Tactics, Techniques, and Technologies For Uncertain Times

2009, Plume, 316 pages

This capstone post-apocalyptic handbook, written by the founder of survivalblog.com is a national bestseller. That, in and of itself, is astounding. Writers like Rawles could once only get published with Loompanics, Paladin and Desert Publications. This guy is out there on book shelves under a Penguin imprint. The popularity of a book that would have seemed kook-fodder twenty or more years ago brings to mind the massive popularity of post-apocalyptic literature, TV and movies. Although our masters at Isenguard keep telling us we are poised to reenter the daisy-waving marshmallow world of some 1950s fantasist, we—even the TV-addicted idiots among us—know, in our gut, that something just does not add up, at least not for long.

Rawles is a former military intelligence officer who seems to have specialized in tracking refugee drift. Although he does not get into much detail with anything, saving that for specialist literature and your own research, he includes everything necessary for a head of household to plan long term survival strategy for a family. This book is first, and foremost, about family. The gritty details Rawles seems to be saving for his fiction, which is actually on the Barnes & Nobles book shelf.

The heart of this book is a number of lists of what you and yours would need to survive a month or more of general societal collapse in the Unites States, for any number of reasons from asteroid strike to Wall Street implosion. It is a lot. Let me be clear that a working class family cannot afford the necessary contingencies. A middle class family can barely manage it. From the description of some of his client’s purchasing decisions it is clear that the author consults for those rich who seek to plan for the worst. It is telling that people in the top 10% of any society would be concerned with its collapse. It is also telling that the folks who leant me this book, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Sensible’, are highly educated people who have worked for government organizations.

Rawles is not afraid to put his own beliefs about community and religion out there for the reader to consider, and also does not let them get in the way. Here is a small sampling of his conclusions, stated in my own words except where quotation marks are used:

1. Without utility service [gas, electric, water, etc.] our society will go medieval within two weeks.

2. The U.S. power grid [in 3 regions]has not been projected by civil and commercial planners to be in danger of ever going down for more than 72 hours. There is no plan for what to do without power, on even a regional basis. You are on your own if the lights stay out.

3. The basic problem in such a situation is our vast population and what they will do to you. Think Walmart on Black Friday—forever!

4. American houses are nigh indefensible. Just ask any crack dealer who has ever had his crackhouse overrun by cops in 5.0 seconds.

5. In any type of grid down walking sped scenario, you basically have two choices, hiding in a remote retreat locations [lots of money and preplanning] or living in a small rural community.

6. A community of less than 200 people does not have sufficient skills to be self-sufficient.

7. A community of more than 3,000 has no cohesive identity.

8. Antique guns are not on Big Brother’s confiscation list.

9. Charity will be an important diplomatic option for any family trying to survive such times.

10. If you do not hide your food and fuel it will be taken by looters, or whatever provisional authority is trying to maintain order.

What a social breakdown will inevitable amount to, according to Rawles, is massive refugee drift as urban centers quickly become uninhabitable. This is central to his whole philosophy, but he downplayed it, perhaps at the publisher’s urging. He is obviously trying to avoid seeming like a panic merchant. So, after he lays out the fact that if you live less than a gas tank away from a major urban center, that you must either flee or die—and that fleeing is a high-lethality low odds proposition—he kind of tip-toes around this key assumption for the rest of the book.

Permit me to distill Mister Rawles’ basic guidelines:

1. If you live east of the Mississippi, and are not prepositioned in some Appalachian retreat or small community, the rest of your nasty, brutal, and short life will read a lot like a zombie apocalypse movie script. East is death, especially if nuclear reactors start melting down and you basically become a roach in a Raid commercial.

2. If you live less than a gas tank away from a major urban center, than you and yours will essentially be an ear of corn awaiting the locusts. That means that anyone living in a city, in suburban sprawl, or in a bedroom community [like my friends ‘The Sensibles’] of in the ‘refugee line of drift’, is little more than human grass holding hands and awaiting the lawnmower of some compulsive Mexican landscaping god.

