Alternatives to the home-as-fortess concept

A lone survival homestead family will be unable to protect itself against armed gangs that will inevitably form to loot and pillage one region after another following a breakdown in social order. Sniping and laying siege will eventually take its toll, allowing even the most heavily armed and fortified homes to be breached and plundered. The only way to defend against these gangs will be to build a superior army that conducts constant recons, sentry duty, and secure communications. At the same time, a much larger logistics team will be needed to grow and process food, make and maintain weapons, boots, clothing, and other equipment and supplies so if there are a dozen dedicated defenders there will need to be over 100 support positions. That size group working in 12-hour shifts would provide only a half-dozen on-duty defenders. (Of course when an alert is sounded, every able member would become a defender as well.)

A more realistic 500-man army would require 5,000 support workers, more than live in many a small town. This would allow well-manned roadblocks on a dozen roads, a half-dozen constantly roving recon patrols, the 24/7 manning of 20 or more concealed sentry posts, a constantly ready rapid-response team, and an active training operation so support workers could be cycled into defense duty.

How do you build an army? You hire them. What do you pay them with? Food.

The serious survivalist builds a team and makes sure the team is well supplied. For those who have not yet built their teams, who will you seek to include in yours? If you have not acted in time, you will have to draw on your neighbors for your team members. Your neighbors are therefore a potential resource after TSHTF. Rather than let them organize into confiscation squads, be prepared to bring them together and offer them food and training. Conduct a group interview that will seem more like a brainstorming session. Find out who has experience doing what and what resources they have and need. You may find seamstresses, machinists, ex-military tacticians, cooks, gardeners, electronics engineers or techs, ham radio operators, ER nurses, gun collectors, auto mechanics, inventors, etc.

Bulk food is still cheap if you don't insist on freeze-dried gourmet offerings. $300-worth of properly stored wheat and beans can form the core diet for one person for a year. $3,000 of food would supply a typical family for three years. This is clearly a strain for those living paycheck to paycheck but anyone in a stronger position who reads this should seriously plan to become the community leader in their neighborhood by hiring their neighbors with food, training, organizing, and arming them as needed, and leading the survival discussion so as to build a neighborhood consensus on what needs to be done. You will need enough room to store at least 15 five-gallon buckets of long-term storage food per person per year, preferably in a dry basement. 4,500 buckets at a food cost of $300,000 would provide food for 100 people for three years and require floor space for 900 buckets if stacked five-high. With a lid diameter of 12 inches this conveniently works out to 900 square feet of floor space, (30'x30' or 20'x45') and that's just for food. Weapons, ammo, tactical gear, communication equipment, seeds, implements, fuel, fortifications, and all the rest would require a small warehouse.

Few can afford this level of preparation, a million-dollar investment at minimum, more likely two or three. But the wealthy cannot expect to skate through a collapse unscathed with just a few security personnel. They will need to plan well to keep their neighbors who have less from becoming their dedicated foes and the likely source of their demise. Some will suppose they can sail away, island hopping till calm returns, not figuring on the likely world-wide explosion of piracy. Others may believe they can escape to their hunting lodge in the Yukon, never having experienced even a visit there in the winter and very likely finding their larder already raided when they arrive. They will need an army and a supportive community to make it and that will cost them a major preparedness investment.

But suppose in the end your careful planning and neighborhood organizing isn't enough. Suppose you are driven from your home and your neighborhood by a superior force or offensive measures you haven't anticipated. Everyone who is prepping should have a fallback position that allows them to escape and still have emergency provisions. The best way to ensure access is the buried cache, not just one but many.

My own caches consist of various-sized hermetically-sealed PVC pipe sections lined with heat-sealed Mylar bags and containing oxygen absorbers. (I manufacture and sell them in fact.) These can be secretly buried on accessible land that is unlikely to be bulldozed or flooded. They can contain food, shelter materials, first aid supplies, weapons and ammo, bug repellent, extra clothing and footwear, sleeping gear, etc. One good use of buried caches is stocking a BOL (bug-out-location) ahead of time so that your supplies will go undiscovered by intruders. Planting small caches along the way there also makes sense in case you have to flee there on foot.

A fugitive lifestyle may seem unappealing but bear in mind that many homeless people live the way they do by choice and you will have more resources than them. Rather than wallow in misery and despair you can choose to adopt a homeless survival attitude and you will be fine. Think of it as an extended camping trip with on-the-job survival training.

With a buried cache system you can appear to have little worth taking, particularly if you avoid appearing to be well fed, well-groomed, etc. The look of a dirty, scruffy vagabond can be your ticket through dangerous areas. Be sure to bear a concealed firearm though in case your camouflage doesn't deter everyone.