Think Like a Green Beret: The PACE Plan

Sometimes you get lucky and your plan works just as you thought it would. Enjoy those days, because there will not be many of them. No matter how smart you are or how hard you work, on the battlefield, the enemy always gets a vote. The famous philosopher Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan ’till they get punched in the mouth.” The Green Berets know something about taking a punch, and they have a plan for that, too.

Exercise Robin Sage is a series of very bad days. The culmination of the Special Forces Qualification Course, Robin Sage starts with intense planning, and then your ODA goes into Pineland, where a team of professional role players and evaluators crushes those sweet plans contingency by contingency until you lose your plan B, followed by that alternative you never wanted to use until you are in emergency mode. That is the point at which you realize, when you plan for the worst thing that can possibly happen, and that thing happens, the situation can only improve.

SEAL math famously teaches, “Two is one and one is none.” Green Berets aren’t happy with those odds when failure can risk a life or jeopardize the mission.

Lacking the SEAL’s poetic nature, the Green Beret forgoes rhyming and uses the acronym PACE.

PACE describes a methodology originally used to build a communication plan. For an ODA in a denied area, communication is the only way to get resupplied, and most importantly, extracted. The loss of all communications normally initiates the escape-and-evasion plan. The no-comms plan universally sucks, and almost always means abandonment of the mission and unsupported escape and evasion. Nobody wants that. The PACE acronym stands for primary, alternate, contingency, and emergency.

Primary: The routine and most effective method of communication.

Alternate: Another common method of passing a message with minimal to no other impact. May be used along with the primary under normal circumstances to assure readiness.

Contingency: This method will normally not be as convenient or efficient as the first two methods, but is capable of passing traffic when necessary.

Emergency: This is a method of last resort that probably sucks in some very significant way and may incur significant delays.

The PACE method establishes four methods of communication between your team and higher. The genius of PACE is what engineers call ‘graceful degradation.’

When your primary radio fails, it is way too soon to worry; you still have A, C, and E. You transition through the plan and hopefully get extracted before you are forced to rely on E.

An example of a PACE plan would be:

Primary: Satellite radio
Alternate: High-frequency radio
Contingency: Satellite phone
Emergency: Survival radio on guard frequency to aircraft overhead

To be valid, each method must have independent equipment and power sources. This costs a lot of weight and is typically spread across the team so the loss of one man or rucksack doesn't compromise more than one method.

Well, if PACE is good for communications, it is good for everything else, formal and informal. If I have four ways to do something, I can be pretty cavalier about a single failure. But there are many instances where we just don’t have that many options. On a parachute infiltration, we have two parachutes and the option to stay on the plane. The failure of all three of those alternatives makes the emergency option for reaching the ground look pretty grim.

For water, chow, weapons, and everything else essential, PACE is a natural way of thinking:

Primary: M4 rifle
Alternate: Grenades
Contingency: Handgun
Emergency: I use my knife to get another gun or two from the enemy

When the Green Beret has a full set of PACE alternatives in any area, he is confident. As problems arise, he works through the degraded options, always looking at ways to regain the lost alternatives and move back up the chain. Things will go wrong, equipment will get lost or broken, teams might get separated during the mission or by enemy action. PACE lets you plan for the very worst while maintaining a positive mindset.

Green Beret survival training prepares them to improvise weapons and shelter while foraging food and water. This gives them a resilience that allows them to maintain morale in conditions that would break others. They live PACE everyday. The idea that you can handle the worst possible situation makes anything better seem like luxury.

You can use PACE to plan how to get to work or what to do if your girlfriend dumps you. What’s the worst thing that can happen? Have a series of plans for that.

Having thought out the options and requirements beforehand makes the execution of a plan much less stressful.

Think like a Green Beret. Use PACE. If you don’t have that many options, be cautious and try to develop more. If you get pushed down to emergency options, push back and recover. Make a plan and work it. As Elvis, The King himself, once said, “When things go wrong, don’t go with them.”

[Source: Article from: Mark Miller, posted on the Load Out Room,
http://loadoutroom.com/14734/think-like-a-green-beret-the-pace-plan/]

Urban Man

Survival Tip - Making Slugs from Bird Shot

Billy sent in an e-mail to Urban Survival Skills asking if we have ever heard of cut shells. Yes, Billy, I know them as "cut down shells" - where we would take a shot shell of bird shot and turn it into basically a slug round by cutting around the outer casing of the shot shell about half way between the end case and the crimped end. We would not cut completely through the case, nor have our cuts connect. (The video below, that I found on YouTube, has a good illustration on how we advise making the cut).

When the shot shell is fired the case separates creating an enclosed end of bird shot propelled down range like a slug. It will have the added benefit of once it hits a soft target, the bird shot sort of like fragments creating hundreds of fragments in a body.

We used to use them as expedient ballistic breaching rounds, to take out door hinges and locks.

This technique can be used by survivalists if they run out of slugs and have bird shot available, they would be able to make their own defensive slug rounds.

