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Editor’s Introductory Note:  This article was written by an active-duty Special Operations Forces officer. I’ve confirmed his bona fides. You may recall reading his article on SOP writing, which we posted in April of 2020.

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I’ve been thinking about writing on the topic of Wargaming for quite some time but recent events really pushed me to get it done and hopefully pass on some sage advice. We are currently in some tumultuous times and it pays to be as prepared as possible.

Now that you’ve got your perfect homestead all set up ready for the Schumer to hit the fan, what’s next? Your answer should be wargaming. If you are being honest with yourself, you should have started wargaming far before this but now is better than later. What is wargaming? Wargaming (sometimes called Red Teaming) is a simulation of an armed conflict between multiple parties. It helps stimulate ideas, highlight critical tasks, and provides insight that might not otherwise be discovered. (For some details on wargaming from the U.S. Army SF perspective, see the Special Forces Detachment Mission Planning Guide, GTA 31-01-003) It is a process used to visualize how an event may or likely will unfold and can be used to our advantage in order to improve our position. You should always be improving your foxhole.

Why you should wargame

The key benefit of wargaming is that it allows you to shoot holes in a plan in order to better it and increase the likelihood of success. You should do this before any risk may come to you. It creates a deliberate process to help discover useful insight that may otherwise have been missed. This can also be a good way to work on and verify SOPs. (I’ve previously discussed SOPs in SurvivalBlog.)

Another benefit of wargaming is that it helps you find out where your decision points will be. A decision point is where a key decision must be made in order to follow a certain course of action. These decision points can be time-based or event-based. By already having some of these assessed, you can anticipate them, and in turn make a quicker, more informed choice. It is preferable to make a decision that you can foresee rather than blindly choosing. A very simple analogy to illustrate this point would be knowing your spouse is going to ask what you want to eat the moment you come home. Is it easier to answer when you’ve been busy all day and haven’t thought about it at all, or, if you thought on the way home and know what food is at the house or where you like to eat? If you know it is going to happen, and a decision must be made, then why not be prepared?

Prep work

Prior to wargaming the plan, you must decide what is the desired goal or best achievable outcome. Now you must define your acceptable outcome. (How much stuff are you willing to lose? How many people are you willing to lose? Et cetera.) This can be harsh and scary but you must be realistic when defining your acceptable outcome. If you aren’t realistic, then you will not gain the necessary insight needed for a successful plan.

I’ll use the example of a home security plan. This is a good time to try implementing some of those SOPs. You first have to define what it is you’re preparing for. I suggest starting by looking at your most likely assessed risk, which is probably going to be robbery. What steps have you done to keep someone from robbing your home? From there you can branch off into further scenarios. Such as, looking at it from a Schumer hitting the fan perspective. A well-equipped group of 15-20 marauders shows up and wants to take what is yours. Realistically, what will make them leave and what will ensure they leave?Continue reading“Wargaming, by Pudge”

(Continued from Part 1. This concludes the article.)

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I also want to leave you with one example of the scenario that I fear the most happening in my localized area. Let’s just say that there was a 7.0 or higher earthquake on the New Madrid Faultline. (I am in an adjacent state that would be affected, per the research by experts.) I ask readers to ponder the following situation:

Powerlines are down in the majority of 3-4 states. Underground power lines could be disrupted. Substations could be damaged. Supposing that parts vendors have enough inventory ready to go, are the interstate highways intact to get them delivered? Is fuel available to run trucking lines? I’ve seen tornado damage in my area take weeks to be repaired enough to get power back online, from a storm that only damaged a few square miles. If the gas stations have gas, they don’t have power to pump it or to process your credit/debit card transaction. The scope of earthquake damage would be much worse.

Also, most of the waterlines in the ground will be broken. My small local water system has around 200 miles of PVC water mains in the ground. These range in size from 2 inch to 10 inch diameters that are usually installed in 20 feet joints. Maybe some could be saved and reused if they are slip jointed, but certainly not all. We have four elevated water tanks that will possibly be lying on the ground, emptied of over half a million gallons of water, so what mains that are left intact will be empty. Not to mention that our water supplier, the treatment plant that provides potable water to us and several other systems, affecting hundreds of thousands of customers, is in the same shape we are.

