In short, decoupling basically means in practice a shift away from international supply chains. These chains emerged in part because outsourcing to foreign nations has some advantages: cost savings, technology transfer, etc. But there are obvious risks involved.
In terms of international economics, decoupling is not exactly a new idea, or at least new in terms of the timespan of the Covid-19 crisis:
However, the disruptions from Covid-19 have made clear exactly how vulnerable we are. It seems likely there is going to be a new urgency to the notion of decoupling. Whether that translates into actual decoupling remains to be seen, but some degree of decoupling may already have been happening so there may be some momentum.
For our purposes decoupling is a more immediate and personal concept. In some sense prepping is an act in anticipation of forced decoupling. You might not get supplies you need, for instance, so you have stores of them. You may not be able to rely on public security services, so you have to think about your own defense. And so on.
It is possible that this instinct to be ready for personal decoupling will be strengthened by this crisis. More folks probably will start looking to reduce their reliance on society, at least in terms of reliance on continuously functioning social structures. They will build up their stores of food, ammo, key pieces of equipment, medicine, etc. Some will start looking for property with survival in mind. And this is a good thing: we will be a more de-centralized society where fewer folks will operate under the assumption of constant support from larger social structures.
Above all, folks will probably start thinking more and more as units decoupled from, and not necessarily aligned with, society. This won’t just manifest itself through prepping: the next few months will probably accelerate an already present trend toward isolated lives based on a bespoke virtual existence. Bearing witness to the way that their fellow Americans have reacted to the crisis, many are probably now concluding that they cannot count on at least some of their neighbors to be smart in tough times: we have also witnessed an epidemic of denial, statistical illiteracy, arrogance, etc.
This reaction is natural, but may also be the wrong move. First, the more atomized and dysfunctional our society, the more likely we are to face some types of crises that would put preps to the test.
Second, the lone wolf model of prepping is a risky. Yes, it allows for faster, more streamlined decisionmaking. The appeal of this is obvious: who wants to spend time convincing the obstinate in times of emergency? The only catch here is what if you are the one that is wrong or not quite right? What if there is some consideration you missed? Sometimes dialogue leads to better decisions. There are clearly limits to this, but a small group of reasonable folks aligned in their goals often delivers better decisions that balance risks better.
Yes, you can develop skills for many things you need to survive. But small groups allow for some degree of specialization. The truth is, some people’s minds are better bent toward thinking about health and medicine. Some are just better at cooking, or sewing, or shooting, or hunting, or just telling stories by the fire that, believe me, might be your psychological salvation on the darkest nights.
This is why I have rule 6 for my personal preps:
6. Community
Yes, a lot of big, long standing vulnerabilities in our society are being revealed now. But don’t go to the other extreme, throwing the baby out with the bathwater in the process.
Its not just about feeling good about yourself. Its also a safer bet in lots of circumstances.
“We’re driving a U-Haul out to the Hamptons. Which means I’ll probably be the first to die”
So it turns out that covid-19 is messing with the Spring Break plans of our betters and instead they are doing what any sensible prepper would do in an emergency like this: bug out out to the Hamptons. To wit:
All kidding aside, bugging out is central to the plans of a lot of preppers. When the SHTF, they are going to hit the open road.
Now when I refer to “bugging out” for the purposes of what follows in this post I mean leaving your home in a major, society-wide SHTF social disruption. I am not referring to, say, driving to your brother’s house 200 miles away because your own is in the path of a Category 3 Hurricane or something like that. To me the better word for that is “evacuation” and the key distinction with “bugging out” is that if you evacuate in a timely, sensible fashion, your journey will be one aided by the fact that most of the support mechanisms of the modern world (e.g. gas stations) are still intact and your jorney will end in a place where they operate as well.
I cannot help but to think that roughly half of preppers who seriously contemplate bugging out so defined as an attractive option are stirred to do so by romantic disaster porn book covers. Exhibit A:
Most of the other half are probably motivated by images of the ultimate road trip from movies like Zombieland.
Columbus and Tallahassee marvel at the cargo room of a ’99 Ford Ranger
Here’s the most important thing to know about bugging out: it is generally a terrible idea that should be pursued only as a last and unavoidable resort.