Urban Man says to use extreme caution if you decide to practice this. This is for educational purposes only.

Urban Man

Secret Iranian handbook calls for EMP attack on America

"Here is an article I recently read that makes chills run down my spine. Is our own government playing into the hands of these idiots. You be the judge and prepare."
                                                                                                              ~Urban Man~

WASHINGTON – A “secret” Iranian military handbook, American officials say, confirms that the Islamic Republic of Iran is including in its arsenal a plan to launch a nuclear electromagnetic pulse attack on the American national grid system. To carry out such an attack, from a high-altitude nuclear blast, would require Iran to have not only the missiles to launch such a device but also the technology to produce a nuclear explosion.

The revelation comes as the United States, along with the P5+1 countries that comprise the United Nations Security Council, is about to finalize negotiations over Iran’s nuclear development program. There have been concerns raised that Iran still has the intention of making nuclear bombs using the technology in that program, and the negotiations may not do enough to prevent it.

It’s also an issue on which WND has reported for a decade,  as long ago as 2005 when intelligence sources were quoted, saying, “Iran is not only covertly developing nuclear weapons, it is already testing ballistic missiles specifically designed to destroy America’s technical infrastructure, effectively neutralizing the world’s lone superpower.”

At that time, scientists, including President Reagan’s top science adviser, William R. Graham, said there was no other explanation for such tests than preparation for the deployment of electromagnetic pulse weapons – even one of which could knock out America’s critical electrical and technological infrastructure, effectively sending the continental U.S. back to the 19th century with a recovery time of months or years.

At the time, Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., warned, “A terrorist organization might have trouble putting a nuclear warhead ‘on target’ with a Scud, but it would be much easier to simply launch and detonate in the atmosphere. No need for the risk and difficulty of trying to smuggle a nuclear weapon over the border or hit a particular city. Just launch a cheap missile from a freighter in international waters – al-Qaida is believed to own about 80 such vessels – and make sure to get it a few miles in the air.”

In the latest development, the P5+1 countries – Great Britain, France, the United States, Russia and China plus Germany – have sought restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program to prevent that country from turning a program that reportedly is for medical and power production into a bomb factory.

Peter Vincent Pry, who is executive director of a congressional advisory group called the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, raised the alarm as the agreement is about to be finalized. He said U.S. military officials have confirmed such an Iranian plan.

“Iranian military documents describe such a scenario – including a recently translated Iranian military textbook that endorses nuclear EMP attack against the United States,” Pry wrote in a recent column in Israel’s main online media network, Aruz Sheva. “Iran with a small number of nuclear missiles can by EMP attack threaten the existence of modernity and be the death knell of Western principles of international law, humanism and freedom,” he said.

“For the first time in history, a failed state like Iran could destroy the most successful societies on Earth and convert an evolving benign world order into world chaos.”

WND could not immediately independently confirm the military documents cited by Pry. But WND reported in 2014 that there was developing considerable alarm among national security experts that Iran was intending to position its warships off the U.S. coast. Those experts confirmed there would be no warning and that the U.S. missile defense system would not be able to respond in time to prevent the high altitude nuclear explosion that could be launched from one of those ships.

“It shows they could put a weapon on a boat or freighter, and if Iran has ballistic missiles it could put it anywhere on the U.S. coast,” John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a senior fellow at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, said at the time. The Iranian Fars News Agency had announced that the fleet would undertake a three-month mission and would consist of a destroyer and a helicopter-carrying vessel.

This week’s revelation comes as Israel has just re-elected Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister. He recently warned a joint session of Congress about reaching any nuclear agreement with Iran. According to sources, the textbook refers to an EMP attack on some 20 locations in the United States.

Pry pointed out that Iran, in fact, would not need an intercontinental missile to launch a high-altitude EMP attack that could knock out the U.S. national grid system and the other life-sustaining critical infrastructures that depend on the grid to function. He said Iran could deliver a nuclear attack from a ship just off the U.S. East Coast either by a missile or by launching into orbit around the Earth a satellite which, in effect, would be a nuclear device.

Critical infrastructures that depend on the already vulnerable U.S. national grid system include communications, water and food delivery systems, financial and banking systems, transportation, regulation of the nearly million miles of oil and natural gas pipelines that traverse the U.S. and the myriad of modern conveniences that function by automated control systems that often are located in remote areas of the country.

Pry said it would cost only about $2 billion to harden the grid from such an attack or a direct hit from solar flares – which could produce similar damage and is occurring now. He added that protection of the grid could include the installation of devices like geomagnetically induced current, or GICs, blockers. Pry’s warning about the Iranian military textbook coincided with a threat from Gen. Hassan Firouzabad, the Iranian armed forces chief of staff.

“We are ready for the decisive battle against the U.S. and the Zionist regime,” Firouzabad recently told the Iranian Fars News Agency. “Iran armed with nuclear missiles poses an unprecedented threat to global civilization,” Pry said.

