I “what if” for a living.
What makes Special Forces elite is our planning before the actual mission. Planning for all possible contingencies, on top of the actual mission. I did it as an A-Team leader, as a battalion operations officer responsible for deploying 15 A-teams around the world, and as an instructor/writer for many years at the JFK Special Warfare School, which also runs the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) school.
I’ve applied those experiences as a bestselling writer in multiple genres in fiction, including thrillers, historical and science fiction and in nonfiction writing with my Green Beret Preparation and Survival Guide as well as my Stuff Doesn’t Just Happen books. In the former I’m looking forward to possible disasters; in the latter I look back at past catastrophes and dissect them for the cascade events that caused them and examine how similar disasters can be prevented in the future.
I constantly study and examine how many different types of people have been preparing for what the rich call the ‘event’. The ‘event’ is a breakdown of civilization.
Those preparing for the ‘event’ range from the person in the remote already living off the grid, to hard-core bunker preppers, to those plunking down billions/millions of dollars for their exclusive estates in places like New Zealand or the isolation of Montana or buying ‘condos’ in survival silos.
One of the problems when approaching the ‘event’ is that it could be many things. Frankly, a key event is going on all around us right now as the climate changes. We are experiencing survival situations right now as a byproduct of that from wildfires to stronger and more frequent hurricanes to persistent drought to flooding and more.
Thus, the first thing I teach is to conduct an Area Study. Every person and group need to examine their situation, beginning with themselves and expanding outward. For example, in my survival book I cover dealing with a house fire (which odds are you will experience at some level) well before learning how to make a fire for survival out in the woods (have a lighter?)
Thus, the rich make the same mistake most make: they’re focused on the end game and miss the more likely, dangerous events in their everyday life, such as stalking (aka Gavin DeBecker’s Gift of Fear), a helicopter crash or even health issues that are ignored or the dangers in their various mansions.
I’ve put a lot of thought and war-gaming into various scenarios for the rich because of some of my fiction. I’ll discuss more of these in other blogs, but one of the first that comes up is security in case of the ‘event’. The moment you establish a static position, you become a target. Thus, one must consider how to protect that position. Hiring guards raises many issues. Money will be worthless after the ‘event’. So, what are you offering? A place in the survival site? But why then is the no-longer-rich person in a better position than the security? Can you buy loyalty? With what? How long will it last? Does your security have family they will have a higher loyalty/love for?
I have an exponential rule of security: the more you need, the less likely you will have it.
There are ways around this, but one thing I’ve learned is that the rich didn’t get that way by giving things away. As I noted, each person’s situation is different so there is no one answer solves all.
For the rest of us? Get prepared now for the more likely occurrences and even for the event. Start small. Build from there. Here is how to do an Area Study. FREE.
The Green Beret Pocket-Sized Survival Guide (same as above, minus the preparation part in order to be smaller in print)
The Green Beret Preparation and Survival Guide. Also in Kindle Unlimited.
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