Urban Survival Skills - Tactical Movement: Basic Reaction Drills

UrbanSurvivalSkills.com received an Anonymous comment on the Urban Survival - Tactical Movement on Foot post,……”Everyone should understand that the reason for the various formations and tactics is to minimize the possibility of an ambush wiping out the patrol/unit. To translate that; it means if you encounter the enemy and they see you before you see them the first awareness you will have is when they take out your point man or your tail man. The bottom line is there is no safe way to move through territory, woods or any terrain. There are steps you can take to mitigate the danger and other steps you can take to maximize the damage to your enemy but there are no "safe" movements through enemy territory. This means your sister or your brother or your brothers wife might die right in front of you. When the SHTF there is no safe".



UrbanMan Replies: Not only is the reason, for proper tactical formations and interval between patrol group members, to preclude getting a sizeable portion of your group or patrol wiped out in an ambush or chance contact,…. the formation and interval allows for your patrol to rapidly execute contact drills to either fire and maneuver on the threat or to establish a base of fire for other members can disengage or withdrawal.



The next step after your Survival Group becomes decent at executing Patrol formations; using arm and hand signals; crossing danger areas; conducting long term and short stay security halts, would be to develop, rehearse and get really good at contact drills.

Contact drills are the pre-executed maneuver and actions your patrol will take upon contact with a threat or a circumstance. These are typically called “reaction drills for chance contacts”.

Chance contact is defined as un-forewarned contact with the enemy, from any direction, during movement or a short duration halt. Usually specifically moving to make contact or break out from an area, the patrol will probably always attempt to break contact from any chance contact with the enemy, as your goal is survival and not achieving any military objective.

During normal movement (column formation), the greatest possibility of making chance contact with the enemy is walking into an enemy position or moving enemy patrol. One reaction drill is the "peel" method of breaking contact. Upon making contact with the threat the point man will initially hold his position, may not be able to give an arm and hand signal for the threat, then be prepared to immediately fire upon the threat in a design to make the threat hold their position so the patrol can break contact.

If the point man has to shoot, and upon completion of firing (several rounds) at the enemy, the point man will turn and run parallel down the axis of the movement formation, placing the patrol between himself and the threat if possible and not flag the fire of the other patrol or survival group members as he turns, peels and runs.

The point man will move to a location approximately 50 meters to the rear of the tail man and take a knee or assume the prone. This location is the immediate rally point. The second man/women in the patrol will also engage the threat with several rapid rounds just as soon as he/she can safely do so, then turn and peel following the point man. The rest of the patrol will also engage the threat then individually and in turn follow the man in front if him as he turns and peels.

The point man after gaining the immediate rally point will direct incoming patrol personnel to one direction, either his left or right, beginning to achieve a skirmish line. Upon the rear slack and tail man arriving at the immediate rally point, the patrol members will be positioned in a linear formation that is perpendicular to its original route of travel.

The patrol, from this linear position, can be prepared to engage fire and maneuver, bounding back to further disengage from the threat….or move forward to close with the threat or to recover a wounded patrol member.

This same drill can be executed with a chance contact from the rear like if a bandit group is trying to run you to ground.

If you are in a wedge formation, your reaction drill may look like the below picture, where patrol members just move up into a skirmish type line in order to bring all weapons to bear on the threat and be able to maneuver either forwards or backwards as directed.

UrbanSurvivalSkills.com received the following comment/question: "Anonymous said... ....Dear Urban Survival Skills, I was going to make a comment on the firearms training post, but I'll make it a question here. I read and hear the term tactical all the time like tactical firearms and tactical shooting. What does this mean and what do I need to know about this other than going to one of those weapons schools you recommended?


UrbanMan replies: Boy, you mentioned a topic that I have long planned to write on an article on and that is the word "Tactical", an over used and misunderstood term. You see "tactical carbine", "tactical handgun", "tactical knife" over and over.

What "Tactical" means to me is the employment of tactics within a series of skills. If you are on a flat range shooting at a target, even doing some advanced skills like "tactical" (there's that term again) re-loads, shooting at multiple targets or doing failure drills, I suggest that you are NOT being tactical, you are just doing some firearms training, alebit maybe more advanced than some.

If you are shooting and moving to cover, shooting from degraded positions, adding multiple tasks such as communicating on a radio, scanning and checking your six, communicating to and/or directing other members in your survival group to bound, move or to give you supressing fire as you move,......then you are starting to add tactics to shooting and therefore doing some tactical shooting/tactical training.

Determing which cover is best; shooting and moving (3 - 5 second rush) to other cover; low crawling from cover to cover; not getting sucked into cover but using it as a protective obstacle between you and your adversaries; practicing exiting your vehicle and engaging targets; setting up "shooting problems" to solve as you expect to encounter in real life based on your environment; using white light or shooting with night vision goggles; role playing (with no live ammunition) to simulate what goes wrong in one on one and one on many situations....this is stactical training.

