The world is pretty tense right now. Every day, it seems, the tension gets ratcheted up a little more. With that in mind, I want to talk about the concept of immediate action plans. In small unit tactics, we would refer to these as immediate action drills or battle drills, but our scope is a bit wider here.
Proclaim this among the nations:
Prepare for war!
Rouse the warriors!
Let all the fighting men draw near
Joel 3:9
These are plans that immediately go into effect as soon as a triggering event occurs, hence immediate action. In the executive protection world, they were once called REACT plans, because when something happens, you need to react, not think. Your team should have several of these in place NOW, so that when something begins to happen, your people are reacting, rather than trying to come up with a plan. In this article, we’ll go over a few.
But first, every one of these plans pre-supposes that you are carrying certain items at all times. The price of admission for preparedness is that it is assumed that you are always carrying or have accessible some type of bag, whether you call it a Get Home Bag, EDC Bag, or Bug Out Bag that contains your basic gear and enough food/water purification for 24-48 hours. It also assumes that you are carrying at least an individual first aid kit, and most likely, unless you live in an unfree state, a sidearm. No matter where you live, you should be carrying at least a folding knife and mutlitool, but preferrably also a fixed blade knife (the 3 Blade Rule). You should always be carrying a radio, preferrably with a “surveillance kit” type eairpiece and microphone.
Lost COMMS Plan
I’ll begin with a mea culpa. All of the locals and most people who have ever attended a class here know that I have a Camp Ponderosa Comms Plan. Well, one of the local guys decided to show up, and as the plan requires, he tried to reach out via radio and guess what? Mr. Tactical “I alwas carry a radio” Wisdom left his radio on the desk and wasn’t carrying it in the field. You should be carrying a radio programmed with your teams planned frequencies.
In the event that cell phones go down, have a plan. Even if the power grid is up, everyone trying to call their family at the same time during a crisis or event is going to overload the system. Have a set time frame for everyone to check in via radio in the event of a cell system outage. For example, if phone service is down more than 4 hours, everyone checks in via a team frequency at the top of the next hour. This can be by voice or by digital messaging. Digital modes travel farther than voice, so keep that in mind.
Here, as we live in an area where cell phone coverage is weak at best, and non-existent for 20 miles in every direction where I live, radio becomes a part of everyday life. In Montana, CB is still a big thing and most logging trucks, hunters, and residents have CB units. We monitor CB Channel 3 every day at Camp Ponderosa as a longer-range calling channel here in the mountains. I’m traveling to a friends place to set up his radio on the next mountain range so that we can relay news and info back and forth off the grid.
Your group might all live less than 5 miles apart and you can use a GMRS or MURS simplex channel. If everyone is a bit farther away, you’ll need a repeater. Here, our group uses a public GMRS repeater and it covers about 90 miles north to south and about 45 east to west (mountains channel the signal and also block the east-west travel of it). We can all reach this repeater with simple, cheap, handheld radios (Baofeng 5RM units, mostly).
Side note here: Everyone who carries a radio in your group should know how to quickly “ZERO” a radio. ZEROing a radio means erasing everything. Every radio on the market has a way to “RESET ALL” on it. Learn what that is for your radio and PRACTICE IT. With computer programming, it’s easy to re-program them. You need to know how to and have practiced how to delete everything from the radio memory. There may come a time when you need to toss a radio or when you know it’s about to fall into the wrong hands (use your imagination).
Evasion Plan
In the event that an attack occurs or for some other reason that group members might be targeted, have a standard evasion plan. In executive protection, if a client is attacked, we always turn and move away 180 degrees from the attack and move a set distance before even trying to link up with other elements. The military calls this a break contact drill and the concept is the same.
Whoever is attacked or targeted (could be with hostile surveillance) should first break immediate contact while letting the rest of the team know that they are beginning an evasion. Anyone else not in contact then manuevers to try and help the evading party. For example, one family is being followed by local agitators and requests help. While they are moving, two other members move closer, letting the evaders know where they are. The parties manage a link up and get the evading party out of the area. You can come back for a vehicle left behind later. While you might use cell phones and a group chat to initiate this plan, using radios makes link up much quicker.
Develop some sort of plan to help each other evade hostile targeting.
No Comms Meet Up Plan
In the event of a major disruption, you might not be able to make contact even via radio (rare – but possible, like EMP). Have a plan that if there has been no contact for a set number of days post-event (usually 3-4), all members will just meet at a designated location and time. You might say, “if you haven’t heard from anyone by the fourth day, meet at 0700 on the fifth day at Johnson’s Farm” or some other location. Then, everyone can meet up and decide what to do, arrange further meetings, re-distribute working radios, etc.
Evacuation Plan
By the same token, some situations are so bad that everyone should just immediately begin evacuation. You might have a standard meeting place, but for whatever reason that meeting place might be too dangerous to use (proximity to a major fire, ground zero of earthquake/tornado/hurricane, or hostile action). Your immediate action evacuation plan might have everyone begon movement and meet at a pre-arranged rally point. For example, “if things are too bad to make the planned convoy meeting point, just get started and we’ll link up at the highway rest area near mile marker 174”. Have a planned wait window – “Anyone going there will wait no more than 6 hours for anyone else to arrive”.
Security Check Plan
During the Rhodesian Bush War, the Agric-Alert system was a system of evening and morning radio check-ins that all farms in an area did every day. If a farm didn’t check in, the two nearest farms sent teams to go and check the farm. Why two teams from two different farms? So that no one farm was without security and so that they approached from 2 different directions.
You should have a plan that if one family or person from your group doesn’t check-in, one or two group members should go and check on them. 95% of the time, it’s going to because of some mundane reason like dead batteries or broken equipment, but what if it’s Mr Murphy and the 5%? Check on your tribe. If no is there, ask the neighbors what happened – you need to know.
This set of ideas is the bare minimum. Think of other areas where can set up pre-arranged plans. There is a big risk in preparedness of everyone waiting around for someone to activate “the plan” and thus get everyone moving. Have as many decision points as possible pre-decided with immediate action plans.
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