Navigating the Shallows: A Guide to Area Studies, by GuerrillaLogistician

Reference – 13E

By GuerrillaLogistician

@glogistician on X.com

Emergency Plans start with mapping your area.

Area studies are nothing new; every military and intelligence organization uses these to learn an area, especially when they will be working in that region for a long while. These create the basic knowledge for a region, allowing you to understand it more.  They run the spectrum of information from SWEAT-MC to intelligence information, enabling you to understand both threats from outside and inside an area and what external forces may go after.  Ultimately, you’ll make maps for your location and the surrounding area. With this information, you can address certain situations, from fires and floods to invading forces. Still, realistically, all you need this for is your natural planning of disaster prep. More technical and military-style research would require books like those written by Mark Shelby, but I’m going to focus mostly on what Joe Dolio did for the simplicity of this article.

Joe Dolio Tactical Wisdom – https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B093CYKGH8/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=tacwisdom-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=B093CYKGH8&linkId=ef8341a75ac7dc6b7d0935bdc264410a – A great prepper starter book with a decent section on area study

Nick Meacher – https://fortunefavorstheprepared.com/product/family-emergency-plan-workbook-book-format/ Family Emergency book for the prepper and sighting all the below info on both map and written down will be great for your family as a bare bones Area study

Mike Shelby – https://grayzonestore.com/store/p/area-intelligence-handbook A very detailed, bordering on a manual for intelligence analysts, book that deep dives into the subject.  What Joe doesn’t cover, he digs super deep.

If you are new to prepping, this is a must. If your prepping didn’t have an area study, Joe’s book might be a good addition to the library. TW-01 is the way to go. If you already know some of this, get Mike Shelby’s book. Regardless, I think Nick Meacher’s book is a great thing to have in any house with kids, etc.

MAPS

TM 5-230, FM 21-25 Aug 44, last page of FM-21-25

Hand-drawn maps are our standard starting point for this project.  As people become more reliant on computers, we have lost a lot of abilities in hand-drawn maps, which help in the field. Older military training programs and skill-building from the past drove the ability to create maps, but not anymore.  While this shouldn’t be your primary skill set, it still is helpful for team leaders or someone to accurately map out an area for many reasons.  Cashe, Battle Damage Assessments, local or small areas which can’t easily be mapped turn into a more important thing especially when people start setting up booby traps, or you find them and have to explain this to others.  See Vietnam, Korea, and even Ukraine, where the terrain has been altered so much by combat as to require new maps.

For the prepper, as Dolio points out, we want to start by mapping out our house and local area.  Start with your house, be it an apartment or a mansion in the woods, along with the area around it.  Define the most common routes people would use to attack your location.  This could be criminal hoards after your food and women, or invading armies for those in bad areas of the world.  You want to think about the easiest ways to sneak up on your own location.  Mark your doors as entry points and consider how bad people might flow into your home.  Realize that any window is also a possible entry point, especially large ones.  Do you have an easy-to-access balcony?  The reality is you might not be able to defend your home like a castle because of construction (thin walls, apartments, etc), but knowing where threats are, and neighboring homes are important to a good defense of an area.  Maybe you have fences or water that prevent people and vehicles from crossing, or maybe it’s just a hedge row that will slow the flow of people.  Whatever it is, mark it out and the surrounding spots.  Also, we want to focus on the four gun safety rules.  This allows us to know where our target is and, more importantly, what is behind it.  A shrub may not stop a bullet, but the backstop might be a neighbor’s thin house wall.  Remember, even in a world without the Rule of Law, there are consequences to actions.  Also, WROL will never truly exist because mobs have opinions, and people will enforce something.

Where to start after we draw are map of our home?

I would almost say decades ago, you would go to your local City Council offices, and you could pick up maps of the whole city, sometimes with the surrounding area. Nowadays, with modern technology, this is not the case, and getting a printed map from your City Hall is probably more uncomfortable than having your wisdom teeth pulled out in the 1800s. That said, I have successfully done it about three times in my life for various projects. Let’s start with the good old maps everyone used to know, topographic maps. The first thing you want to look for is how you search for these maps.  We will work with the place I talked about in the podcast.  I have no relationship and have never been to Pea Ridge, AR, so we are using this for an area study on the larger Macro area.  So, how do we address this? Well, there are a few instructions and various places to look. First, though, let’s be able to build one off a printer, either at Kinkos or off your personal computer.

For now, let’s pick an area and pretend we live there for the sake of this project. This is a newer area off to the right of town, and let’s say we are at the end of the street as well.

