For many of us, a ‘team’ is a no-brainer’. Our family is our survival team. For others, though, this is a decision: whether to try to make it on their own or join forces with others. There are advantages and disadvantages to a team, which also change depending on whether you have a mild, moderate or extreme emergency. Here are some for you to consider:
Advantages
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You can’t be an expert on everything. Having an array of people who bring different, needed skills, is important. Some people just can’t handle being alone. Can you? Have you ever spent a night out in nature alone?
A sense of purpose. In combat, soldiers fight for each other, not for a cause. Being a member of a team can increase your motivation to get out of yourself and fight for the survival of those who you care about.
In an extreme emergency, long term survival will eventually depend on team building. In this scenario you often won’t have much of a choice who you will ally with. Groups will form with different agendas. You have to evaluate your goals, and also whether you will be an asset to the team. What do you bring to the table?
Disadvantages
You make a larger target. It is indeed better to run away rather than fight. Your running away is limited by the slowest member. The only soldier I had to remove my A-Team couldn’t keep up with us in the field, carrying our extremely heavy combat load. You are also more likely to be discovered in an extreme survival situation as part of a team.
You are letting others in on your survival plan. The lazy survivalist simply lets others prepare, then comes in and plunders.
I’ve consulted with wealthy clients and always have to bring up my inverse rule of security: the more people you bring in to provide security, in an extreme situation where money will no longer be a factor, the more dangerous you have made your situation.
Will the other members of the team be prepared? If it’s your family, it’s your responsibility to get them ready since you’re reading this.
Will the members of the team actually pull their weight? To wait until a survival situation to evaluate team-members is foolhardy. The more people on the team, the more security gets looser. I call it the trust ripple effect. How many people do you trust? Trust with your life? How many people do they trust? In the move Contagion, as soon as the CDC character tells his wife about the outbreak and to get out of town, warning her to ‘TELL NO ONE’, what does she immediately do? Tell someone. As Ben Franklin said: “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” In covert operations we tended to be very paranoid, but you’re not paranoid if they are out to get you.
Where to find survival A-Team members?
Most likely it will be your family.
Think about last Thanksgiving. Do you really want to huddle in a BOHS with those people?
Joking.
Not.
In mild to moderate emergencies, you will want to gather your family and team members as quickly as possible.
Other places to find potential survival buddies:
Your friends.
From your job. Actually, you should quietly evaluate your co-workers anyway, because the percentage of time you spend at work is the percentage chance an emergency or natural disaster will strike while you are among them. On Nine-Eleven certain co-workers proved to be true life-savers.
Your church
Hunting and garden clubs. Two extremes here, but each brings something to the table.
Those attending self-defense classes or survival workshops. Hiking clubs.
Who Do You Want On your A-Team?
Often this won’t be a choice. You’re going with your family/loved ones.
However there are those who want to build a team and/or train their family members/loved ones in the necessary skills for a survival team.
Using the A-Team above, let’s discuss who you’d want to have on your team and what skills they should have before an emergency. These are also the choices you might have to make while in or after an extreme emergency/catastrophe.
The first person many think of is someone who is ex-military. I even point out that you’d most likely want a Green Beret as your #1 choice, but remember, those are Special Forces; not your run of the mill military person. The majority of veterans, while they have some basic training, were support personnel, so you have to consider what their MOS- military occupation specialty was.
Then there is the ‘prepper’. Unfortunately, too many people confuse owning a bunch of guns and stockpiling ammunition and food as ‘preparing’. As you can see from this manual, I give little mention to this topic. First, if firing guns comes into play, you are in, or just escalated into, an extreme emergency. The odds of a mild or moderate emergency are much, much higher and need to be prepared for first.
Simply owning guns doesn’t mean a person knows how to use them. Even hunters who use long guns may be great shots, but there’s a big difference when we’re talking Close Quarters Battle.
The other issue with guns is you can only carry a couple. Unless you’re a “shooter”, someone whose full time job is training on weapons, you can only be proficient on a couple of guns. It’s better to have two you know how to use than 40 sitting in your gun locker.
So who do you want?
The most important attribute is someone who handles crisis well. Who doesn’t panic. Unless you’ve actually seen someone in an emergency, this is a hard quality to ascertain.
Focus on skill sets:
Medical
Law enforcement and military
Leadership
Survival
Communications
Engineering
Weapons (both close quarters battle and hunting)
Gardening, farming
Ranching
Electrical
Scavenging. This last one is a skill one rarely thinks of. But as we will see in Survival, a key phase after a moderate to extreme emergency is scavenging. Not just scavenging (being able to find things), but also the ability to improvise. A MacGyver type of person, who can make something out of disparate parts. Who can find different uses for things. Interestingly, often woman are better at this than men because men tend to be linear thinkers. For a man the only way to get to B is from A. Women tend to be circular thinkers and they might think the best way to get to B from A, is to go to C and loop back. And often, it is.
