Urban Survival Preparation - Be Prepared to Fight Zombies

Among the possible collapse scenarios and subsequent threats is a biological catastrophe that mutates previous dead people into flesh eating Zombies. You know it's true or otherwise Hollywood would not have made so many movies with Zombies. Enter the U.S. Army,..not necessarily known for their flexibility, but eventually someone "gets with the program" and now the U.S. Army have developed doctrine on how to fight the Zombie threat.

FM 999-3, Counter Zombie Operations at the Fire Team Level, is the primary doctrinal reference on conducting fire team sized infantry operations in a Zombie infested environment in the United States. The term “Zombie” refers to a previously living biological organism which continues to move with purpose while showing no other sign of life (negative pulse, blood circulation, cognitive function etc).

This manual is divided into five chapters:

Chapter 1, The Zombie.
This chapter discusses the most current intelligence on the Zombie’s combat capabilities.

Chapter 2, Zombie Fighting Equipment.
This chapter will explain what equipment is required to fight in a Zombie infested environment. Note that some of the equipment is not standard issue, but can be made with readily available materials and with readily available tools.

Chapter 3, The Fireteam in a Zombie infested environment.
Basic formations, soldier tasks and fireteam tactics in a four man fire team in counter-Zombie operations.

Chapter 4, Terrain and Weather.
This chapter will cover what terrain and weather conditions are favorable and which are not when conducting counter-Zombie operations.

Chapter 5, Civilian Considerations.
This chapter addresses proper procedures involving armed and unarmed civilians. These situations vary from a hostile civilian force engaging in armed conflict against the United States Military to civilians requesting protection.

In a Zombie infested environment, the Zombies are not the only threat to achieving tactical, operational and strategic objectives. Understanding of other field manuals, notably FM 19-15 Civil Disturbances, FM 3-4 NBC Protection and FM 7-8 Infantry Rifle Platoon and Squad is highly recommended to achieve maximum effectiveness in a Zombie infested environment. Where there is conflicting information between FM 999-3 and other field manuals, information on FM 999-3 takes
precedence in a Zombie infested environment.

The smart survivalist would procure a copy and place in their Survival-Collapse library,...for those just in case scenarios.

Reader Question on the Case for the Coming Collapse

UrbanSurvivalSkills.com received a reader comment on the post titled The Case for the Coming Collapse,…...."Anonymous said... So what are you suggesting I do? Take out my money from the bank and empty out my 401K and sit on my money at my house? I do not understand what you are trying to get me (us) to do."

UrbanMan replies: The article I drew from was by Dr Craig Roberts and was not meant as a “how to” or “what to do”, although I can see how it is implied that you should do something since the momentum for a collapse is practically unstoppable.

What you do is up to you. A prudent man would listen to a lot of sources, collect information across the board and develop a plan that is feasible for him and his family. Feasible means doable….within your capability.

That plan also needs to be Complete,…considering all possible events and circumstances. From these events and circumstances, that same man and his family could develop a list of Survival Gear, Equipment and Material that would be necessary to support the plan.

Your preparation for the plan and the execution of this plan needs to be Suitable for your goals. This list for procurement and preparation will be long and most certainly will be expensive, therefore the list will need to be prioritized.

The plan also needs to be Acceptable,…..meaning the risks on not doing the plan or the financial risks of executing the preparation plan are acceptable.

Those words,....Complete (covering all major planning areas); Feasible (within the your capabilities); Suitable (meets your needs); and, Acceptable (within accepted risks) are straight out military operational planning when determining possible course of actions to accomplish a given mission.

Now as far as financial planning goes, I am not suggesting you pull out all your money from the banks and sit on it. Think about this….you have $4,000 in cash in your gun safe – worth about $4,000 of goods today and probably tomorrow. If and when hyper-inflation hits that money will loose value. That same $4,000 will then buy less and less. Nor am I suggesting you spend all your money all Survival Gear, Equipment and Material. And I am also not suggesting you trade your paycheck every two weeks for an equal value of gold or silver. What ever you do has to meet those operational requirements for you and your family.

I would however suggest that possible things you can do, is ensure you have a minimum amount of Survival Gear, Equipment and Material which for you may or may not include firearms, equipment, and stored foods; think about keeping some cash on hand for immediate procurement/purchasing needs;....think about having some amount of gold and silver; and, above all keep yourself situational aware of indicators for the coming collapse, be it a over night major event or a gradual slide into a economic depression and chaos. You should have a plan on where to go (that is safe) in the event where you are at is no longer viable for survival.

Good luck to you and remember my first suggestion,...collect information, listen to diverse sources, determine what is valid for you, your family and your plan and get to preparing.

