Survival Stratagies

Survival is about a lot of things but the one thing that will in the end make the biggest difference is going to be forethought. Winning a fight is good and knowing all sorts of martial arts and having all the best weapons will greatly improve your chances of surviving a fight. An even safer way though would be to avoid getting into a fight.

A lot of people are going to die simply because they just didn't plan to live and survive. If you spend much time fighting with people you are eventually going to lose one and in a world with no Doctors and few medicines any injury could be lethal.

Basically you need to start thinking now about how you want to go about NOT getting into fights. The obvious one that many will embrace is to head out into places where there are not many people and live a sort of migratory lifestyle where is people in many large numbers show up they will simply more on. For very small groups without children or solo survivalists this can be effective.

Another common tactic is the one where you basically fort up into some sort of easily defended place and defend it with a lot of firepower in hopes that it will just not be an attractive target for scavengers or gangs. If you have the time and money now this can work well. You won't have to defend yourself from military Armies and people that are stupid enough to attack an obviously well defended place won't last long to be a threat.

Another possible strategy is the bunny method. Hide and stay hidden most of the time. If they can't find you they can't hurt you. Some version of this may be the best urban technique if you can find a place that is safe from fire and have sufficient stores and water to stay hidden for a pretty long time. I suspect that the cities are all eventually going to burn down. If you are not in a fireproof structure you will at the very least lose all of your stores.

Unfortunately there will at first be a lot of people that will basically go “Road Warrior”. They will be armed to the max with all sorts of militaristic weaponry. Most of these people will not be vetrans and won't have the training or understanding to actually be very dangerous. They will try to live with a basic “might makes right” take what you want mentality. You need to avoid these people as much as possible but when forced to deal with them you need to be ready to shoot first and ask questions later.

There are going to be a lot of people that will go crazy at first and without any legal boundaries forced on them they will be like a dog with rabies. I think that after the first 3 to 6 months these sorts will mostly be dead. If you can hide out in one way or another for a year the world is going to be a lot different than it is now and the people that occupy it will be different.

Where I live I don't see running into the woods as a good choice. I wouldn't recommend it for most of the people in California either. Forest Fires without anyone fighting them will sweep a lot of areas clean. Many of the places where people live now were bone dry before people irrigated them. Las Vegas will be a GHOST TOWN in short order. LA has no water source that could EVER water that number of people. Their water like the water in NYC comes from hundreds of miles away. When that water stops flowing those places will become death traps.

Every place has its good and bads. As a survivalist though you can ill afford not looking and seeing the world both as it is now and as it will be after the power stops flowing the water and sewers dry up. Look at where you plan to go or where you are going to stay and really look into what there is around you. Where are there ponds and lakes near you. How far will it be to a wood source after a few months of you living with a wood fire based lifestyle. I have looked at pictures of the area where I now live. The forests that surround us here were mostly not there when people were cooking and warming their homes with wood. This isn't a coal area so the forests took a beating. You also want to think ahead about whether you want to harvest your wood from around where you are living. It is hard to hide in an open field and your presence there will be pretty obvious.

Plan now so that you will be safe and secure if things go bad. After the fact it will be too late...

 

My place is way up north deep in the woods, the only way in is through a drt roads. on the lake there are about 44 cottages, and we all know each other, so my strategy is to close the road nobody in that we do not know. we would be a community of maybe 100 people that are hunters and fishermen. anyway that is my plan. please fill free to comment.

 

You can lay trees down onto a road to hide and disguise it without actually blocking it. Lay them such that the middle of the road in only covered by the small tops that are meeting. It will look impenetrable but you can slowly drive right through the middle of it if you know it is there.

Something like you describe if isolated enough and the people involved are the right sort is about the best of all possible strategies.

 

What TexDanm said. Add permutations. For instance, create a zig-zag that forces a vehicle to slow way down. If someone is stupid enough to try to go through, cut him to pieces.

Rednecks in an adjacent county to my own were cutting trees down behind deputies when the deputies dared wonder onto their turf. The message was, "We can kill you for sport." That county's sheriff, got fully automatic M14s (selector switch / military surplus) through the Fed. He armed his deputies with these and the rednecks cut-out the B.S.

 

Be carefull with blockages, obvious blocks mean there is stuff to defend and when people have lost everything they have nothing to loose by breaching those blockages.
Any blocks need to look natural as in trees fallen not cut etc.

 

400km is doable in 8-10 days easy. in my better days I have done 500km in 10days in 30C plus heat and I was never super fit.
So if it is something I could do I am sure many others could do it!
It is amazing how far people with nothing can travel
Most people carry as fat a month or two of reserves
They will travel, they will be hungry and very irritable but they will travel as there life depends on it, yes many will fall along the way but few from starvation in the first month or so.