As you can see in the image above, we have a nice little cul-de-sac at the end of a paved road, inside a housing community with nice fences and a dirt road just north of us. As we expand past our house and whatever piece of property you choose to do this on, you may draw one of these houses and fields of fire from that house, or you can look down the street and the views you get there. If you want to do a deep dive, you could use Street View to see if the house was two stories tall or one story tall, which might give you even more information on what you can see, but for now, we’re just going to do a top-down map of this. If you prefer, you can use the standard terrain map that just has the outline of the houses, but I’m showing you this in satellite form because it’s a little easier. As we progress through the building of our information, one thing you might want to look for is water, which I’ve also marked on this map. More on that later but this is a direct connection to SWEAT-MC/IR that we will discuss.  Mark any power lines you might have in the area, as well as manhole covers, drainage systems, you can find.

So we have three viable vectors of attack here without jumping several fences. The reality is that most threats will come up the main road into the cul-de-sac. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look at the 2nd avenue of attack off the dirt road. If they’re coming from the north, they may move on the road and drive up our original attack path. However, with one fence in the way, this might be an option for them to just blow in the backside of the small community. This also leaves the third option: coming through the trees across the dry Creek bed into our location. Well, not probable that it is an option for these people, and they also have only one fence to cross. Although I would assume people coming from this direction will probably be during reconnaissance more than an act of assault, it is still a location to look at. At the same time, we want a 360° view and security of an area, but we will want to focus our primary view on the vectors of attack into an area. As you do area studies, you’re also looking for other resources for survival, such as water.

Later on, you’ll see why the dangerous water has been marked, and if you zoom out in this area, you’ll find other resources on other people’s property. Hence, it’s a good time to discuss possible needs with some of these neighbors in the future or become friendly with them, because maybe this is an untenable location for you. Your friend may have a better house on more defendable property. Many people think of staying at their house and switching to another location. Still, some people will look at their house and see that it is not a good location to even begin with, and their fallback for some will be their primary area where they study. This means more work for you if that is the case. If possible, you must do an area study for both places and a transit plan that keeps you off of main roads and choke points. This isn’t always the case, but it is a good idea.

While I will be digging into more details on mapping below, I want us to look at what’s available from the township’s information, which is very easy to find in most locations. Go to your local towns’ and counties’ websites, which generally have mapping information for your area. Sometimes they have substantial GIS data and other things you would never think would be available to a common person. So let’s do a quick search now for Pea Ridge, AR.

https://cityofpearidge.com/planning/

If you go to this website, you can look at the town’s functional workings, including several good addresses where you should have jotted down the names of people in charge and other possible information you’d like to know.

Police info and links

Sex Offender Map

Fire Department info

Local Medical Facilities

One of the things to note here is that there are no real major medical facilities in this town. I didn’t do a deep dive on this town’s medical facilities, but there are tier one through 4, which Joe de Leo talks about in his book. I’m sure he references it also in his medical book. The higher the tier, the more trauma the medical facility can take on. So it is good to know that information and think about it in the long-term disaster.  You may also want to think about who may attack these places, drug addicts, criminals, gangs, they want it not only for the medical but also for the narcotics. Another side point is the veterinary clinics here as well. While not doctors, they have many of the same resources, and some veterinary practitioners are probably more competent than other doctors I’ve met.

We also have access to much more information, like who to contact about electricity, water, etc., which you need to know while planning your defense of an area. You may look for areas where there are Power Distribution networks, and that may be something you need to secure realistically. However, all that information will help you understand who to contact or where to go in an emergency. Also, having this information allows you to be more on top of day-to-day life in case someone gets sick. Knowing where the sewage treatment plants are in relation to where your water comes from is very important. And as I said above, sanitation and possibly other drinking water are also very important.  If you look at the topographical map and you slide just north of our community that we’ve chosen, you will see something very interesting, especially in the satellite image. While doing research, you will find out that there is a sewage treatment plant above the creeks that flow near your community. Like power, you should know where your water and sewage are coming from and going to, if possible. In one of my previous articles, I did a whole topic on this revolving around the drainage system and sewage system of Dodge City for other reasons.

https://www.pearidgewater.com/

Major pipelines

https://www.geology.arkansas.gov/docs/pdf/maps-and-data/fossilfuel_maps/arkansas-pipeline-map-30×30.pdf

