By Standing Tall on Friday, 24 February 2023
Category: Preparedness

Community Defense - Part 5

INTRODUCTION

In Part 5 of this series, we'll address some of the specific requirements of defending a community against violent threats in an uncertain future. These caveats apply:

  1. We cannot anticipate every situation and environment, so we will not descend too far into specifics, instead relying on concepts and principles that are broadly applicable. These can be used to create training requirements and focus your preparations.
  2. Our focus is on the great state of Wyoming – where most of us live in rural or small town settings, only 11 towns exceed 10,000 population, and the two largest towns are under 70,000. Community defense in a big-city urban environment, from either the conceptual or tactical perspective, is not our primary focus or concern.

We've previously discussed legal and social constraints (Part 1), several historical and hypothetical threat scenarios (Part 2), the challenges of "community organizing" (Part 3), and the requirements of leadership, command, and decision-making for community defense (Part 4). Here we will review some of these ideas and assumptions, and present some concrete concepts and principles.

OPERATIONAL PERSPECTIVES

Defending a community is a more wickedly complex endeavor (see the differentiation of tame vs. wicked problems in Part 4) than self-defense or home protection, very different from relying on taxpayer funded government structures, and likewise very different from war in a foreign land. It is sadly necessitated by the dystopian future into which we appear to be headed.

Your area of operations will probably encompass a neighborhood, village, rural community, perhaps even a business or industrial complex, all of which share certain characteristics. The people or assets you seek to protect may be scattered among several locales, mostly private property, on which the owners and their representatives have substantial rights of arrest and use of force. These are interspersed among both public areas where private citizens have substantially less authority, and among other private properties whose owners will not support your activities.

Because of the size and complexity of this area, your intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities must grow, your need for reliable communications will be great, and sound contingency plans will be necessary to guide performance as events begin to unroll.

You would not be thinking and organizing for community defense unless you are concerned about the potential for a breakdown in social trust and cohesion, and a collapse in the rule of law that depends upon law enforcement response and functioning system of justice.

Threats include long-term or repetitive civil disorder (e.g., Portland 2020-2021), financial or infrastructure collapse, race- or class-based conflict, pandemic disease, or even acts of war, terrorism, sabotage, or insurgency. Natural disasters – challenging enough in themselves – can trigger downstream consequences of all the above types. Events could be brief and localized or affect a wide area for a longer duration.

You might be entirely outside the footprint of any of these events, and still feel their effects through cascading consequences and second order effects. These can include supply chain disruptions, in particular shortages of food, fuel, and agricultural inputs; and breakdowns in communications and connectivity. Migrants, refugees, or just an influx of family members and friends from out of town or out of state looking for a safe port in a storm, can impact your community even when local conditions are stable.

PERSISTENCE

Short term crises such as storms, power failures, or isolated episodes of civil disorder can be challenging enough for the unorganized and unprepared. But these are still relatively tame problems.

We cannot prescribe complete solutions for a sustained, long duration crisis. These would be very situation-dependent. One thing is axiomatic: individual and family preparedness is a cornerstone for your networking and recruiting for community defense. Responsibility first rests with the individual. To the extent that individuals and families are willing to, as the LDS church says, "Prepare every needful thing," the burden on their neighbors and community will be reduced. They will be more capable of contributing to community efforts when they are not fixated on where their next meal is coming from. Realistically, however, we recognize that many of our fellow citizens, no matter how smart, capable, and upstanding they may be in other respects, are more like the grasshopper in the old fable than they are the ant, and do nothing to prepare for adversity. Others live hand to mouth in the best of times and don't have the means to stock up for the worst. And yet they are our neighbors, and when adversity comes, we do not want them to suffer, to flee, or to become predatory; we have to consider what can be done to help our neighbors, even those who wake up too late.

Protracted crisis conditions, as we've said several times, imply a breakdown in response, assistance, and relief from government. Police, fire, EMS and other forms of support are no longer a phone call and a matter of minutes away. Human nature being what it is, those conditions are likely to rip the social fabric – destroy whatever level of social trust and cohesion existed pre-crisis. This is why, for instance, an event like a severe forest fire, hurricane, or hazardous material spill can lead to evacuation, which leads to looting and violence, displaced refugees with little more than the shirt on their back, and an unanticipated surge in demand for goods and services just as supply becomes constricted and uncertain, all in proportion to the severity and duration of the crisis. As S.M. Stirling put it, "People get cranky when they don't have enough to eat," or a warm place to sleep, or medicine for the kids, and therein lies the threat of violence.

Your threat profiles and preparations will be complicated by acknowledging people who are neither criminals, terrorists, nor enemy combatants, but only fellow citizens who are refugees from danger or disaster: cold, hungry, dehydrated, injured, ill, desperate, abandoned by the government – and possibly very numerous. Will you shoot them, turn them away, or do what you can to care for them?

