Border Security Update: African Migrants Flooding Border Towns

Mexico helping unvetted African migrants to U.S. border, many from Al-Shabaab jihadi hotbed

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To show you how serious an issue this is, I am over 400 miles from the Mexican border in Texas and in the nearest town to my residence I am already seeing Somali’s and “other” Africans walking the streets. Two days ago at a gas station two thuggish looking Somali’s in badly broken English tried to solicit a cigarette and ride from my better half to which she told them loudly and firmly (drawing the attention of two other patrons at the pumps) “I Cannot Help You Please Leave Me Alone” while having her hand on the grip of Her G26 in her purse. They mumbled under their breath and walked away. After she told me the story that evening, I was beeming like a proud papa!! She had done exactly as we had trained. I was Very Proud of her!

This immigration “Issue” has stopped being some ambiguous news story we read about every week folks. It has hit the streets where WE LIVE in full force and has become a legitimate security issue for the Civilian Operator.

I urge all of you to review and practice what I call your “Stranger” speech now. Most all of you have had some experience with this I am sure, but the main points I always drill on is to be LOUD and FIRM. You don’t have to be rude, but then again don’t be a push over either. NEVER apologize for not being able to help them! Speak LOUD enough to attract attention also. Predators don’t like attention.

Confrontations on the street with vagrants, immigrants and/or thugs are becoming a frequent event for a lot of armed civilians  across the country right now. Just recently, John Farnam posted a story and a Follow-Up from one of his students about a similar encounter at a Drive-thru window. It is a great review on both the verbal skills necessary when dealing with a possible threat and dealing with a threat while inside a vehicle.

More to Come on this.

 

Stay Alert, Stay Armed and Stay Dangerous!

 

 

Mindset: A Time for Wolves

A Time For Wolves

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I think this has tremendous civilian operator applications as well. From a purely philosophical point of view, a man can be just at utterly vicious and brutal as his enemy without surrendering his moral code or inadvertently becoming a “grasseater” himself.  As the old saying goes “It takes a wolf to hunt a wolf” is very true in some cases in today’s upside down society.

Stay Alert, Stay Armed and Stay Dangerous!

 

Without Warning!

Without Warning!

by John Farnam

Personal Preparedness in our Exciting age:

“Now remember, when things look bad, and it looks as if you’re not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean. I mean plumb, mad-dog mean. Because, when you lose your head, and you give up, then you ain’t gonna win, and your ain’t gonna live. That’s just the way it is.” –Josey Wales (played by Cline Eastwood) in the 1976 feature film, “The Outlaw Josey Wales”.

These comments from a recent student at one of our Courses:

“Things I took away:

(1) I can shoot reasonably well
(2) Shooting is the easy part
(3) When you fumble at the beginning, it makes everything else harder and sloppier

Conclusion: We need to perfect basic manipulations. There is no doubt that
fumbling/indecision/hesitation/dithering invariably represent the ‘kiss of death!’”

Reinforced by a friend, an old Warrior like me, in the UK:

“I remember the way we regularly practiced in total darkness, against time, all aspects of weapons handling. Wasted parts and wasted motions were thus assiduously eliminated.

We regularly spent endless hours on the range precisely adjusting and confirming sight settings, so our personal rifles were always absolutely ready, ‘… left of bang’ A rifle that is not precisely, continuously sighted-in (zeroed), to your satisfaction, will be about as useful to you as a bar of soap, as you pointed-out in your last Quip.

Someone asked me today, with a cynical tone of ‘moral superiority,’ why I drive a powerful SUV, equipped with four-wheel drive. I preferred not to answer this idiot, as foul weather erupts over us with freakish regularity. I told him I prefer not to get stuck, while always being able to leave paved roads, when civilization’s trappings disintegrate without warning!”

Comment:

The operative phrase is, “… without warning!”

“No matter what anybody else on board says or does, never get into an aircraft flying over enemy territory without your pistol, AR, magazines, blade, compass, trauma kit, rations, water, hat, jacket, and boots!”

