need all of the help you can get to survive and keep ahead of the goblins and zombie biker gangs out there. Not utilizing that asset--turning it away--is just plain foolish.

Plan to Support Them
In this strategy, you accept the fact that your family and friends won't prepare and will look to you when TEOTWAWKI comes. You prepare accordingly, storing away additional food, water, guns and gear for them to use. When they show up, you can feed 'em and put them to work.

This communal approach to survival may be more expensive, but it also enables you to capitalize on the extra manpower and expertise that more people can provide, and it also acknowledges the fact that you will have to accommodate them anyways.

Cover your family's survival bases first, and then look to build up your supplies to accommodate your "doorstep crew." This doesn't need to be top of the line stuff--they're handouts, so make them cheap but durable and functional.

For food, add in more buckets of bulk staples. For gear, buy used, army surplus or keep around old stuff that you've replaced and upgraded. For guns--well, many survivalists that I know have gun safes packed to the brim. They could outfit a small army without too much trouble. If you're not in that group and looking for low-cost "handout" guns, I'd pick from .22 rifles, Mosin Nagants and inexpensive pump shotguns. Plus several hundred rounds of ammo for each, plus some basic support gear, which could be as minimal as a satchel of some kind.

Aside from conventional survival supplies, think through the logistical and community-building aspects. Where will new comers sleep? How will you divide work? Make decisions? In a pandemic scenario, do you quarantine them? How? How can your little community thrive and stay ahead of competing/combative groups?

You should also make it clear to friends and family that if they show up at your house looking for help, you're going to be in charge and you're going to put them to work. No free rides. Set the expectations beforehand.


Finally, few people--even unprepared ones--are totally useless. People have some kind of interest, asset or skill that you can capitalize on in a disaster scenario. Encourage your doorstep crew to bring that along with them if disaster strikes. So "yes, you can show up here, and we'll share our food with you, but I'm going to put you to work, and I want you to bring your welding gear/guns/attack gerbils/ATVs/whatever with you." Get whatever value you can out of them in exchange for the security you'd offer.

Convert them to Prepping
This is kind of the "ideal," but also the most difficult to achieve for unmotivated friends/family. It's hard because getting someone to go from being an unprepared sheeple to a self sufficient sheep dog is a big change of attitude and behavior. But that behavior change starts with something simpler, a change in belief. If you want to get someone to prepare for themselves, you've got to get them to believe that they need to.


In my experience, if a friend/family member has zero preps and the "doorstep" attitude, they probably believe something like the following:

1. Nothing really bad will ever happen and there's no need to have food storage, survival gear, etc.
2. Even though I think something bad could happen, I can't afford/don't have time to do anything about it.
3. If something bad DID happen, I have my good ol' buddy/relative, the police, the government, etc. to depend on.

WE can see through this reasoning pretty easily, and honestly, most people that I've known can too. Most people, deep down, feel some desire to be quasi-prepared for hard times. But they use the above reasoning to rationalize that feeling away.

"That will never happen" or "that could never happen here/to me" is the most prevalent, and often tied with "you're paranoid to think something like that COULD happen!" Of course, the news provides us with all kinds of great opportunities to point out the crappy things happening to people around the planet. Sometimes the doom and gloom approach works--opening peoples eyes to the fragility of society and all of the horrible things that happen can be a powerful and necessary thing.

Other times, the doom-and-gloom approach just doesn't work. Yep, you can point out all of the bad things out there, but again, they can say that it won't happen to them, they can't afford it, whatever. So, you have to be able to take alternate routes to change those beliefs. Here's a few ideas:

• "It's your responsibility as a man/father/woman/mother to be able to take care of yourself."
• "It's practical to have an emergency fund, food storage and a firearm for home defense. Use examples of how they've come in handy in your life or provided peace of mind."
• Get them interested in something peripherally related to preparedness. Canning, sewing, hunting, fishing, shooting, reloading, camping, hiking, martial arts, knitting, mechanics, personal finances, whatever. 
• Give prep-related gifts, especially those that can influence their beliefs and attitudes vs. getting put in a closet. EDC gear (that they will carry) is also a good belief changer--learning from experience that it's good to be prepared.
• Discuss the economic benefits of preparing, mention great deals you've gotten, etc. Persuade them that they can afford to prep/it will save them money.
• Along with the above, share survival related media with them. It gets the conversation going and can open people's minds. Books are good, but they can be overwhelming or too doomy-gloomy (Patriots is a good example here). Movies and TV shows are usually more approachable.
• There's a variety of religious motivators for preparing, too, though scripture alone isn't enough to motivate many.

If you can convert someone over to the prepper ways, you've won the battle. If they show up on your doorstep post-SHTF, they'll be a valuable allies to your group, able to provide for themselves and pull their own weight.

A Combination Approach
Life is generally not as clear cut as we'd like it to be, and addressing the "doorstep" problem is the same way. You will probably have to use all three strategies as you deal with this problem.

There will be people you'll have to turn away--the neighbors, Bob from the accounting department, etc. Think that tough decision through beforehand, but realize that there will be some people you just won't be able to send packing.