OBJECTIVES

Let's review the fundamental objectives of community defense in this context of sustained, serial, or cascading crises that lead to a breakdown in order. It's about defending against violent threats. A strong defensive posture can deter many threats: si vis pacem, para bellum (if you would have peace, prepare for war); but you must be truly prepared to defend.

Objective #1: Protect property against violent threats. This is about real estate and "stuff" – some essential, some perhaps less so. It's also about geography: the type, number, and distribution of key property and assets. You may have to perform some triage. What are the most essential things and places that you must protect? Especially over an extended period, or against a large scale threat, you cannot protect them all, and as Frederick the Great said, "He who defends everything, defends nothing."

If these key assets are widely distributed, like farms or ranches isolated by distance from their neighbors, your ability to secure them will depend on manpower, communications, and mobility. If necessary, you may have to consolidate essential assets and supplies, just as you do people, in fewer locations that are more defensible and will require less manpower to secure.

How do you accomplish this? Portable assets, tools, equipment, and supplies (fuel and food foremost) should be consolidated in defensible locations, and to the extent possible, concealed from casual detection. Physical security measures (i.e., gates, fences, locks, hardened structures) can be helpful but are not sufficient. These are barriers, but all barriers can be defeated. It's a military axiom that obstacles and barriers are worthless – or at best, provide nothing but delay – if they are not covered by observation and fire.

Real estate that requires protection can include shelter for your population, water sources, farmland and gardens, and materials and equipment that cannot be easily moved.

Other important property, depending on the nature and duration of the crisis, can include livestock, feed, grazing, and crops in the ground or in interim storage.

Triage and consolidation sound simple; it is anything but. It is cold logic that conflicts with human nature – with individuals' resolve to remain on, and defend their own property. Few people will be willing to abandon their homes and property; but those who insist on their own private Alamo may have to do so with no guarantee of assistance.

Consider the often played-out drama of evacuation from the path of a wildfire. Smart and prepared families may have "go-bags" of essentials, but almost everyone facing this necessity waits until the last minute, throws an unsorted hodgepodge of items into one or more vehicles, and abandons the rest to the possibility of destruction. And of course, in 'normal' times, the vehicles are fueled and operable. How many essentials – never mind luxuries and sentimental items – are left behind in this kind of scramble? This is even more reason to have these discussions, and make these preparations, well in advance of any crisis.

Objective #2: Protect your people against violent threats. People are soft targets, high value, and mobile; for the most part, they are also flexible, stubborn, intelligent, resilient, and reactive. Some will be armed, trained, fit, dedicated, and capable, if you have been a good "community organizer." Others will be members of your support cadre, who can fight to defend themselves if attacked, but lack the experience, training, fitness, and disposition to serve as a tactical operator. Others yet will not be fighters at all, but can still assist in many ways, such as logistics, observation, and communications.

DEFENSIVE FUNCTIONS

There are five nearly universal functions you must adapt and apply in order to defend your community against violent threats. Each is built upon qualifications, abilities, and tasks that we will introduce here, and address in greater detail elsewhere:

Protected Locales. These are strongpoints, structures or compounds that can be defended against violent threats, and designated as refuges or rallying points for others. Not every home will qualify; and there are finite limits to how long any stronghold can hold out without reinforcement or relief.

This applies to both the protection of people, and of assets and property as discussed above. The concept is based on two assumptions, the first of which is a nod to the fact that you may be operating in the gray area between the stable rule of law, and a 'wild west' environment where legalities are no longer a consideration:

  1. Common law and statutes in most jurisdictions in America recognize your right to defend yourself on your own property, but not as armed groups in public; and
  2. Some worthy people in your community will not be capable of effective self-defense, and some properties will not be defensible.

It can be difficult for a family to defend a home, or a small staff to defend a business against more than a few attackers (regardless of their capabilities or intent), even in the short term; when vigilance around the clock is necessary, it may be impossible. It would be better to seek safety in numbers and in defensible locations.

People who have been alerted to general threats, or warned on a timely basis about specific immediate or imminent threats, should assemble in designated, prepared, protected locales where numbers, prior planning, and physical security measures can provide them a degree of security they could not achieve on their own. This may be as simple as two or more neighboring families congregating in one home, or it may involve a church, a school, a community center, or a business prepared to offer refuge to a larger number of people. If a protected locale is not within observation and small arms range of others, then its occupants will be on their own until the aggressor departs or reinforcements arrive. Historical antecedents are many, from medieval castles to the stout log homes of colonial New England. Today, examples abound in unstable, crime-ridden societies like South Africa. Security measures there, for suburban homes and remote ranches and farms, seem extreme by contemporary American standards but have evolved in response to a real and worsening threat.