First, let’s be honest: it would be physically grueling. You are most likely going to have to undertake a major part of your journey on foot and living out of a bag. In a real SHTF scenario the roads are likely to be challenging to say the least. Abandoned vehicles clogging the lanes. We know this is likely because it routinely happens in certified non-disasters. Consider the picture below that gave birth to a thousand internet memes, from an ordinary (and light) snowstorm in Raleigh, NC a few years ago. And most of you have vehicles that mostly confine you to roads (no, a Toyota Highlander is not a post-apocalyptic off road war machine).
Snowmageddon, Raleigh NC style.
So get used to the idea that bugging out will probably mean walking. Test yourself sometime by taking a 10 mile hike with a 50 pound pack and something heavy enough to simulate carrying a rifle. I bet you are in serious trouble by mile 4. You will also learn why blisters are such an obsession for those of us who recreationally put pack to back and ramble around the woods. If you would have to bug out in any kind of hilly or mountainous area I give to mile 2 before you are in trouble.
And here is an instrinsic problem: realistic physical conditioning will only go so far in getting you ready for this. The only real way to get ready for this is to hike constantly with a pack on, but that is a very time inefficient method of exercise. Even folks in pretty good shape will struggle with the practical physical realities of a long forced march with a lot of weight on their backs.
And if you are thinking about bugging out then you better think hard about gear. For instance, the dude on that book cover (“Founders”) above is wearing an “Alice” pack.
An “ALICE” pack
The Alice (as in All-Purpose Lightweight Individual Carrying Equipment) pack is a US military design that was adoptd in the early Seventies. Alice packs carry a lot of nostalgia weight. They were a foundational piece of kit for generations of US soldiers. And they are a comparatively very affordable pack (I bought one off of Amazon for evaluation maybe 7-8 years ago for $50 bucks or so). But here is the most important thing you need to know about Alice packs: they are not so good at carrying actual weight. With more than around 35-40 pounds in them they are a torture device.
You need a pack with a high speed frame that distributes the weight in a sustainable way (that is, away from your shoulders and toward the Iliac crest of your hips) that works with your body. Finding that pack is a financially and time expensive undertaking.
Bugging out is also a security and resources nightmare. You will likely be pushed into essentially unfamiliar operational environments for which you have little ability to anticipate risks or know where to look for things you might need. The locals know that new environment better than you. They know where to get food, water and resources better than you do. They know, frankly, where to ambush you.
Bugging out is also rooted in the idea that the grass is greener over there. While that is always possible, in many realistic disaster scenarios limited information flows will probably make it hard to determine whether this is really the case. And you are probably going to be betting a lot that conditions are better in your bug out destination.
Yes, these folks leaving for the Hamptons do not have the image of the book cover above in mind. But what makes them so sure the Hamptons isn’t actually ground zero for the next huge Covid-19 cluster? Would anyone have guessed the Orthodox Jewish community in New Rochelle would be the first huge cluster?
We are going to talk about bugging out but make no mistake about it: it is likely a desperate choice in most real SHTF scenarios. Your first line of defense should be bug in: stay where you are and try to ride out what is happening.
This is so important, and flies so strongly in the face of a type of prepper escapist fantasy, that it deserves a rule of its own:
This evening the local news had a special on covid-19. An economist opined that this could cause a recession. On the other hand, if there was some good news, such as a fall in cases in Italy, it could rally people’s spirits and make them think everything was going to be alright. I got stuck on the thought of people’s “spirits” and how they shaped personal trajectories thus far in this story.
Though I have prepped for a decade, this has been the first
really big crisis I have experienced as a prepper. We’ve had weather threats
and stuff like that, but those were all at best local threats. This is the
first really big disruption I have seen. Put differently, this is the first dry
run for something even remotely approaching SHTF.
Now, before proceeding, let’s characterize this event. It is
the biggest thing that has happened to many of us, but there have been some
saving graces. It happened slowly enough that anyone who was paying attention
had the time to make at least adequate preparations for, say, bugging in to
ride it out (whether they have the resources to do so is admittedly a different
story). Moreover, this is a crisis that has not so far impacted vital systems:
the lights are still on, the gas pumps are still running, the store shelves are
still more or less stocked, etc.