 

In western Canada I won’t be worried about the people from the cities as there are mountain passes they will need to cross which will deter most. With a high population of hunters in western Canada I’ll be worried about the people that are mentally unstable that own the guns. These people forming gangs will be a lot more dangerous than anyone who makes it from the cities.

 

I'm with Lone Wolf on this. Most people can't imagine walking much further than once around a Mall. They will sit and wait for someone to come and take care of them until they are driven out of their homes by starvation or lack of water. A person that is starting off like that who considered walking to the kitchen for another beer exercise just isn't going to get very far.

Honestly the ones that make it out of the cities and manage to get very far and survive the first couple of months are not worrying me much. Survival of the fittest is going to take over in a way that hasn't been seen since the big rock punched the dinosaurs ticket out of here.

There is and will be plenty of food available. The problem with food and water after a disaster is distribution. The stores will be empty in a day or two and then the local distribution warehouses will be pillaged. After that short period the places where the masses are will be death traps. They will turn on each other and in an amazingly short time the population in the megalopolises will be gone.

More and more people are getting dumber. I'm serious. It is like the first frost foretelling the coming of winter. It is as if something has been put in the air that is taking away people's ability to think in linear fashions. Maybe it is all the computerization. Instead of thinking we are training people to turn to machines for all the answers.

Reading seems to be dying out. I have dropped a lot of my news feeds because they are getting to be video almost totally. Reading and writing are activities. That means that you are doing something. Turning little black squiggles into words and pictures in your mind is like isometric exercise for the brain. All this video stuff today is a little like deciding to live on a liquid diet so you don't have to chew. I heard something a little while ago. It was an advertisement for audio books. They called it "The NEW Reading". Trying to get someone to actually think is getting harder and harder. You ask a question and all that they can do is grab their phone and look it up. I am starting to see this like the leaves turning colors. Winter is coming.

 

You do not need to be fit to walk you just need to be inclined to do it!
Most anybody can flee if they need to, history is full of whole communities from newborns to oldies moving on foot.
Agree some will not flee but most will give it a go.

 

There has not been a situation in any of the first world countries since WW2 where lots of civilians had to evacuate on foot. In the last 20 years things have changed a lot. People shop on Amazon not to save having to actually go out and walk around the stores. All of the major grocery stores where I live now have curbside shopping where you place your order online and a kid gathers it together for you and they even bring it to your car and load it. You don't even have to get out.

25 years ago your "friends" were people that you saw and got together with. Now for millions of people "friends" are people online that they have never met and never will. When times were tough friends got together and helped. I knew a young man in his 30s that got the flu, got pneumonia, died and it wasn't until 10 days later that anybody thought to check on him. Even families now days are scattered out and only have face to face contact a few times a year.

There are tons of people these days that are just not up for much of anything in the way of a challenge. I think that this is more of a mental issue that just a pure physical inability. People now days in the big cities seem to have a growing inability to deal with problems. One of the problems inherent into democracy as it is now practiced is that in order to get elected you have to say and do what people want. Nobody wants to pay more taxes so the schools in the cities are going broke. The water in one of our American cities is poison, they know it and aren't fixing it. The infrastructure all over the place is in need of repair but the voters don't want to pay for it. They gripe about it but when it comes time for elections they vote for the people that don't raise the taxes.

If the US had to go to war today we would be in trouble. All the factories have been shipped overseas. All the kids want to be middle management. We gripe about illegal aliens but without them our crops don't get harvested, our meat doesn't get butchered and most heavy construction has a certain number of questionable "contract" laborers. without whom the job doesn't get done.

People just aren't able to make hard unpleasant decisions anymore. They will sit and starve rather than make the decision and take responsibility for their own salvation.

 

If the military needs to remove any sort of blockages to get to where it has been ordered to go, it will do so with bulldozer blades on tanks or blow impediments away with high explosives. There was a Army Reserve unit in my home town. The unit was maintenance. They also could re-configure mobile armor, tanks, APCs. Anything, whatever needed to be done, they did. Good'ol'boy welders and access to whatever they needed meant "it got done."

 

Idioms

1. at one's wit's end. at the end of one's ideas or mental resources; perplexed: My two-year-old won't eat anything but pizza, and I'm at my wit's end.
2. keep/have one's wits about one, to remain alert and observant; be prepared for or equal to anything: to keep your wits about you in a crisis.
3. live by one's wits, to provide for oneself by employing ingenuity or cunning; live precariously: We traveled around the world, living by our wits.

 

Learned skills, knowledge in your head, Luck and a certain level of faith that you can survive this and things will be better. Faith doesn't have to be a religious thing. It is just a sort of optimism that carries you through the bad times. Luck enters into everything. You have to live with it both good and bad.

 

I think that it's hilarious that people just assume that somehow a roadblock renders people unable/unwilling to get out of their vehicles and outflank the roadblock, looking for what's obviously worth having. Most guys are going to be running motorycles, so that they get 3-4x as much gas mileage.