“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War
In a post-disaster scenario, your survival and the survival of those you care about is going to depend heavily on several factors:
- Skills and experience – Knowing how to perform tasks that are critical to survival
- Mindset – The ability to face reality and take appropriate actions
- Resources – Having the right equipment, tools, and supplies
- Information – Knowing what’s going on around you and how it impacts you
While the first three have been pretty extensively discussed on SurvivalBlog, comprehensive approaches for collecting and managing information/intelligence in a post-disaster scenario haven’t been addressed nearly as much. The focus of this article is on collecting information and intelligence while you’re away from your home base and mobile, although much of it can also be applied to activities while in and around your home.
What do I mean by ‘intelligence’? I consider intelligence to be information regarding anything that can have an impact on your survival, whether it’s about people, resources, events or anything else. Intelligence typically starts off as raw data – say for example ‘3 people’. By itself that doesn’t tell you anything useful, but if you add more context it becomes information – ‘three armed strangers’. If you add even more context that qualifies how it can impact you it becomes intelligence – ‘three armed strangers that have been spotted four times over the last week, moving in your direction’.
Intelligence shouldn’t just apply to armed people or conflict scenarios – in a post-disaster scenario your enemy can be starvation, medical emergencies, flooding or anything else that can have a negative impact on you and yours. My goal is to be able to collect and manage information relating to a wide range of topics, which I’ve categorized as follows:
- Security—Information relating to your security – e.g. group of armed marauders spotted at location X, heading west
- Safety—Information relating to your safety – e.g. erosion of dam upriver, wildfire several miles away moving east
- Health—Information relating to your health – e.g. slow leak at chemical plant upriver, flu bug going around in local population
- Resources—Information relating to things you can use
– Food—e.g. location of patch of raspberry bushes, herd of deer spotted
– Medical – e.g. location of medicinal plants, location of doctor
– Material—e.g. stack of lumber at location X, location of deserted tractor for spare parts
– Equipment—e.g. location of a bunch of garden tools in back of a crashed landscaping truck
– Water—e.g. lakes, rivers, ponds, etc.
– Shelter—Possible shelter for when you’re mobile or as a fallback position - Events—Information relating to significant events that have or are occurring – e.g. burned building with bodies at location X, observed shootout at location Y.
- People—Information relating to specific individuals or groups.
- Operational—Information that could impact your operational activities – e.g. bridge fell down, avalanche blocked trail.
- Social—Information relating to the general state of the world around you – e.g. nearby town has re-established government.
- Logs – Things that have happened that don’t fall into any of the above categories – e.g. stopped at location X for the night while on patrol
A single intelligence tidbit may actually contain information from multiple categories – for example, ‘Spotted John Smith breaking into the old Jones house’ contains information on People (John Smith) and Events (break-in at Jones house).
The goal of field intelligence collection is to gather information that can be later analyzed and correlated with other information to provide insight into what’s going on around you, identify trends that could impact you and to support planning and decision-making. Note that this article will focus exclusively on collecting the information in an organized manner and returning it to your base of operations for further analysis; I’ll be writing an article in the future on managing, correlating and analyzing the data after you’ve collected it.
Note: Recording audio, video or pictures of people without their permission may be illegal in some locations – please understand your local laws before doing so in ‘normal’ circumstances. For the purpose of this article I’m assuming you’re operating in a scenario where legal issues aren’t as much of a concern.
Containers
When thinking about collecting intelligence I find it useful to start with what types of intelligence ‘containers’ you might use to collect information. A container is something that holds intelligence information, and can be things like your brain, notes, pictures, maps, recordings, etc. Since most of us don’t have a photographic memory, the simplest and most obvious type of container is a notebook and pencil or pen that you use to document your observations. However, this approach has a number of potential limitations:
- You’ll need to stock enough notepads and writing instruments to cover the post-disaster period. When you run out of paper your ability to document intelligence goes away and you’ll need to rely on memory alone, or use pencils and stock up on plenty of erasers.
- The notes will have to be legible to be useful (I can’t even read my own handwriting sometimes).
- People taking notes will need to be skilled at quickly writing what they’re trying to convey in sufficient detail to be useful.
- Hand drawing or describing complex images, especially human faces, can be difficult for most people.
- Collecting and correlating handwritten notes when you return to base will be difficult.
Another factor to consider regarding intelligence collection is ‘metadata’, which is essentially data that describes and provides context for other data. For example, if you take a note regarding something you observed, the date, time and location of where you made the observation would be the metadata. Metadata is critical as it provides the context you’ll need to correlate, analyze and understand the intelligence you collect, but can be difficult to create using paper and pencil.
For these reasons I’m going to focus on an approach to collecting field intelligence that leverages technology, utilizing various electronics and software apps as opposed to a purely analog one. However, some of the approaches I’ll be discussing can be applied to analog intelligence collection as well as digital.