Criteria for protected locales should include sturdy construction to deny unauthorized entry and provide protection from small arms fire; sufficient food, water, medical supplies, and armaments; and redundant means of communication.

Checkpoints. If geography and numbers permit, consider establishing checkpoints on routes or points of access to your community. We presume that violent threats are unlikely to arise from inside your community – if we're mistaken, redraw your boundaries. That means that adversaries must come to you, and it should not be difficult to identify the routes and methods they could use, and screen traffic to either discourage intruders or at least identify them and sound the alarm. There are, again, potential legal constraints; you will only be able to legally block or impede traffic on state or federal highways if you are acting in a legal capacity, such as deputization by your county sheriff. You would also be unjustified in use of force except in self-defense, and that would not stand up if you were illegally blocking a public road.

Regardless of legal considerations, it would be foolish to make enemies either within or outside your community, so give serious thought to how you would screen and/or control traffic. The choke point that is a good tactical choice may be outside your community boundaries, and either your own members, or others whose property lies inside your checkpoints but outside your community may reasonably expect to be able to use the road.

Consider also how many people it would take to man each checkpoint 24 hours a day, and compare that to your available manpower. More on that below.

Observation Posts (OP). You will need the earliest possible notification of trouble, and you probably cannot control all possible avenues of approach or access; nor can checkpoints monitor the actions or movements of people already within your perimeter. Static OPs manned by dedicated observers with reliable communications can narrow this gap in situational awareness. This is a sterling example of how you can utilize your support cadre, what we called Tier 2 members, who are not fit, trained, or prepared to act as armed responders. Some may be armed and capable of defending themselves and their OP, while others will be observers only.

OP duties should not be approached casually. You will want consistent, compatible communications means and procedures, and observers need to be trained – together for consistency's sake – on what it is they are looking for, and how to report their observations. They need to possess the moral courage to call an alert over ambiguous indications that may turn out to be nothing at all. The nature of your community, the level of commitment and involvement of citizens, and your spectrum of potential threats will shape your answers to these questions: Who is watching? What are they watching for? To whom do they report? Aside from those manning designated OPs for a scheduled shift, trained observers can go about their daily business, alert to what is going on around them, and prepared to call in reports when they observe something suspicious or out of place.

As with checkpoints, consider how many people it will take to man an OP around the clock, if threats are imminent or expected. As noted below, four-hour shifts should be the norm; one person on duty at a time should be sufficient. A family unit of four or more adults and teenagers would probably be the minimum practical number to keep an OP manned.

Substantial leverage – and a reduction in personnel requirements – may be attained by the use of security systems built around cameras, motion sensors, monitoring stations, and solar powered battery arrays to keep them functioning.

Patrols. Checkpoints and OPs together will not provide the level of awareness you need in a truly hostile environment, especially if your community is large in extent and lightly populated, for instance in an exurban or rural setting with significant distances or intervening terrain between homes and other occupied structures. For a small area, e.g., a subdivision or small village, foot patrols may suffice; otherwise, they should be road and off-road mobile assuming you have functional vehicles (cars, trucks, ATV's, golf carts, motorcycles) and sufficient fuel to operate them. In some rural settings, horses and mules will provide a viable alternative. Patrols should use varying routes, routines, and frequency to avoid setting exploitable patterns. They can complement OPs, checking the routes and areas not easily observable from a static OP. A patrol should comprise at least two persons; their primary role – deterrence and reporting of off-normal events and indicators – is little different than a Neighborhood Watch, but they should be armed for self-defense.

Reaction Teams. These teams complement the defensive capabilities of protected locales, offering reinforcement and relief to them and to OPs, patrols, and checkpoints at need. Even more so than patrols, they need the capability for rapid response: fueled, reliable, high-mobility vehicles. If they will be operating outside the boundaries of private property, legal considerations again apply. They may in some contingencies operate with the knowledge and sanction of your local law enforcement agencies, or through the mechanism of a private security company, or with greater freedom (but higher risk!) if the rule of law has been so compromised by the time the need arises that you will be willing to ignore the legal ramifications.

Reaction team members should possess the highest levels of motivation, fitness, firearm and tactical skills, and experience you can find within your community. Some aspects of police training and experience are applicable, but so are the basics of soldiering. Most fit, intelligent adults can learn and apply the necessary skills with sufficient training, but the best core cadre for this role will be those with infantry or special operations backgrounds. Around this core, you can build cohesive small teams, but repetitive, consistent, quality training is the key.