Major transmission lines

I also want to remind some of you that even though it doesn’t hit the news very often, major transmission power lines have been attacked multiple times in the United States. This includes the substations that distribute the power to communities and the major electrical power conduits. People have flown drones with electric bare wire onto these major power lines, although the power is usually sufficient to destroy the cable and the drone simultaneously.

https://koordinates.com/layer/102953-arkansas-power-lines-usgs/

Rail for the state of AR 2009

While this map doesn’t have all the rail systems and certainly doesn’t have the times that these trains are moving, there used to be a heavy argument in the prepping community about knowing all these specific details. Much of this information became less available for security reasons as time passed. However, I’m sure much of this information is still available in some format. That said, know that this kind of knowledge might be useful if things go bad, because this is where large amounts of supplies can be transferred to your community in case of a major disaster. It also might be a bottleneck to getting help if someone damages or destroys it. While rail sabotage was normal during the world wars, it seems the trains are more of a critical infrastructure than the rails, which are much more easily repaired than people might think. This is a rabbit hole I refuse to go down in an article like this, much like I will not discuss specifically about finding substations easily on a map.

They also have their mapping system here and prebuilt maps for your average citizen.

https://cityofpearidge.com/city-maps/

Street Map and construction

For some of you GWOT guys, this map would be slightly concerning. Realistically, I’m not too concerned about this information being out there, as it is just planning information. However, nefarious people can do horrible things with information and protect areas with the same information.

Facilities Map

HARD COPY

As you look at all these maps, you’ll realize that you probably need a few of these printed out for yourself, family members, and possible friends. There are many ways to deal with this, but I will address several of these as we go along. Realistically, you can download much of this information and take it to a print shop, like Kinkos. You can purchase these through various websites currently. Lastly, there’s always the homegrown printout of multiple pages to build a larger map. This may even allow you to make multiple smaller map sections for a team.

This is a good reference for setting up your printer to print an accurate version of the PDF you have.
https://www.instructables.com/USGS-TOPO-Maps-Downloading-Printing-Assembly-Prote/

Okay, now that we can print specific maps, where do we find them? Let’s go to the USGS topo site.

https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/viewer/

Below is a reference image of what you need to know to find your area.  Just click on the location and download the map in your desired format.  Like the link above, I suggest PDF, but this might be a trial-and-error thing.

If you are lazy and don’t want to print them out, you can buy them from TOPOBUILDER. Several resources, including National Geographic, sell these, but this is an option.

https://topobuilder.nationalmap.gov/

https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/viewer/#15/36.4508/-94.1184

Looking up “grid for ___location____” also generally brings up maps for the area
https://www.geology.arkansas.gov/docs/pdf/maps-and-data/topo_maps/24k/P/PEA_RIDGE.pdf

EVEN MORE MAPS

So many books tell you to reference a lot of this information because things change, and you’ll also find other information just by searching again. Realistically, there’s no good way to get all the data from every location, and even more importantly, are you going to these areas and seeing this for your local defense and security? While teaching one of these classes on doing an area study, I pointed out a National Guard facility in a bowl with multiple overwatch locations surrounding it.  I had driven by this place over and over, seeing a very well-built, almost fortress-like building placed in the worst piece of property known to man.  Add to that, they built an overpass right next to the building, which looked down on all the armored vehicles. If they were attacked by enemy forces or roving hordes of semi-competent radical revolutionaries, a building built to be in a safe, defensible position would be almost impossible to fight out of.  Mind you, there was a military base right down the road, so that changed the dynamic of things, but the reality is, if you were at that National Guard site with your friends, it would be worse than probably being in some of the municipal buildings within the city. So here are even more maps of Arkansas based on GIS data, which you can download.  This info can be downloaded for use on stand alone software which needs no internet connection.

https://www.nwarpc.org/interactive-gis-maps/

HUMAN TERRAIN

Human terrain is a diversified area of study that will probably require more information and time than just maps. In Mike Shelby’s area intelligence handbook book, he quotes TE Lawrence, “Learn all you can about your Ashraf and Bedu. Get to know their families, clans, tribes, friends, enemies, wells, hills, and roads.”  So what does that mean for us? We need to learn everything from demographics to the frictions of society. Part of the reason why I picked this area of the US to look at is that the demographics are very stable. Mind you, in the 1940s this town was only populated by 72 people and only broke 1000 people in the 1970s, and the town expanded from 2346 to 6559 from 2000 to 2020.  You want to know more things you can find on various websites, such as the demographics, grievances, social basis, and cleavages. Think of this like knowing who the Hatfields and the McCoys are and why they have a long-standing feud.