In 2012, when Iran was reporting the successful testing of a variety of missiles, including those that could strike targets 1,250 miles away, WND reported that the rogue nation also was working on an intercontinental ballistic missiles under the guise of it is space program. One nuclear warhead detonated at high-altitude over the United States would black out the national electric grid and other life-sustaining critical infrastructures for months or years by means of an electromagnetic pulse, Pry said. He said the chaos could result in the deaths of 90 percent of the American population. Such an attack would not be exclusive to the United States.

Dr. Emily Landau, director of the Arms Control and Regional Security Program at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, said Iran also could target Israel.

Landau, who is an expert on Iran’s nuclear program, said Iran could very well be planning an EMP attack on Israel, based on statements from high-level Iranian officials. She said Iran already has the missiles but only needs the nuclear device to launch an EMP that would be capable of destroying Israel’s electrical grid.

“Iran doesn’t have a nuclear bomb yet, and hopefully it won’t have one, but if it does manage to build a bomb, an EMP attack is a real possibility,” Landau said.
Pry went so far as to say Iran is actively preparing for an EMP attack.

Tehran has undertaken offshore exercises using Scud missiles fired and positioned in such a way that they exploded in the atmosphere, exactly the method you would use for an EMP attack, he said. “(Iran) could even marshal a major Islamic invasion of Israel, massacring the Jews and ushering in the era of the 12th imam, the Islamic messiah, whose arrival Iran’s leadership believes is imminent,” Pry said.

WND also reported at the time that a 2004 report by a congressional commission found “several potential adversaries have or can acquire the capability to attack the United States with a high-altitude nuclear weapons-generated electromagnetic pulse (EMP). A determined adversary can achieve an EMP attack capability without having a high level of sophistication.”

“EMP is one of a small number of threats that can hold our society at risk of catastrophic consequences,” the report said. “EMP will cover the wide geographic region within line of sight to the nuclear weapon. It has the capability to produce significant damage to critical infrastructures and thus to the very fabric of U.S. society, as well as to the ability of the United States and Western nations to project influence and military power.”

Some individual states have adopted various requirements to minimize the damage from such an attack, but federal legislation has not yet succeeded in setting those standards. It’s the SHIELD Act, from Rep. Trent Franks, that has been introduced several times.

The Shield Act stands for Secure High-voltage Infrastructure for Electricity from Lethal Damage. It calls on industry and government to develop, promulgate and implement standards and processes that are necessary to address the electric grid’s current vulnerabilities and shortcomings that would be affected by an EMP.

[source: Posted By F. Michael Maloof On 03/19/2015 @ 9:48 pm In Front Page,Politics,U.S.,World | No Comments]

P.S. Here is an interesting video to watch regarding Iran and its nuclear intentions.

Urban Man

How To Survive In The West- An Al-Qaida Training Manual

One the precept for military operations is to understand your enemy. Know his Techniques, Tactical and Procedures or what the military calls "TTP's".   It also gives you the advantage when you can also learn of your adversary’s strategic plans and goals.
 
Al-Qaida has published a guide for radical Muslims living in the west, called "How to Survive in the West".  It is advertised as "A guide for the Muslims who are living in a majority non Muslim land, or a country where the rulers are harsh towards the believers. It will explain to you the different scenarios you may get into and how to react. It will teach you how to be a secret Agent who lives a double life, something Muslims will have to do to survive in the coming years."

This book was apparently written by an al-Qaida operative who states he has been involved in the global Jihad for 10+ years.   The prologue states "Being an undercover agent requires knowledge and skills. In this book, you will be taught these skills. You will be taught; how to live a double-life, how to keep your secret life private, how to survive in a threatening land, how you can arm and strengthen the Muslims when the time for Jihad comes to your country, and neighborhood.  In simple terms, from this guide book - you will learn how to become a Sleeper-cell which activates at the right time when the Ummah needs you."

The subjects covered in this book include:

Chapter 1: Hiding the Extremist identity
Chapter 2: Breaking Allegiance
Chapter 3: Earning Money
Chapter 4: Internet Privacy
Chapter 5: Training
Chapter 6: Primitive Weapons and Survival Techniques
Chapter 7: Modern Weapons
Chapter 8: Bomb Making
Chapter 9: Transporting Weapons
Chapter 10: What happens when you are spied on and get raided and Sting Operations
Chapter 11: The Jihad Begins/War in Protests/ Guerrilla warfare
Chapter 12: Escaping for Safety

Urban Survival Skills has received a copy of this 71 page eBook and we are offering it to readers free of charge in order to recognize extremist Islamic operations or even prepare counter measures against these extremist attacks by a potential enemy that may precipitate some sort of collapse or societal chaos with attacks across this country.

If you are a reader of Urban Survival Skills and would like a copy of this eBook, please send an e-mail to urbansurvivalman@gmail.com, with the subject line "Request copy of How to Survive in the West".   I will, as soon as I'm able, send you copy via reply e-mail with the attached PDF eBook.
Prepare well my friends.

Urban Man