Urban Survival Planning - Courtyard Vegetable Garden

UrbanSurvivalSkills.com received the following e-mail from a reader who appears new to Survival prepping, but seems to be catching on, learning skills and acquiring Survival Gear and Equipment.

Dear UrbanMan, I am a HVAC technician and am located within the city with a population of just over 500,000. I am living in a quad plex one street of a main six land boulevard. I started a courtyard garden this late spring with the intent to gain some experience growing some vegetables as well as produce some food for the table!

I am growing two types of squash, egg plant, cucumber, mini tomatoes, onions and beets. I tried growing carrots and peas, but that didn’t work out.

You can see from the picture that my squash is large,…..I placed the coke can for scale. With four squash plants so far this year I have harvested 13 or 14 squash fruits. I have about six or seven other fruits coming to ripeness. Each squash fruit is large enough to last three, sometimes four meals easy. I add them to everything, but in a Survival situation I would use the vegetables to augment the rice, beans and pasta I have stored in buckets.

I use one egg and some flour to bread the sliced squash and fry up in a pan, then added to the cooked rice. I have grilled the sliced squash like shisk-k-bobs over the grill and also over an open fire. Pretty good actually. Next I’m going to try baking in a dutch oven over an open fire with rice, beef bullion and some beans – sort of like Survival Jumbolaya.

I am learning how to preserve by canning so I can make some of these vegetables last into the fall. I live in a climate where I think I can grow vegetables through late October. I am also thinking about a small greenhouse so I can grow late in the winter.

I bought a couple of those Suisse Sport Alpine Sleeping bags and Aqua Mira Water Filter Bottles from your Survival Store and am in the process of building some Bug Out Bags.

In my quad plex, I have witnessed Survival Prepping to two out of the three other occupants. I myself have a wife; the other people I’m beginning to develop into a Survival Group are also couples, but not married. One I took to the range shooting my Bushmaster copy of the M-4 and now he bought a Mini-14 and a .357 Magnum handgun. I am working on the other couple as well – at least he owns a 12 gauge shotgun. But both have also planted some vegetables and are about ready to stock some basics like rice, beans, salt, soup stock and such.

So you can see we are starting to get prepared. I have gained a lot of confidence as I am beginning to get prepared but scary as I have along way to go before I satisfy I am ready. Can you ever be really ready?

So thanks for all the information on your site.

Book Review - Financial Armageddon, by Michael J. Panzner

Full Book Title: Financial Armageddon: Protect Your Future from Economic Collapse, by Michael J. Panzner

Financial Armageddon depicts a disturbing collapse of the U.S economy plunging us all into a very dire Survival Scenario. Michael Panzner takes financial gogbbledegook and makes it understandable for all. It is pessimistic and predicts hyper-inflation, a terrible depression and other very bad scenarios. And this was in 2006 when he finished the book, with an update in 2008. None of the things that have happened since have basically affected how the book was written, but present day events will certainly correlate what he predicts.

This book is really depressing, however realistic. If the crash comes like Panzner predicts it will be a horrible event. Urban Survival Skills.com believes this is the most likely Urban Survival scenario.

Panzner does provide some preparation guidelines so people can prepare themselves financially. This book “worst cases” a total economic breakdown making each of us on our own. Pensions, be it social security, private or governmental just may not be there. How can it with the U.S. falling steeply into debt?

Read this book, understand the possibilities of several scenarios, all not good at all, and come away better informed and with a will to prepare much better.

Publisher: Kaplan Publishing; Revised edition (May 6, 2008); ISBN-10: 1427797412; ISBN-13: 978-1427797414

Urban Survival Planning – Preparing Your Home for a Longer Stay

The primary focus on Urban Survival Skills as been to prepare the individual new to Survival Planning & Preparation to surviving a collapse of society as we know it or some calamity that would sufficient degrade or destroy the existing infrastructure so that individuals would have to fend for themselves or band together in groups for survival.

The basic premise on Urban or even Suburban Survival is the Survivor will most likely be forced to re-locate someplace else in order to provide for a better survival chance.

The problems with surviving in an Urban or Suburban environment are, in part, due to large concentrated population; issues with security that are compounded by buildings and population groups in close proximity; presence of organized criminal gangs that do not exist in rural or remote areas; limited resources to spread throughout a large population.

We have endeavored to help the new Urban Survival Planner with the need to select a safe location, probably with relatives or friends at a rural or remote location; prepare a Survival Bug Out Bag to make the withdrawal or movement to the safe location possible; necessity for firearms for survival and self protection – and in this area we focused on common and simply firearms rather than the need to arm oneself like a para-military unit; we have touched on Survival skills such as map reading, basic land navigation and water purification for example; and, we have wrote about survival gear, equipment, food and books.