While in the 90s to early 2000s we looked at the demographics with a blind eye to race, nowadays most people can’t even look past that without coming to some conclusion. Even if you are not a racist and have no ill will towards anyone, religious or otherwise, that doesn’t mean that they won’t have an issue with you or your community. This also drills down into some of the politics of your area and what might happen if those politics and beliefs backing them slide into a more hostile world than we currently live in. This doesn’t mean that you have to run your day-to-day life based on this information, but this is something you should know. Where are the poverty-stricken areas? How many people live in those areas? What’s the crime rate like, and what crimes are being perpetrated?  This is why I presented the Police Department as part of your information, not only for location and who runs it, but also as a place to get the data you need. Many law enforcement organizations will readily tell you what kind of gangs and crimes are in the area if it isn’t already posted online.

One other thing that I wanted to add to this is that Mike Shelby breaks out the politics and governance from the human terrain, which I believe is not a bad idea overall if you’re really deep diving into the information. To be fair, if you went through his book chapter by chapter and methodically built up the information, you probably have more detailed statistics and knowledge of the area than most mayors and governors. Also, with that much deep down information, such as economic, social status, the judicial branch, and who’s in charge of it for your local area, you could take the time to identify things that may need to be sorted before any major disaster. He discusses things like power mapping local issues, political ideology, etc.

If you wish to travel this deeply into that information, many major resources exist. Still, there are also things like administrations for farming and ranching that may be more important to your local governance than you would think. His book is phenomenal, but I also think he deep dives too heavily into subjects that most people would normally not need to go into for an area study. Likewise, some areas are so complex, like Miami or New York, that trying to do this in an area bigger than your street block would be almost impossible. While I will not discredit human terrain and the politics that reside within human terrain, I still think you should prioritize the other features more heavily.

CHURCHES

We also should be looking at the churches in the area, and there are outreach programs. If you go back up to where we had located our little community, and do this for me you will understand why religion can be critical even if you are a stone-cold atheist. Make a quick search for the churches in the area and tell me if they do anything specific to help the impoverished of the area.  If they do this, what are the consequences to your area when they either run out of whatever they provide or things start coming apart at the seams, and the people who went to the church for more than just spiritual salvation are left wanting? Truly, I tell you, if you are in an area with multiple churches and multiple religions, it is good to know where they are, and you may at some point want to just stop in and see how the community is in that area. If your human terrain information tells you have a diverse population, and this specific religious organization only caters to one key demographic, this may be important later.

No, I am not suggesting that you need to worry about a church that has one minority group in it. What I am saying is that the culture that backs that minority might be swayed to better and more promising ideas if the leader of that community is morally just and does more than read the word. Case in point, I would never want a Joel Olstein in charge of a church near me when things tear themselves apart because I’m pretty sure he will be forcefully trying to get something out of my house as soon as his resources dry up. Likewise, a just and God fearing pastor might keep an impoverished community from tearing everyone apart and work toward a stronger community regardless of his Demographics.

DATA

At the end of this, I will make a list based on some of Nick Meacher’s Family Emergency Plan Book information, but there is so much more.  For those more focused on preparedness, I think his book is probably the paramount information you need to know for your family, loved ones, and even children. With this all filled out, your child has a better chance of getting the correct help if he can read and make phone calls. Well, Nick’s book is not, per se, an area study guide; it is full of things you need to know about for a area study.  He largely focuses on the data that you will absolutely need when doing an area study. In fact, you can go even further than what he does and tip your toes into the deep side of politics and the human terrain. Whichever way you look at this, though, the information that you set aside in this area study also needs to come with all the pertinent information, such as addresses and even grid coordinates in case the cell phone network goes down and your GPS doesn’t work anymore.  The major players of a hospital might be the name drop that everyone else can’t do without the internet active.

QGIS

QGIS is a free mapping system that allows you to pull in the ArcGIS data points and build your maps, which might be very useful at this point, considering how many maps we’ve pulled up at this juncture. Mind you, there are even more details that we can pull out with other things that I will talk about in just a minute, but the reality is you can set up these maps, draw on them, and do so much more with this data than just printing a map out and handing it to somebody.  This also works with no internet if you have downloaded the needed maps.
https://qgis.org/

So what other Maps should we look at since we have QGIS?