Brigadier General Chris Thirion, SADF (a genuine hero of a long-past era)

/John

Read This and a Host of other Original John Farnam Quips at Defense Training International

Tradecraft: Escape and Evade Danger

 

A Special Forces veteran explains what you need to know to successfully evade and avoid Danger

If you run scared, you’re going to die.

This is the rule of thumb when it comes to evasion, and there’s a reason for it. If you’re confronted with a threat you can’t overcome, you should escape it. That makes complete sense, but there’s a difference between running scared and evading.

Successfully evading someone or something comes down to planning, making a deliberate decision, and maintaining your situational awareness, says Mike Glover, an Army Special Forces veteran. Glover is also the chief executive officer and co-founder of FieldCraft LLC, a company that teaches civilians how to survive natural disasters and extreme situations.

Glover walked Task & Purpose through the different types of evasion techniques, their basic principles, and what you can do in everyday life to avoid losing your shit and running wildly into danger during a catastrophe.

Related: A survival expert lays out what you need in your bug-out bag »

“When you think about evading, you’re obviously evading something that’s dangerous,” explains Glover. “The way we look at it, is number one, everything we do, if your point is to avoid a potential danger that you know about, we always pre-plan for those potential dangers.”

Pre-planning is the number one priority and you can use it to evade everything from a stalker, to a bad neighborhood, to a war zone, according to Glover, who adds that “the principles kind of remain the same.”

Pulling off a successful evasion requires you do three things.

1. Develop a plan to facilitate your evasion.
2. Get as far away from the epicenter, or disaster area, as quickly as possible.
3. Establish a safe house, or safe haven, where you can start planning your next move.

Additionally, there are things you can do to avoid having to evade a threat, says Glover.

For example, if you’re you’re trying to dodge a stalker boyfriend or girlfriend, don’t follow the same routes to and from work, school, or the store. Switch it up.

“Evading in military or civilian life is basically avoiding detection,” explains Glover.

But once you’ve been found out, it’s time to escape. For that, there’s a whole other set of steps to follow, and they vary based on the situation and how much time you have to react.

There are two types of evasion: pre-planned and hasty.

Pre-planned, or deliberate evasion, involves logistical or pre-placed elements to facilitate your evasion, for example, pre-planting supplies at a series of places along your escape route.

“The number one priority is develop a plan to facilitate your evasion,” says Glover, adding that this means making a safe route with pre-planned destinations.

If you work and live in the city, that might mean making a call to grandma saying “Hey, if something happens, you’re going to be the first person I call, expect me to show up on your doorstep,” says Glover, who notes that yes, grandma’s house can be a safe house.

That might be the halfway point to a friend or family member’s home out in the country, where you’ve placed some food or water in case of emergency. You can even go old school and give a grid coordinate like, “by the white mailbox near the old windmill.”

But, it’s essential that you fully plan your evasion, you can’t half ass it. For example, if you plan on bugging out to someone’s house, you need to let that person know that you’ll be heading there.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have a hasty evasion, which is an escape plan that’s developed on the fly in response to an unexpected or unforeseen danger. A hasty evasion may not have a fully laid-out plan, but you still need to think it through, says Glover, adding that in this case it might be a few steps at a time, literally.

This can be as simple as immediately assessing the situation. Maybe you’re stuck on a crowded street during a catastrophe. Find the quickest way to a safe place, whether that’s home, work, or a friend’s place, and ensure you can get there on side streets.

Ultimately, pulling off a successful evasion hinges on being decisive.

Whatever you do, don’t panic.

“At least have the wits about you to make a hasty plan of evasion, as opposed to doing what 80% of people do in survival situations, which is freeze, and about half of those people die,” says Glover.

Don’t be that guy. Just think a few steps in advanced and whatever you do, don’t freak out.

Read the Original Article at Task and Purpose

Only 1% Are Preppers

No one really knows how many preppers exist in the world, but it is safe to say that there are more than three million in the United States alone.  Even though this sounds like a huge segment of the population, this is still only slightly more than 1% of the total US populace.