When we start to do these things we are getting into the "tactical" world and better preparing ourselves to survive the coming collapse. The Army uses "Training Principles" - my two favorites being "Train you as Fight,....Fight as Your Train", and, "Train Using Realism". If we employ these principles well, then we are so much the better when we come to the point of relying on ourselves for surviving.

Urban Survival Planning - Financial Indicators: The Debt Crisis

UrbanSurvivalSkills.com, since our inception, has been counseling on Survival Planners having a list of indicators that would precede and foretell the coming collapse. The idea is this list is self developed; based on factors and indicators you think are important to identify the near term coming collapse; and, should consider all factors – social, economic - financial and political.

UrbanMan uses a lot of financial sources, probably none more credible that Leeds who we have hyperlinked to this site just below the title.

Sandy Leeds, CFA is a Senior Lecturer at The University of Texas at Austin . He teaches graduate level classes in the MBA program and also serves as President of The MBA Investment Fund, L.L.C. Prior to teaching, he had careers as a lawyer and a money manager. He did his undergraduate work at The University of Alabama and also has a law degree from The University of Virginia and an MBA from the University of Texas . At UT, he has received many teaching awards, including Outstanding Professor in the MBA Program. He is married and has three children.

Leeds’ latest article, go to here: http://leedsonfinance.com/2010/09/21/ideas-about-a-debt-crisis/

Talks about the debt crisis and why you should be worried,…and if you are worried you should be preparing maybe just alittle more.

This is Leeds’ article in his words:

Here are a few quick points why you should be worried about the US :

1. By 2040, the US ’ debt-to-GDP ratio will be 425% (according to the BIS). This estimate is worse than the estimates for Portugal , Italy , Ireland and Greece.

2. We can only print money to solve the problem if we don’t mind inflation.

3. Even if you adjust for the effects of the economic cycle and you exclude interest payments, the US has a -7.3% structural budget deficit.

4. If the US wanted to reduce our debt-to-GDP to 60% by 2030, we would need to have a fiscal adjustment (lower spending or higher taxes) of 8.8% of GDP. While that might sound like a small number, realize that our tax revenue is approximately 18% of GDP.

Factors That Cause a Debt Crisis

1. Excessively large debt (pretty obvious).

2. Excessive dependence on foreign capital (which may flee).

3. Economic weakness (the debt-to GDP ratio grows if GDP is stagnant).

4. Political weakness (excessive spending and insufficient taxation).

5. Irrational exuberance (b/c investors don’t learn about the risks of debt from the past).

In the US , we could argue that we’re five-for-five (on these factors).

Six Ways Out of a Debt Crisis

1. Higher GDP growth.

2. Lower interest rates (to reduce impact of excess debt).

3. Bailout – capital from abroad.

4. Raising taxes / cutting spending.

5. Inflation (printing money).

6. Default.

Here’s a quick summary of these six exit strategies. The US is too mature for high growth. Eventually, risk premiums make low rates impossible. We’re too large to be bailed out. We don’t have the political will to cut spending or raise taxes. We’re unlikely to default (b/c we can print money). So, high inflation seems likely.

Key Lessons From History

1. Governments do not cut spending or entitlements. Similarly, they do not reduce taxes to stimulate growth. They do not tax consumption to stimulate savings. They do not grow their way out of the problem (without defaulting or depreciating).

2. Governments encourage central banks and commercial banks to load up on government debt. They often discourage foreign investment so that investors are left with little choice but buying domestic debt. They tend to default on commitments to weaker creditor groups. They condemn bond investors to negative real returns (through inflation).

3. Not all debt crises are the same. We have issued much short-term debt – so rates may rise ahead of inflation. We could have high rates in a deflationary period! This may mean that inflating our way out of the problem won’t work and we would have to default.

See…short and sweet. I didn’t clutter this report with any reason to be optimistic.

end of Leed's article.

In our view, this makes more certain and hastens the growing gap between the haves and the have nots, which is another way of declaring the extinction of the American middle Class. What happens when there are 30 million, 60 million or 50 million have nots who cannot afford to live?

WIlderness Survival - Sword of Survival website

For those of you interested in wilderness survival, there is a site on the web, called Sword of Survival, that has a lot of Wilderness Survival type field expedient solutions mostly through videos.




It looks to be a new site, maybe a couple of months old, with the demonstrator seemingly doing all the videos himself. Really informal, but the information is good. I’ll be looking at this site from time to time, to refresh myself with old and mostly forgotten wilderness survival skills. Good reference for those who have never been trained in wilderness survival.

Go to: http://www.swordofsurvival.com/

In fact, everyone, whether they are planning to Survive a Coming Collapse in an Urban Environment or from a lavish and well protected Survival Compound in some remote part of the country, should still develop skills for surviving with minimal equipment in the wilderness.

UrbanSurvivalSkills.com published an article on what we considered a basic list of wilderness survival type skills, go here to see this article. One could print the list of skills from this article and “work them off” as you train on them.