Can we get the pipe we need to rebuild the system? Will the electrical grid be up to run the pumps to get the water from our supplier if we do? Will our supplier even be able to treat the water safely to furnish us water when we can get back up and running? And guess what, the service lines from our meter to your house could be broken too. Good luck finding the pipe and supplies to fix your side.

Gas mains could be broken underground too. The fires that could result from damaged gas supply lines will be hard to put out without water in the mains. I don’t know very much about the natural gas industry, but I assume that it is somewhat dependent on electricity for distribution.

The Mississippi River ran backward and flooded a large area in 1811-1812. I don’t even know where to start to detail the consequences of that happening again. But I know that the area affected the last time is now densely populated and heavily industrialized. Besides the horrors of lives lost, and homes and businesses destroyed, there will be no guarantee that public utilities will be restored within the normal parameters of time that they have become operable in the past. The ramifications of that one possible event are terrifying to me personally, but any scenario in which the electricity grid as we know it collapsing could have catastrophic results. I realize that an earthquake may not cripple the entire country, and there are other situations that could, such as an EMP, a nuclear event, or another country attacking our country’s grid.Continue reading“Be Ready For Infrastructure Collapse – Part 2, by J330”

I feel a pressing need to share with you some things I have learned about the industry in which I am employed.

I am very blessed to have grown up on a working farm in a close-knit rural community in the south. I come from a long line of vegetable gardeners, lunchroom ladies and short-order cooks, and the main order of business has always been to get food on the table and all that this entails. I still live on the same 100-acre property that I grew up on. We grow chickens, pigs, cattle, hay and vegetables. We have abundant wildlife, wooded mountain acreage, a fruit orchard and wild blackberries. The property has three ponds, a natural spring, and a well.

My husband is a jack of all trades and always seems to know how to make anything useful and efficient with a little welding and mechanic work. We are financially stable enough to have food stocks, medicine and seeds stored away. I have like-minded able-bodied friends and family. I feel somewhat secure that I can feed my family as long as I still have control over my own land. If I don’t, then my family and I are already dead anyway. Bugging out has never been an option that I could live with. I know I am in a much better place and position than most. I never had a huge realization (like some of the writers that I enjoy reading on this blog) that I needed to be prepared, it was just always there, a normal way of life.

I work part-time at a small local utility. I mainly answer the office phone, file paperwork, and take payments. The utility provides water to less than 2,500 customers. It is an easy job with excellent benefits and I am very thankful to have it.

I am, however, often dismayed at the instability of the utility structures in the area that I live in. I am not knowledgeable enough about the electric and natural gas and propane industries enough to discuss much about them, but I will say that the entire industry of utilities is interwoven. The water utility that I work for is extremely reliant on electricity to pump water where we need it to go and to keep wastewater from going where we don’t want it to go. When the power goes out, we go scrambling to find a generator big enough to run the pump station. The office is dead in the water – no phones, no computers, no internet. That means that we can’t effectively communicate with our customers about the status of our system or their individual service connections – both of which are important in an emergency.

Water and Power

I realize that commonsense will tell you all this. But the point I want to emphasize to the general public is that you cannot depend on public utilities at all for being able to quickly operate at normal level during any type of disaster scenario. We often have tornadoes in this area. And because tornadoes are so hit and miss, the chances of everyone being out of power at the same time are pretty low. But we have had some close calls. In one example, the entire area was out of power for two weeks because the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) equipment one hundred miles away was damaged in a tornado and the parts to repair it had to be ordered from another part of the world. How would that turn out now, with Covid-19 having such an effect on international manufacturing and shipping?

Why don’t utilities have adequate generators on hand? And plenty of extra parts and materials stored on site? And extra trained laborers always available to work whenever disaster strikes? An alternate source of water, gas, or power supply in case their primary supplier can’t functionally supply their demand?

These are all good questions. And, as you probably already know, the answer is money. Most utilities are not there to make a profit, only to provide a service to the public. Some utilities are private, some are public corporations owned by members, and some are government entities governed by a city or county. But they almost never actually make a profit. Utilities rely on grants and loans and raising rates on the customers when it becomes necessary to upgrade the system, and sometimes just to make the balance sheet work. Larger utilities probably have better disaster plans in place, but I am only familiar with smaller systems in my area.Continue reading“Be Ready For Infrastructure Collapse – Part 1, by J330”