This has been a comparatively forgiving event, at least compared with some plausible and serious alternatives (such as the grid going down, a virus that had a higher “Rho naught” combined with much higher mortality and morbidity, etc.).
One of the major lessons I am going to take from this experience is how badly so many folks process risk. The won’t see obvious threats approaching and then will react in a fashion that does nothing (angry Tweets really make a difference!) or, in a smaller and more intimate social unit where they might have more influence, is actually counterproductive. On an intellectual level I already understood this, but it somehow looms much larger in my thinking after watching the past few weeks.
The vast majority of people I encountered did not see the Covid-19 tsunami coming, even as they were obviously in its shadow. Really, their falure to pay attention was just incredible and could only be explained beyond a certain point by denial. And now when they have finally acknowledged this great, awful wave..
Anger. The dominate gear for many is anger. They are angry and want someone to pay. Some blame China. Some drove ever deeper into the labyrinth of “Orange Man Bad”.
Some of the angry are simply panicking. Some are disappearing into blame game escapism. Many instant public health experts explain that this is only happening because we don’t have enough test kits. The shortage of test kits has been really lamentable, but no, this was going to happen regardless because we were never going to detect most of the cases in time due to the nature of this virus. This morning I heard someone on YouTube explain slightly caustically that Italy is in trouble because they did not have total surveillance immediately: you see, as he so plainly explains, a nation needs to detect all with cough, fever, myalgia, aches, etc. and quarantine them and they need to do that before the health system even notices cases. Lets not focus on complication, such as that there is literally no way to do this in a Western democracy.
Others suddenly and angrily push “solutions” that are just punches in the air. And they can never understand why they those solutions haven’t been implemented yesterday (back when they were personally still in denial, that is). Some argue that we need immediately to test everyone and that will solve the problem, but that would likely put us in an entirely different crisis as we drowned in a sea of false positives. Others argue that we need to adopt China’s “get tough” measures. Mind you many of these folks split their time between this demand and insisting that Trump is a dictator, but what I think all sensible people can agree on is that Chinese solutions probably wouldn’t work in the U.S. You’ve got that who nagging problem of a different society with different political and institutional structures, culture, history, laws, etc.
Then you have a final, and rather amazing group: those who
still think there is no problem, even as they feel the first mist of the
tsunami upon their cheeks.
The problem with people who process risk poorly is that they are a liability when difficult, evidence-based decisions need to be made. Emotion and psychology enter too deeply in their process, and that more often than not leads us to do stupid things that enhance risk.
A lot of lone wolf preppers are probably nodding in approval at this point. They plan to rely on no one but themselves. This has the advantage of insulating yourself from dependency on people who make poor risk choices. But there are probably instances where all of us make poor decisions and one of the great things about a social unit is that it provides a check on our errors and excesses. Moreover, socieities cast a broader net in terms of information gathering. And society is really critical to things like specialization, emotional support, defense, etc.
A core assumption behind lone wolf prepping is that you can make better decisions than others (or, alternatively, better at making them in isolation) and execute them better on your own. The first assumption is questionable. At a minimum lone individuals are probably generally at an information disadvangtage. Per the second, while there is probably some speed advantage to being alone, the Rambo myth is just that: in the tactical arena individuals rarely if ever defeat teams. There is no reason to believe that gathering resources, performing tasks, etc. would be any different.
So where does that leave us? As preppers we need to build a social network for mutual support in a massive disruption. But we clearly have to be a little selective about who we choose. A lot of folks are a liability in bad times. This happens to perfectly encapsulate my person rules 6 and 7:
6. Community
7. Let the right ones in
Lone wolves will probably not make it. But neither will a society of clowns. Strike the balance between the two.
Guns are a key part of being prepared. If there is a major disruption they can be an essential source of security and food. This leads to my 12th rule of prepping:
Rule 12. Slaves and the dead are unarmed
This sounds harsh and intentionally so. You don’t want to be unarmed two months into a grid collapse. Trust me about that.
Before moving on, I need to acknowlege and emphasize that guns are a necessary but not sufficient condition for successful prepping. This is why my next rule of prepping is:
Rule 13. You can’t eat or drink bullets
But more on that later. The focus here is Rule 12.