You should prepare handouts and extra supplies for those who you do take in, so that you're able to take full advantage of the benefit additional people can provide. Take care of the needs of your immediate family first and then make inexpensive preps in this area.

As you can, motivate your "doorstep" contingent to prepare--work on changing their beliefs about preparing and surviving. Take multiple approaches as needed and work to motivate them to be able to take care of themselves in a disaster. Turn them into valuable allies.

"I'm coming to your place!" is a big concern and headache for many survivalists, and needs to be handled with thought and care. But, if handled well, you can capitalize on the manpower and skills bring to the table, and hopefully convert a few into well-prepared allies along the way!

Resilient communities pt. 2

A resilient community is not just your retreat or your cabin in the woods. It is a community. Numbers are important. You need numbers to provide adequate manpower, security and the array of skills needed after TEOTWAWKI.

Small communities have been the backbone of civilization since the dawn of man, and remain the smallest group needed for long term viable survival. Call 'em tribes, clans or whatever else you want--it's a group of several families who have banded together for mutual benefit and survival. Community members are bound together by co-dependence, trust, tradition and beliefs. These tight-knit community bonds last for lifetimes and generations.

These kinds of communities have been around for thousands of years, but have become rare in our modern world. Families are spread across continents and only see each other occasionally, people move and relocate frequently, friends lose touch with each other and few of us are more than casually friendly with our neighbors. Many of us yearn for a sense of community, belonging and need--we yearn for the "tribes" that mankind has thrived in for millennia. It's pretty sad.

So, it's this kind of small, tightly knit community that we want to make resilient and self sufficient. And it's this kind of survival group that would stand the best chance post-TEOTWAWKI.

Advantages of Technology 
Modern technology has given us massive advantages that our ancestors did not have. We have electricity and all of its benefits, combustion engines, the list goes on. The resilient community seeks to "harden" their access to those technologies so that they will be available no matter what happens to the global grid. When TEOTWAWKI comes, a resilient community will still have electricity, transportation and so on.

Worldwide electronic collaboration/open source idea sharing is one recent "technology" that holds a particular interest to a resilient community. Communities of the past were usually isolated from each other. Their ideas and knowledge were limited to the community's immediate members. Today, we can communicate and share ideas and information with people across the world. This information sharing is incredibly powerful--now you are not limited to just the ideas of people that you know, you have access to the ideas, practices and techniques of everyone. Through this open source collaboration, the best ideas can be identified, refined and perfected.

Manufacturing
When you add in small-scale automated manufacturing technologies, you can see the vast potential that collaboration holds for resilient communities. A small community typically lacks most any manufacturing capability. If you want a new machine/widget/gizmo, you've got to buy or trade for it. If you can't buy/trade for it, you're screwed. Take the Native Americans, for example--they had none of the advanced manufacturing capabilities of the settlers/pioneers/foreign devils--and were defeated and conquered (in part) because of it. Today, we are all very dependent on manufacturing, and dependence is not good.

Take a car part for example.  Today, it's produced in a factory hundreds or thousands of miles away--maybe even across the ocean. It's then shipped to a distributor and then shipped to your local shop before you buy it. We're dependent on that system working in order to get that part.

What if you could just load a schematic into your community (or basement) automated manufacturing machine and have it built right in front of your eyes? Now what if thousands of others had collaborated together to make that part more durable, safer and more efficient than the original? Now what if instead of a car part, you were building an entire car?

Sound crazy? It's not. People are already open sourcing car design:

http://www.theoscarproject.org/

http://www.autoblog.com/2009/03/03/geneva-2009-clever-edag-light-car-open-source-is-like-safety/

Resilient communities

We survival/peppers recognize something that many do not--that the world we live in is fragile, fundamentally flawed/broken and in decline. So we plan, train and stock away supplies to survive the coming collapse. But, overall, our part in this is passive--we're waiting and preparing for the coming hard times.

What if instead of waiting for the collapse of the global system, we created a system that had none of the weaknesses and inequalities of the current system and could provide (and ensure) a better quality of life for its members?

What if instead of relying on truck farming and eating food grown hundreds of miles, we lived in a community that produced all of its food locally?

What if instead of depending on intricate, fragile and worldwide manufacturing supply chains, our local community was capable of manufacturing everything that we needed?

What if instead of relying on electricity generated hundreds of miles away, our community generated all of its own power?

These are just a few of the ideas behind what military strategist John Robb, author of Global Guerrillas, has termed "resilient communities." Read his synopsis here.

Basically, a resilient community is one that has the capability to provide the services that we conventionally rely upon the "global grid" grid for--food, energy, security, transportation, communication, etc. As a result, the community has a much greater ability to withstand collapse/disruptions to that global grid--it can survive without it just fine. And also, because its members have real assets and capabilities (energy generation, food growth, local manufacturing, etc.) they can also preserve their wealth better than those who have imaginary assets and capabilities.

Instead of sitting passively on the sidelines or hiding in a mountain retreat, waiting for the broken system to fall apart, you build a system that works. Ironically, this new system is pretty much just a modernized version of how people have been living for thousands of years. Self sufficiently.

More later.