So, the bigger question is this: who is going to take care of the remaining 99% percent of the population when a major disruptive event occurs?

My guess is that most folks believe that the government will step in.  Yeah right; just like they did with Katrina and Superstorm Sandy.  We all know how well that worked out. The victims of Katrina waited days for aid while thousands were housed in the Superdome without supplies, and the victims of Sandy sat huddled in dark, stinking apartments, then stood in long lines for hours to get their allotted bottle of water and an MRE.

Here’s the cold, hard truth: the US Government is ill-equipped to take on a massive rescue operation. They have neither the manpower or the supplies to do so.

Plus, if the disruptive event is an economic collapse, you can bet that corporations will be bailed out long before the populace.  It happened in 2008 and 2009, and many of us have the retirement account statements to prove it.

It’s undisputed that disasters can happen – and often do. The only question is, how will you deal with it? Will you wait for someone to charge in and rescue you and your family? Or will you take the matter into your own hands and prepare so that you can be self-reliant, regardless of the crisis?

The idea of prepping can be overwhelming when you think about the vast amount of supplies that you don’t yet have when you discover your home may not be the best location in which to ride out the storm, or when you realize that you really don’t have that many viable post-apocalyptic skills.

The Ultimate Guide to Becoming a Prepper in 20 Easy Steps

Don’t despair. This is your ultimate guide to becoming a prepper, complete with some assessments to help you figure out where you’re at right now, and the steps you need to take to get to where you need to be. Best of all, this is a guide that doesn’t require you to drop $11,298.36 (aka big bucks) today to become prepared in one fell swoop. Many of these to-dos are absolutely free!

The Four Stages of Prepping

Before starting, let us first review the four stages of prepping that I first wrote about in 10 Simple Strategies for Becoming A Prepper.

From what I’ve noticed, the mix of readers on prepper-centric websites fall into four major camps. This is a progression of preparedness.  You may recognize yourself and others in these descriptions.

I do not mean to imply that any stage of prepping is a bad thing.  Not at all.  Rather, it is our duty to exercise our own free will to make preparedness decisions that bring sense to our unique situations.  There is no such thing as the one-size-fits-all Prepper.  You may reach a certain stage and feel very comfortable at that point. Not everyone can be a candidate for a reality show, nor does everyone want to do something like that.

The Prepper Wannabe

This is someone who wants to embrace preparedness but does not know where to start.  This person may also feel that he or she does not have adequate financial resources to prep.

The Prepper Newbie

This prepper has started to prepare but needs help in sorting through an overwhelming amount of advice and preparedness strategies both online and off. Whether it is simply handholding or education, the Prepper Newbies have started their journey but continue to seek knowledge and positive reinforcement to ensure they are on the right path.

The Dedicated Prepper

This is someone who has embraced the preparedness lifestyle with gusto.  These preppers have supplies, knowledge, and skills but are seeking to fine tune their preps with advanced strategies for survival healthcare, living off-grid, and coping with civil unrest.  They actively share their own personal experiences with others and offer tips and help other prepper-types learn and grow.  I consider myself to be a Dedicated Prepper.

The Diehard Prepper

This prepper is planning for a major apocalypse and devotes considerable time and energy to ensuring that he or she will prevail.  The Diehard Prepper may have a well-stocked bug out retreat where they can live out their days if the end of the world should come.  They may also be highly secretive and unwilling to share what they have and what they know for OPSECreasons.

Being a Diehard Prepper has been somewhat glamorized by the entertainment media.  This serves to disillusion and discourages those who are unable to create this type of alternative life for themselves. But don’t despair! It’s important to understand that this is the absolute far end of the scale and that this lifestyle isn’t necessary to weather the most ordinary storms that we are most likely to face.

Okay, so we now know that there are at least four types of Preppers. There are undoubtedly more, but for the sake of simplicity, let us leave it at that.

No matter where you are in this range, it’s a great place! Why? Because you’ve already taken the most important step: you realize that you need to become more prepared.  After accepting that uncomfortable reality, the rest is just adding the nuts and bolts.

Read the Remainder at Back-Door Survival