Guns are a topic that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. This is not wholly unreasonable. Guns are dangerous and people do a lot of stupid things with them (just like they do with, say, cars). But some of the fear, and maybe some of the stupidity, is probably driven by a lack of familiarity.
Guns certainly are not the only weapons you can , or should, use when prepping. But at the same time guns are indispensable. I have run into preppers with a great aversion to guns who argue that their substitute, such as a recurve bow, is just as effective. Well, the probability of someone with a recurve defeating someone with an AR-15, for instance, isn’t zero. But it is low. Very low. In the rock, paper, scissors game in a post-disruption world without the rule of law, guns break most other weapons and defensive schemes. You should not kid yourself about that.
In this and a long series of posts to come I am going to provide an introduction to guns. I write under the assumption that the reader knows nothing about them and build from there. If you know everything up to a certain point, jump in then. Alternatively, simplification can sometimes lead to potentially misleading statements (e.g. missing important exceptions to general truths). If you feel I have done this, please call me out and I will edit appropriately.
Let’s begin at the most basic departure point:
A (“rifle”) cartridge
A gun is a device that uses a cartridge (pictured above, showing a shape often associated with “rifle’ cartridges) to deliver concentrated energy to a target via a bullet (1). The two major parts of a cartridge are the bullet (1) and the casing (2). Generally speaking, guns ignite the primer at the bottom of a casing, which then sets off a larger charge within the casing.
The bullet is the part that is shot out of the gun. The casing of the round being fired is immobilized in the chamber of the gun. This is a section of the barrel (on many guns it is technically an extension of the barrel, but let’s not worry about that) in which the round to be fired is placed ready to be fired. It is usually held in the chamber by the bolt of the gun.
The ignition of the primer (by the gun driving what is called a firing pin into the primer) and then of the charge by the primer causes gas expansion, the mounting pressure from which in turn causes the bullet to separate from the casing and accelerate down the barrel.
The energy involved in this is basically constrained within the narrow barrel between the bolt and the back of the bullet. That constrained energy feeds the acceleration of the bullet to its final velocity when it leaves the barrel. The bullet then travels beyond the muzzle of the gun.
Its trajectory thereafter reflects three basic forces. Atmospheric resistance causes it to slow, until other things being equal, it comes to a stop. Gravity causes the bullet path to fall relative to a straight line out of the barrel. Finally, atmospheric movement of air (i.e. wind) causes shifts in its trajectory as they act on the bullet. These forces operate on the bullet until it either hits something or comes to a rest somewhere.
That’s it, in essence.
To round out the anatomy of a cartridge, from the image above we have the neck (3), shoulder (4), rim (5) and base (6). The details and implications of these are not super important for now.
For those a little lost, below is another cross-sectional diagram of a cartridge, this time showing a profile more typical of a “pistol” cartridge (though to be sure, many rifles accept cartridges that look like this; for an example, Google “30 carbine” to see the cartridge for the M1 Carbine rifle from WWII) . Note the lack of a defined neck and shoulder. The bullet (1) is at the top of the cartridge and seated a bit in it. Striking the primer (5) ignites the charge (3), causing the bullet (1) to separate from the casing (2) and travel down the barrel.
A “pistol” cartridge
From the operational basics of a gun flows two big realities:
What bullets actually deliver is kinetic energy, which is the energy associated with an object due to its motion. And the kinetic energy of an object is its mass times (m) the square of its velocity (v):
e=m*v2
In terms of the energy delivered by a bullet, there are two big implications. First, there is a big payoff in terms of kinetic energy to higher bullet mass m, which is usually measured in grains (there are 7,000 grains in a pound). Second, there is an even more quickly growing payoff to the increasing velocity at which a round travels v (usually measured in feet per second). If someone threw a bullet at your chest, you would say “owww!”. If they shot it out of a gun at your chest you might be killed. The difference mainly reflects the implications of velocity for kinetic energy.
The damage a bullet does can depend on how the energy is delivered at the point of impact with the target. Some bullets designs concentrate energy (e.g. armor piercing bullets, which are in simple terms very hard and try to concentrate a huge amount of energy at a point to overcome great resistance) and some effectively act essentially to spread it (e.g. so-called “hollow point” rounds, which generally maximize damage to softer targets).