LiDAR is a system that removes most of the plants by shooting lasers at the ground.  This system creates an image of the ground surface capable of seeing under the vegetation and accurate enough to find roads hundreds of years old, as seen in the image below.  This tech was also the stepping stone for another tech to find footprints on the ground, hidden wires in the trees, etc.   As you can see below, most of these old ruins are lost for the most part.  Using this can help you find cave entrances, old mines, and even well-worn foot trails in your area that are not seen, provided the LiDAR is detailed enough in your area.  I can’t go through all of this, but @Geocomms167640 on X sent me this YouTube video below, an exhaustive explanation on using Google Earth and QGIS software to look at LiDAR info.  Add to that the resources above, and you can download info and have a dedicated mapping system for your region.

Deep Dive into Mapping and the works, LiDAR

Thank you @Geocomms167640 for sending this over.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc9IwNRweDo

The Military Aspect

Let’s quickly break down SWEAT-MC/IR from https://www.americanpartisan.org/2023/09/run-silent-run-deep-the-insurgency-primer-to-submerging-under-your-enemy-by-guerrillalogistician/. Also, you might want to reference that article as well here.  As you can see, sewer water and electricity are the key starting points in this acronym. The acronym looks for weaknesses in an enemy and your communities. As I have stated before, SWEAT-IR is slightly different but comes from the rationale of what the military was involved with infrastructurally and logistically during the Global War on Terror.  One of the things left off here that I think is of key importance, not only in foreign countries but also in the United States, would be religion, which we touched on already. I’m reviewing this now so you can understand the attack vectors people will use against you, and the reality is that sewer water and electricity are always the first ones that will critically harm a community. Then we move on to access transportation, medical, and communications. Mind you, in a grid-down scenario, your trash might become very important, whereas academia might not be. Anyone who’s followed Radio Contra for longer than two seconds understands that academia is already under attack from multiple sources, both revolutionary and from international actors. So with this in mind, while doing your area study, think about these key features and research them. Some things may not be as important to you as they are to other people. For instance, if you live on a homestead and compost almost everything, you may not have to worry about trash like somebody who lives in an urban or semi-urban environment.

There is so much more information that I could go into, especially on the military aspects of this subject. I will probably be doing more private classes teaching people these lessons as time progresses, but the point is that all of this can be done on your own with some work and some friends. Have each individual focus on a specific topic of information, and if you were doing a GIS map for later, have them download that information so they understand where to get it. Not only will this assist in your small team or communities’ preparations it also takes some of the responsibility off of you for doing all this. Sure, some of the information below might be specific to you, like your personal doctor and his contact information, but maybe your medic wants to know this too, for various reasons. The engineer in your group might want to know more about the road systems than you do, and that might be helpful later on as well, but if he’s tracking this information in detail, he will be able to brief you more competently. Likewise, the RTO who sets up the map with all of the towers and frequencies now has a good map and could do some line of sight calculations to figure out where to set up repeaters, which is something I would never do in an area study for myself normally. This can be a team operation or just a one-man scope of knowledge, depending on who you have around. That means all the information you gather must be scaled to your ability and time management, and what is critically important to you versus what is least critical to you. I think Joe Delio’s book and Nick’s are probably best for the one man starting off to family size.  If you have a group, though, grab Shelby’s book and break up the chapters, then compile your data.

I may do another podcast on this to flesh this article out in more detail if there is any interest.  Maybe discussing it with some of you guys if possible.

A list of info you need, along with your own PACE plan for your area study.

• Contacts PACE
  • Name
  • Relationship
  • Address
  • Coordinates UTM
  • Phone Numbers
  • Work Location
  • Ham/GMRS Callsign
• Out of Area contacts
  • Name
  • Relationship
  • Address
  • Coordinates UTM
  • Phone Numbers
  • Work Location
  • Ham/GMRS Callsign

Rally Points PACE Plan

• Schools/Daycare
  • Name Of Child and Grade
  • School Name and Address
  • Coordinates UTM
  • Phone
• Fire Stations
  • Name
  • Address
  • UTM
  • Distance from Home
• Police Stations
  • Name
  • Address
  • UTM
  • Distance
  • Phone
  • Hours
• Hospitals/Urgent Care/Pharmacy/Veterinary/ Doctors/Dentists
• Name
  • Address
  • Coordinates UTM
  • Phone
  • Distance from Home
  • Trauma level, if applicable

Utilities

• Power, Water, Sewer, Gas, Trash, Internet
  • Name
  • Phone
  • Account #

Resources

• Post Offices , Red Cross Foodbank
  • Name
  • Address
  • UTM
  • Distance
  • Phone
  • Hours

Churches

• Name
  • Denomination
  • Address
  • UTM
  • Phone
  • Hours
  • Notable programs