How many reaction teams you can form, and how many you can have on duty or on call at any given time, will be a function of your total qualified manpower. Reaction teams may be able to operate on the colonial "minuteman" model depending on the reliability of your communications system: otherwise occupied but ready to respond with full kit at a moment's notice, to link up with their team mates and respond to a call for assistance.

STANDING WATCH

24-hour security at any location requires some simple but inexorable math. It is manpower intensive. If you do not have enough capable personnel to maintain coverage on these terms, you must rethink your plans:

OPERATIONS CENTER (OC)

We do not call this an Emergency Operations Center, both because we don't want to conflate it with government or corporate EOCs, and because we do not propose that it be operational only during an emergency. We might call it a Command Post, but you will have to be your own judge as to whether it will have command authority. You may get by without it, depending upon the size, distribution and complexity of your defended community. Its purpose is to receive calls and notifications from OPs, checkpoints, and patrols, request law enforcement and other outside assistance as needed, and coordinate response actions within the community. As with any headquarters or command and control center, it needs to be in a secure location, and must have redundant communications, such as multiple radio nets, landline, cellular and satellite phones, and any other contingency or emergency means of signaling that you decide to implement. In deference to the concept of Unity of Command discussed in Part 4, the OC should operate in accordance with the Commander's Intent unless or until he arrives or asserts command from another location with adequate communications.

CONTINGENCY PLANNING FOR COMMUNITY DEFENSE

Advance planning for community defense is important, because as General Dwight Eisenhower put it, "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything."

You have defined your area of operations (AO) through an Area Study, complemented by Site Surveys of all potential targets within your AO. You have a grasp of your own capabilities and limitations, and you have considered what effort you can sustain over an extended period, versus a sudden and speedily resolved crisis. You have considered the legal and social factors that both enable and limit your options. You have profiled your threats and identified sources of support and assistance from outside your own organization. All of these are vital bases for planning.

Significant elements of this wicked problem include:

A contingency plan is ". . . a course of action to be followed if a preferred plan fails or an existing situation changes. . . a plan or procedure that will take effect if an emergency occurs."

For our purposes here, we consider all prior planning to be contingency planning. Your preferred plan, after all, is simply to call 911 and wait for the authorities to respond. It is a continuation of normal conditions of political and economic stability, civil order, and the rule of law. Under those conditions, a community defense organization will have no more critical function than to deter or detect occasional criminal activity, and then notify and assist local authorities. These are relatively tame problems, amenable to routine and procedural solutions. If that were the worst contingency you envisioned, you could form a Neighborhood Watch and be done. However, we prepare for the growing likelihood – already reality in some areas – of far worse conditions and challenges.

Contingency plans are prepared in advance of need, kept on the shelf, and reviewed and updated on a regular basis or when required by changing conditions, requirements, and capabilities.They should be based upon the entirety of your Security Analysis, which should therefore be undertaken before planning efforts begin.

Contingency plans serve several purposes in a community defense organization:

An actionable contingency plan is one that is based on today's capabilities and threats, which could be executed immediately because it has been developed, vetted, and trained among all key personnel.

Contingency plans should be formulated and tested repeatedly against four standards. They must be:

If they do not meet these four standards, they will be a waste of time and either useless or dangerous in a crisis.

It is impossible, in practical terms, to develop a specific plan for every possible situation or threat, and even if you could, the effort would prove counterproductive. Too many plans, each tailored to a different threat, may lead to paralysis and indecision in the initial moments of a crisis, when the shape of the threat may be unclear but immediate action is needed. Many threats will be hard to distinguish from one another in the initial moments of a crisis, when information is sparse and unreliable and the situation is developing rapidly. In conditions of fog, friction, and chaos, how will key personnel decide which plan to follow, and what can ensure that dispersed individuals with a different perception of events will each select and follow the same plan?

Be especially careful to avoid the "zone of indifference" in which plans for various contingencies vary so slightly that there is little practical difference between them, although there may still be great potential for confusion, misdirection, and resultant failure. Keep it simple. Allow for decentralized decision making in accordance with clearly expressed intent, and rely on prior planning only to set the initial conditions for effective decision making and success.

CONCLUSION

Many of the concepts presented in this series beg for more detailed treatment. The operations of patrols and reaction teams, for example, must be based on a firm grounding in basic tactics, applied and adapted to the specifics of season, terrain, time of day, the nature of the threat, the nature and distribution of defended assets, the abilities of team members, and more. Whole books could be written – and have been. What you may at least be better prepared for now is to appreciate the true depth of the wicked problem of community defense in what may be, at least temporarily, a failed state. That appreciation and the concepts presented in this series can help you formulate plans, begin the gentle process of persuasion, recruitment, organization, and planning, and shape the necessary training and education.

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