The flight performance of a bullet once it leaves the barrel can also depend heavily on bullet design. For instance, some bullets experience a large amount of air resistance as captured in a low drag coefficient. This may or may not be a big deal depended on the intended mission of the bullet. For example, the AK-47 cartridge, the famous 7.62X39mm (also sometimes called the “7.62 Soviet”), has a generally low drag coefficient compared with many cartridges for similar guns. But the AK-47 was designed primarily with engagements out to 300 meters or so in mind, and from what I have seen that cartridge gets the job done to those distances
The discussion thus far has hinted at two types of guns: pistols and rifles. For legal purposes, there is actually a third category, called an “any other weapon” (often abbreviated to AOW). I don’t went to get into these too much in this post except to say that the only even quasi-clear defintions for these are legal, and due to rapdily mounting innovation around legal technicalities, even these legal distinctions are starting to blur for practical purposes.
When most people hear “pistol” they think of this:
The guns at the top and bottom are rifles, the one in the middle is a pistol. Confused? That makes you a sensible person. But don’t worry about this for now: they are all guns. We will return to this distinction, but pistol and rifle definitions for practical purposes are at this point very much a discussion in flux. We’ll discuss this further in a later post.
Before concluding I want to clean up a little more on the terminology. I referred to the “M1 Carbine” earlier. If you’ve seen Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, etc, you have seen the M1 Carbine but for the uniniated here it is:
“Carbine” is one of those funny words you see bounced around in the gun world. Everyone familiar with guns generally understands what is meant in context when the term is invoked, but a precise definition that captures every application of the term is somewhat elusive. But the M1 Carbine is a pretty good example of the generally agreed on features of a carbine: it is a generally shorter, probably more maneuverable rifle and the term is sometimes also applied to rifles that chamber less powerful cartridges. For example, he is an M1 carbine next to the M1 Garand rifle:
And here is the M1 Carbine cartridge (.30 Carbine) next to the M1 Garand cardtridge (.30-06 Springfield, often referred to a “thirty aught six”):
.30 Carbine (left) and .30-06 Springfield (right)
Clearly, the M1 Carbine chambers a smaller cartridge and is a smaller gun, at least compared with the M1 Garand. Generally, in my experience carbine implies “short” more strongly than it does “less powerful cartridge” (for example, the M-16 and its carbine counterpart, the M4, generally still chamber the same cartridge, the 5.56X45mm). There are lots of other funny terms like carbine that are useful to know if a little fuzzy (e.g. some day we’ll talke about “recce”, which makes carbine look straightforward). For now it is important just to know that such words are abundant in the gun world, which evolved from a long and varied history, leading to a lot of sediment and confusion.
Finally, some slang. Bullets are sometimes called slugs, for example. Cartridges are sometimes called rounds. Confusingly, cartridges are sometimes referred to as bullets. And catridges, bullets, etc. are often referred to generically as “ammo” or “ammunition”. You’ll get used to it and you will learn how to process the almost unending malapropisms surrounding guns and shooting if you start with a good grounding in the fundamentals.
I am going to talk about prepping in part through a series
of rules or guidelines that have informed my prepping. In my last post I
introduced my number one rule (“Be the gray man”) because…hey, it’s
the number one rule.
And now I’ll skip to one of the last rules on my list,
because I think it is timely:
Rule 22. Don’t ignore experts, or follow them
Covid-19 is a complex foe. Though we are learning about it
faster than maybe any other pathogen in history (think of the terrifying
darkness that, for instance, surrounded the 1918-1919 Spanish flu) I suspect
that what we know now is only the slightest portion of what we will know in
only a few months.
There are a lot of questions, and many of them can only be
answered by folks with dense technical expertise in virology, medicine,
epidemiology, public health, hospital administration, etc.
At the same time it is already clear that the experts of the
moment are not infallible.
Take masks as a case in point. We are told not to buy masks because they cannot protect the general public and health care workers desperately need them for protection.
It should be self-evident that in some sense both of these claims cannot simultaneously be true. If they aren’t potentially protective then why do health care workers need them?