So what particular data containers could be useful for collecting intelligence? The list I came up with includes the following:
- Written/typed/dictated notes
– Thoughts
– Observations
– Concerns - Audio recordings
– Notes
– Interviews
– Intercepted radio transmissions (Gists or full recordings) - Photos
- Videos
- Maps & location data
- Drawings
Goals
When I was putting together my field intel collection system I defined a number of goals the system had to meet:
- Internet Independence – In a post-disaster scenario the Internet probably won’t be available, so all applications, data, maps, etc that I would need should be pre-installed or downloaded locally so everything would continue to work.
- GPS Independence – While the current generation of GPS satellites are pretty robust and can run for months or even years after a major terrestrial disaster (assuming the satellites themselves weren’t directly impacted), I wanted a solution that could perform location-based intel collection without depending on them.
- Power – Everything had to be rechargeable via low voltage, preferably via USB, so that I could use portable solar panels to recharge things while on the go.Flexibility – Changes in your situation, climate, location, etc. might necessitate different approaches to intel collection, so I wanted a system that was flexible.
- Investment – I wanted a system that could start with a minimal financial investment and expand as my requirements and financial situation changed.
- Non-commercial – I focused on software that was free and open-source that didn’t require you to sign up for an account, track your activities or share your data, and would continue to work without the need to regularly connect to an online account or ‘phone home’.
- Interoperable – Data collected in the field is useless if it can’t be easily shared with your intel system at home for analysis, so I wanted mobile intel collection apps to be compatible with what I use on my desktop for central intel correlation and analysis.
Intel Collection Scenarios
There are two possible types of scenarios for collecting intelligence information – ad hoc or planned. In ad hoc scenarios your planned activities didn’t specifically call-out collecting intelligence, but you encountered something in the course of those activities that could have intelligence value. For example, while walking around the local barter market you notice some shady looking characters that you’ve never seen before, so you surreptitiously take a couple of picture of them for future reference. Another example would be the discovery of a patch of raspberry bushes you come across while walking through the woods. Planned intelligence collection scenarios include things like active reconnaissance missions where you’re traveling some specific route in order to collect intelligence or setting up a fixed observation post (OP).
These two types of scenarios bring up another consideration – the difference between ‘mobile’ and ‘portable’. For this article I’ll consider anything you can take out and use without having to stop and set it up to be mobile, and anything that requires you to stop, take things out and set it up to be portable. Portable items are generally more capable, but they also tend to be larger, heavier and more complex and would typically be taken on dedicated reconnaissance missions or when setting up an OP.
Optics
Humans are visual creatures (around half of our brain is devoted to processing visual information), and a lot of the intelligence you collect will most likely be in the form of pictures and videos. As such it helps to have a basic understanding of how optics work to help you select the right equipment for your requirements. Professional photographers are probably going to cringe at my over-simplifications, but I just want to provide a little foundation for some of the equipment I’ll be discussing later.
Before discussing optics I want to point out that I’m only going to focus on visual enhancement optics like binoculars, monoculars and telescopes, and digital image collection devices like cell phone cameras. I enjoy film photography and spent many years in my younger days taking and developing film pictures, but I don’t consider it practical to stock the equipment and chemicals required to process film in a long-term disaster scenario.
First off, every visual image you deal with in the field will probably go through a lens of some kind, and understanding the basic characteristics of those lenses can help you select the best one for you needs. Most optics include a two number rating such as ‘10×25’ – the first number is the ‘focal length’ (in millimeters), which basically indicates how much magnification the lens has, so a higher focal length will allow you make out more detail at a further distance. The second number is the diameter (also in millimeters) of the objective lens, which is the one the light first comes into, and is part of the ‘front element’ (the ‘rear element’ is the part closest to your eye or camera). A larger objective lens will allow more light in, allowing you to see more clearly in lower light conditions. Optics that can change the focal length (e.g. zoom) will usually have a rating of something like ‘10-50×25’, so you can zoom in and out. The other impact the focal length has is the field of view, which is how wide of a view you’ll have at a given distance. The shorter the focal length the more you’ll be able to see side-to-side but the less magnification you’ll have. Some other considerations regarding lenses are:
- ‘X’ factor zoom – Some optics manufacturers use an ‘nX’ zoom value instead of of a pair of focal lengths like ‘10-50mm’ to indicate zoom. The X value is the multiple between the shortest and longest focal length, so a 10-50mm zoom lens can be said to have a ‘5X’ zoom. An X factor isn’t quite as useful when you don’t know either the shortest or longest focal length, and is typically used for marketing lower quality optics.
- The size and quality of the objective lens is critical to the overall picture quality and low-light capability of the lens. The larger the objective lens the more light photons will hit the sensor or your eye, but the larger and heavier the lens will be. For an extreme example of this, check out the Canon EF 1200mm f/5.6L USM Lens [1].
- Enhancements – Things like chemical coatings on the lenses, gas purging of the interior spaces and screw-on filters can all impact the quality of the images the lens produces.
- Mount [2] – Lenses need to be attached to whatever you’re using to take pictures, and lenses have a mount on one end to attach to your camera or other imaging device. Unfortunately, every vendor tends to have their own standard for mounting lenses, but you can buy converters that allow you to mix and match lenses and cameras.
- Extenders – Lens extenders [3] allow you to increase the focal length of a lens, giving you more magnification.
(To be continued tomorrow, in Part 2.)