3. A three family minimum is required to maintain and defend an isolated retreat.

Throughout the belly of the book is much sharp, well-considered advice on things that we never have to contend with on a day-to-day basis, like purifying water and shoveling shit. The wit is minimal and well-placed, in keeping with a work of such gravity. Every thinking person should read this book. Because, even if such a sudden collapse is extremely remote—which I do believe it is—if it happens, you can be certain that the 300 million plus non-thinking people in this country will not be making sensible decisions. Whatever shit situation you could find yourself in, it would be made better by having a copy of HTSTEOTWAWKI on hand.

James Wesley, Rawles strikes me as one of those rare breeds of patriotic Americans who is not a government worshipper, racist, or reactionary, but just a man with a lot of baseline information that has been obscured by our masters to enhance our own confidence in their management of our living parameters. When an artificial world created by lawyers, who have cultivated hatred between various segments of the population as a strategy for population management, hits a bump in the normally bumpy historical road, you could do no better than to have this guy as your next door neighbor.

The author remains cautiously upbeat to the end of the book, and finishes on a home economics footing, with a print prayer, that if the worst does happen to this unprecedented urbanized super society we live in, that some of us will be able to rebuild the best of what was, rather than wearing a diaper and hockey mask and growling demands from the grill of our hungry death-mobile at those people with the last of the gas.

In ‘Hunkering down in the big city’, Rawles lets you know that it’s a real bad idea. Hell, it’s already a bad idea, and we are still living in a liberal paradise. He goes on to cover some basics, but only devotes 6 pages to what he rightly thinks is a low odds option.

I had a problem with Rawles' seeming assumption that all urbanites live in apartments. Of course, the tiny minority of urbanites with the financial ability to implement his contingency plan would be among the white bread Tom Clancy style elite living in urban penthouses. I began thinking to myself, “But he forgot about trash like me, living in a pretty defensible old-style house with a massive wraparound porch and a high foundation that no car or pickup truck could ram through without heavy modifications.”

Then I recalled his ‘one gas tank away from an urban center’ rule. You see the one thing that he blew over so quickly in this book, was the ‘migratory drift path’, and the fact that being in that path would be like being overrun by a Chinese Army in 1951 in North Korea.

Keep in mind, that if you live in an urban house, or any suburban house, within a gas tank of a major city, that you will be run over and looted either by refugees, law enforcement, or the military. Rawles is a former military man who seems to believe that the NSA is on our side [and noted with much confidence that only the good old NSA has the ability to detect your prepared status], that cops will not form looting parties, that martial law will not become a sack of suburbia, and that urban drug gangs, once they take to the road, will be no match for good farmer militia folk in survival retreats.

Rawles has penned an important reference work that should be the index of any survival library. Despite that, I think he has underestimated how nasty things could get in a grid down situation. He did have to get this book by a mainstream publisher, so I am guessing he thinks it will be worse than what I do. If you are planning to survive what will happen in a crumbling America one day—which I see as more of a slow motion erosion than Rawles’ vision of a Week Two event-generated apocalypse—remember that you may be preyed upon by The National Guard and The Local Police, police often being the first looters in any disaster. And ultimately you would have to face what Rawles calls ‘the golden horde’ coming out from the city.

Would what remains of the government try to prevent the urban masses from overrunning your community and looting the food and supplies you have stored for a shit-storm of a rainy day? Or, would they demand that you give up your goods to a centralized distribution center, and maybe even take in refugees?

Rawles seems to assume that the golden horde will be deficient in technical skill, versatility, adaptability, and leadership. For a counterpoint watch HBO’s miniseries The Wire. Now, imagine that those drug gangs—who virtually operate state prisons, and cannot be stopped by the law enforcement agencies who enjoy numerical and material superiority at most points of contact—‘tool up’, ‘mount up’ and ‘go to war’ in search of the food and water that has now replaced their coveted ‘product’ as their primary operational concern. Imagine them coming your way on the heels of the cop that siphoned the gas from your car and the National Guard troopers that hauled all of your groceries to a distribution center or supply depot.

Now that is ugly.

What is my plan?

I’ll do a piece on that someday. Suffice it to say that my long term goal in such a situation is to make sure I take two looters off the planet before I bite the dust.