Now there are some complexities to proper mask usage. You need a fairly tight fit, no breaches in the seal (it’s time to shave your beard of Zeus), etc. But even health care workers fail these standards routinely (I have seen plenty of footage in the last few days of health care workers with clearly ill-fitting masks on, facial hair, etc.).
And you certainly could infect yourself by improperly
handling a mask that has Covid-19 on its exterior.
But couldn’t these issues be resolved with a simple public
information campaign?
It’s also true that an N95 mask won’t stop all virus
particles. But this seems like a silly framing of the issue: even military
grade full face CBRN masks are not an absolute guarantee of protection.
Surely properly used N95 masks must help inhibit some virus
contact and thus reduce risk. Again, why would health care workers need them
otherwise?
The suggestion that health care workers need these masks instead of us really means that there is a shortage of them in the health care system, at least compared with anticipated need. Now, there is some chutzpah in appeals to a shortage. At a minimum, to the extent that this is true much of our health care system failed to prep adequately. I’ve seen folks on Twitter who work in medical supplies argue that the rest of us just don’t understand that the health care sector runs on a just in time (JIT) supply model. They seem less aware of the implications of that statement for their credibility in lecturing us during an emergency.
I have also been trying to learn more about mask
distribution. I have some degree of skepticism that many of the masks ordinary
folks have bought really were in practice at the expense of the health care system.
Yes, there is a shortage of masks, but many of the masks available to us have
already travelled farther down the distribution chain from the bulk purchase
level where many health care facilities operate.
Nonetheless, if health care workers face critical shortages
of these masks, many will get sick. Some will die. And many others will die
because sickened health care workers couldn’t treat them.
The argument that masks can’t help the general public is kind of incredible. And many of those lecturing us about it played a role in bringing us to this sad pass. But nonetheless here we are: a shortage of masks could critically impair our health care response. And that means people will die. Maybe even someone you love.
So where does that leave us? First, this Covid-19 crisis isn’t your last rodeo. Preparation in advance, by ordinary people and health care institutions, could have averted this entirely. That does not help now but is a lesson that should be retained when this all over.
Second, if you’ve got masks keep them. But make them stretch
out as long as possible and only use them when it makes sense. And if you can,
give any masks you can spare to folks who don’t have them.
And if you have a really large number of them, consider
reaching out to your local health care provider to see if they could use some.
How many masks can you realistically use yourself? Put differently, if you are
putting yourself in situations where you need that many masks then you are
probably raising your risk profile. Maybe by a lot.
But perhaps most importantly remember this: experts and
authorities aren’t always wrong. But they aren’t exactly always right either.
And this isn’t the last time this will be true in this crisis. Think carefully
and critically about what you are being told. Cynicism isn’t sophistication,
but faith can be misplaced.
So let me say a little, but just a very little, about me.
I have been a prepper for around a decade. There were series of triggering events for me (e.g. watching the chaos and disruption in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, social distrubances in our increasingly polarized society, witnessing increasingly severe climate events, etc.). But I can’t really point to a particular moment when I became a prepper. It was more like an instinct that became more acute as time passed.
The birth of my son a few years after Katrina was a major milestone. I was responsible for the welfare of that little, dear life, and I realized I had a responsibility to anticipate and protect him.
I was quite lucky in that my wife was following a similar trajectory. (Spousal support and agreement has been an issue for some other preppers I know.)
As for my particulars:
I am middle aged. Gen X. I have an advanced degree in a technical field, but that doesn’t make me an expert in everything. Or maybe even anything.
I am unexceptional in appearance. A bit tall but that’s it. You wouldn’t think twice if I walked past you on the street.
I live in the suburbs. My neighborhood is a planned development of fairly recent vintage.
I am located in what some call the Southern Part of Heaven (i.e. south of the Mason-Dixon line) in an area that is an epicenter of the “knowledge economy”. In practice that means many of my friends, associates and acquaintances are reasonably smart people who also have acronyms after their names, are very focused and technically (if narrowly) skilled and tend to be hypercompetitive.
Most of them are also blind in some respects. The arrival of Covid-19 has burst many of their personal bubbles in very an unsettling way.
And that’s it. That’s all you get, or need, to know about me.
And maybe therein lies the most important rule of prepping: be secretive. Some refer to it as being “The Gray Man”: the one who doesn’t stick out.
