As a young Private in the U.S.Army, I had wondered what happened inside the company Command Post (CP) or Tactical Operations Center (TOC). I had the opportunity to work in our unit’s Headquarters Platoon, including working in the TOC. Before my personal experiences working inside the TOC, I believed the TOC was where all the officers went to keep warm, get hot coffee, and sit around. After working in the Company Headquarters Platoon, I got reassigned to the Battalion Headquarters Company in the Scout Platoon. These experiences allowed me to grasp how situational awareness is gathered by scouts, analyzed, and acted upon in a TOC.
Fast forward sox years after the military and I was working in a County Emergency Operations Center (EOC). One of my primary goals was the readiness of our emergency operations center (EOC) to be able to activate and operate for any emergency. When I started the job, I had a few copies of the county’s written plan, some EOC position handbooks, some pens and paper, and lots of phones. Our EOC operations budget was very slim, as in zero, as our county “leaders” did not view emergency management or disaster preparedness as a high priority or any priority for that matter. Being able to establish and operate a Command Post, Tactical Operations Center or emergency operations center where information is collected, analyzed, synthesized, and shared with other key leaders/staff and where decisions are made is important. That actionable intelligence can be communicated to your family, Mutual Assistance Group (MAG), or your neighborhood.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was once mocked and ridiculed for saying: “We don’t know what we don’t know.” This was the same mass media that could not figure out Joe Biden was a feeble and confused (at best) old man. Rumsfeld was able to articulate the big issue with “intelligence” or information. How do you know something if you do not actively seek out the information? How do you know you know everything about a situation? In a post-TEOTWAWKI world, being able to gather, organize, and use information will be a challenge. Like every other challenge of TEOTWAWKI, we need to be prepared to address this issue.
First, establishing a Prepper command post should be low on your priority list, until you have adequately addressed food, water, medical, sanitation, power, security, and communications needs.
Why you need a Command Post
The need for a Prepper command post is not need for “regular” disasters like a tornado or flood but rather those events that truly collapse society. Think nuclear war, EMP, CME et cetera. That is not to say you will not need to gather information in a tornado or flood, it just will be done perhaps in notebooks or verbally and mentally. But when the event is more complex and will last longer, you will need a better “system”. Many preppers are familiar with area studies, that is what is in your area, like stores, farms, water points, medical facilities and the like. The pre-TEOTWAWKI area study information is the starting point for you command post operations. Why? After a TEOTWAWKI event, determining if those things, identified in your area study, are still around and functioning will be important. The prepper CP is a place where daily operations of the MAG or neighborhood can be managed. Who is doing security? Where are your check points and patrols, what is the status of your critical needs such as food, water, fuel, ammunition and medical supplies?
Information is Power
Good information is key to making good decisions. Knowing what threats are around you or coming your way post-TEOTWAWKI will allow you to make wise decisions to prepare and defend your community. Waiting for the threat to knock on your door is not a good plan. You must have a system to gather information, vet that information, make logical conclusions, and develop courses of action (COAs). Furthermore, having a location and system in place to lead defensive operations will help better manage your resources.
Seeing is believing
A simple map hung up in a space where your mutual assistance group (MAG) or key neighbors can see it is vital. For the most part, people can comprehend visual inputs better than verbal inputs. That is, show me, don’t tell me. The preferred map would be a pre-September 2001 topographic map in 1:50,000 scale. There was a lot of information taken off USGS topographical maps after September 2001. So, older maps will have more information than newer maps. You may need to perform a reconnaissance to ensure that things depicted on the map are still there. You may also need to add any new features that you find that are not currently on the map. Your topographical map should be laminated or put behind plexiglass.
Next, you will want to stock up on overlay acetate. This is placed over your map and is where you can draw, write and otherwise mark up your maps with erasable markers. Only one person should be responsible for adding and deleting anything on the overlay(s). You will want to stock up on good-quality dry-erase markers, and alcohol pens (such as Vis-A-Vis). Grease pencils store better and longer but they have a limited number of color options and points. Grease pencils do better in the rain, but when using them it is harder to clean your overlays. Alcohol pens and dry erase markers have many color options and point options such as thick point, chisel point, and fine point. A fine point Vis-A-Vis marker will probably be the most useful for you, for plotting details. Study military map symbols manuals (such as FM 101-5-1), to create map annotations that are coherent and consistent.