We know the individual new to Survival Preparation may be over whelmed with the enormity of preparing for a collapse and the cost associated with procuring Survival Gear, Equipment and material. So we have attempted to consider the cost of completing these preparations and Survival Equipment procurement in our recommendations.

We also know that human nature being what it is, most people will make the decision to move from their Urban or Suburban location to the safe area, in other words, execute their Bug Out Plan much later than prudent. People will natural accept a incremental change decreasing their standard of living, such as shortages of commodities, high inflation for goods and fuel, water shortages, etc. And when the collapse hits, most of these people will be waiting for the government to fix it.

Well the truth be told, the government is made up of people and largely due to bureaucratic problems are at best going to be like a Aircraft Carrier trying to turn – in effect slow and cumbersome, if it does fix anything which isn’t likely. We believe in self responsibility hence taking it upon you to prepare for survival in trying times.

Knowing that people will remain in their known and somewhat comfortable Urban or Suburban homes, even when the threats indicate a growing danger, we now want to focus a little information on preparing your home for an extended stay during a collapse until the Bug Out Plan is initiated.

The first order of business is a Vulnerability Assessment. Don’t be intimidated by this large word, it is simply assessing your home to determine vulnerabilities.

Common vulnerabilities include weak locks on doors and windows; size, location and number of ground floor windows that are more easily breached than doors; vegetation masking approaches to your house and limiting observation from the house to the immediate area; outward signs of “well to do-ness” where possible burglars, robbers, looters or criminal bands would be attracted to your house.

Other vulnerabilities would be lighting. Now lighting strikes two ways. Full time illumination and/or motion detecting lights can serve as a deterrent. It would be nice to have solar powered motion detecting lights in the event of a power failure or utilities grid infrastructure collapse, however if everyone else’s lights are off and yours are on, who does that attract attention to?

We’ll address these things in up-coming posts to help prepare the urban or suburban home for an extended stay before the Survival Bug Out Plan is initiated. Stay safe – stay tuned.

Urban Survival Planning – Absorbing People into the Survival Group

One of the tenants of Survival Planning that this Survival Writer believes Survival in a Total Collapse, be it in an Urban or Suburban Area or in a Remote or Rural Area will be near impossible in a very small group. I am very sure of my ability to survive wilderness conditions and even conditions where armed men are actively hunting me, but that is simply surviving like an animal – there would be no reasonable correlation to living.

To be able to maintain security, accomplish daily survival or life tasks such as fixing things, tending to vegetable crops, procuring foods and other things, cooking, and resting the Survival Group would need at least four adults who are competent and could be counted upon. The more in this Survival Group, the more survival tasks could be rotated and usually a better quality of life.

However, the more people in your Survival Group the more commodities and food will be consumed and the greater the chances there are of human conflict.

Choose wisely who you bring into your Survival Group. In the fictional Survival Novel, Patriots – A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse, the Survival Group plans well ahead of time ensuring that the Group has adequate supplies at the Safe Location (a farm in Southern Idaho). They go so far as to ensure all members of the Group buy the same type of camouflage uniforms and firearms to have compatibility.

Both in the Novels, Patriots and Lights Out, the Survival Groups well into the beginning of the Collapse begin a process to interview and otherwise vet (check out) new incoming potential Survival Group members to make sure they only allow people who can contribute in some form or fashion to the overall group survival effort.

If you haven't read those books, you really need to. Patriots is available through the Amazon carousel at the bottom of this page. Lights Out is available (free as a PDF download) through the link under Book Reviews.

So not only are you going to have to be careful who you clue into your Urban Survival Plan and Preparations, you need to make sure they can contribute and will not be a burden.

You will also need to plan for strap hangers showing up. What if a young mother comes to your door and begs for you to help her? What if you refuse and she then begs for you to take her 3 year old baby? Human nature is to be compassionate. Human nature is also to be jealous and greedy. Bringing in an untested and unknown someone into your small Survival Group could spell doom. Refusing to help someone could also damage your humanity quotient for lack of a better term.

Think and wargame various possible scenarios. For Jim, he would have to think about his ex-wife. What if she calls or shows up at the beginning of a collapse? What if she and her new boyfriend and baby show up at the Family Cabin? Who else has she told about it? All of a sudden the duration, that the food in Jim’s Survival Cache will last, is reduced in half. What happens if you have several adult single males in your group and your wife or girlfriend is the only female?

I could go on and on, but I think you get the idea. Be prepared and that preparation starts with thinking about and Wargaming likely events and possible solutions.