You can use permanent Sharpie markers, that also come in a number of colors and point types but you will NOT be able to clean any marks made by them on your overlays. Other items to have stocked for your map include “sticky” notes, tabs and shapes (like arrows and dots) that can be easily stuck to and taken off the map. A protractor and compass are also great tools and if you can find a map measuring dial those are great for helping determine distance. If using alcohol markers they make a white eraser that can clean alcohol marker marks off your map overlays. A bottle or two of rubbing alcohol to clean the overlays along with rags would be wise. Use expired alcohol for this purpose.
What to put on your Map
Key facilities/locations that are important to your post-TEOTWAWKI community should be denoted on your map. This could be a water point, a security checkpoint, homes of people who are not in your community but are friendly to it, observation post (OPs), locations of working amateur radio operators, working medical facilities and others. As time goes on, you may want to mark areas where raids/attacks against nearby communities have taken place, this helps patterns to be seen. The good thing about using map overlays is you can have several overlays on one map. The more overlays the harder it will be about to see since the map will be cluttered. When dealing with security information, that should be on one of two overlays and not posted up on the map unless needed. These maps can help pre-plan and implement reaction drills should your community be attacked. The map and overlays are also a great way to teach your family of MAG what to do and when.
White Boards
Besides a good map and overlays, your command post should have plenty of dry-erase white boards. When I was out in charge of ensuring our emergency operations center was “ready” for use, I had Malamine boards used for shower backing placed on all the walls in the emergency operations room. These made a cheap dry erase board around the center. These boards worked, however they are not as rugged as a real dry erase board as the coating was easy to scratch off and there also seemed to be dry erase marker residue left behind.
Plain white dry erase boards are functional but you may want to make certain status boards are on your dry erase boards. For example, you may want a permanent place to put “ACE” report information. ACE is a military acronym that stands for Ammunition, Causalities, and Equipment. If your community is attacked after TEOTWAWKI your command post will want to quickly determine the status of your communities security team’s ammunition, any casualties (report by casualty class) and the status of sensitive equipment. Sensitive equipment could be items like night vision, radios, or special weapons.
Another permanent status board might be an area to list any Priority Intelligence Requirements (PIRs). These are pieces of information that leadership needs to understand what is going on around the community and to help make good decisions. These might be reporting strangers or visitors to the community or nearby the community. If most vehicles have been knocked out by an EMP it would be seeing an operating vehicle. To make a permanent status board on a dry erase board you can be fancy and use stick on vinyl letters or you can just use a dry erase marker and write the words on the board.
Communications
Your command post should also be equipped with all the various ways that you will communicate with your community. Amateur radio, GMRS, CB, field telephones and if need be, runners. Having a communications room where all types of communications can be monitored for intelligence should be co-located but not in the same room as the command post. It may get loud and distracting hearing all the various radio conversations.
Enhancements
One of the enhancements I have made is putting together an aerial photograph of our immediate area. This was done by printing off images from Google Earth on regular 8 1/2 x 11” paper on a color printer then cutting any extra paper away and then taping them together on the backside. Once you are done taping pages together you can laminate the aerial image. Just like with your topographical maps you will want to put overlay on top of the aerial images to preserve it. The aerial image does not cover the same area as the 1:50,000 map but just our immediate area. There are several small towns around us. I have used Google maps to determine the distance to those locations by the main route I would take to get there. Using a label maker, I printed labels with the name of the town and the distance. These towns and distance are placed next to and above my map. I have also added several different types of stencils with shapes. Think like drafting geometric templates/stencils.
Access to your CP and viewing of your maps should be very limited. Only trusted individuals with a need to should have access to your CP.
Practice make perfect
The sext time there is a major weather event in your area listen to the radio “chatter” of first responders, ham radio operators, public utilities, CBs, and other response entities you may have in your area. As they report things like damaged structures, closed roads and bridges, power outages, and other information put it on your map overlays. This will hone your skills of collecting information from radio traffic and then displaying it on your maps/overlays. As you gather your information, note the impacts to your community and/or family. Are your ingress and/or egress routes usable? What are your alternatives should you need to bug out? Is the local gas station without power, and therefore fuel for your community will be limited? Just displaying information does not do anything for you, so you have to ask “so what, now what?”.
If not you, then who?
In a true TEOTWAWKI event, where civil government and society are dysfunctional or non-existent, groups will form, and de facto leaders will be adopted. If you and/or your group have structures (as procedures) in places and can demonstrate to your community or neighborhood you know what you are doing, they may very well follow you or your group. Having a “united” community or neighborhood will make it much easier to stabilize and rebuild civilization.
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