WATER
Three sources of potable water are a must. One source could be the municipal pipe into your home, but is not a source you can count on. City dwellers might consider renting a shallow well auger to sink their own backyard well. It is not too early to think about the availability of pond, river, or lake water as part of one’s water Rule of Threes. You’ll also want to consider a rig to catch and store rainwater from house and building roofs. All that is needed to implement this collection storage plan in most city circumstances are some extra gutter, plastic tarp, and plastic storage barrels (which for some reason are most often blue). Other suggestions are to store water in bottles, bladders such as waterbeds, or fiberglass water tanks.
ENERGY
Planning three sources of energy is not tough once you overcome the realization that they probably all must be purchased well ahead of need or, within cities, actively scrounged up by creative survivors. I plan to use 1,000 gallons of stored fuel oil to run my generator and provide some heat, and 1,000 gallons of propane to cook, heat water, and perhaps warm the house. Large propane storage tanks may not be legal in cities, but I know of two current survivors who have 1,000-gallon propane tanks buried out of sight under their garage floor. My third energy source is 25 cords of scrap wood that I can replenish from abandoned buildings and storage areas as needed. I could heat, cook, and survive with scrap pallet wood alone.
Depending on one’s specific circumstances, there are also coal, geothermal devices, solar cells, and fuel cells. Small, increasingly inexpensive fuel cells used for direct electrical conversion from LP (liquid propane) gas are coming on the scene. There are also very unconventional fuel sources. My father ran out every time a team of horses came by to scoop up any road apples, which were either dried for fuel or shoveled into the garden as fertilizer. Although road apples have gone the way of dinosaurs in most places, your city survival plan will eventually entail these sorts of improvisations.
SHELTER
Shelter in our list of threes also encompasses clothing and emergency medical supplies. Most people in our outdoor-oriented society have sufficient boots, jackets, and warm, woolly sweaters to wear when the place can’t be kept at 62 degrees. Emergency medical supplies are a complex, separate, and very philosophical issue that should be addressed by survivors as quickly as possible.
Shelter might be your present home or apartment. First backup can include an abandoned cellar, backyard dugout, a tent, or per haps a cooperative area, depending on risk levels. Others may have a travel camper, old bus body, or even an old warehouse in which to hide a shelter. You may make tentative plans to move in with your kids or back to your parents. Anything just so long as the Rule of Threes relative to shelters is addressed.
It’s tough advice for city people, but no matter what, never, never become a refugee. Survival rates among refugees with no control of their destinies are dismal. Refugees are totally the wards of government. If you believe the government does an adequate job of running the post office, Social Security, and the military, then you will probably be satisfied with the way it will run your life as a refugee. Effective hiding is an important part of city survival as it relates to the Rule of Threes.
Our technology is changing quickly. For this and reasons of personal circumstances, skills, and likes and dislikes, our personal survival plans are never final. Readers should include survival means that I have never dreamed of within their own Rule of Threes. A survivor in east Boise, Idaho, has his own private geothermal heat. well, for instance! We will miss opportunities unless we are constantly alert for them.
This is the overall guiding philosophy to survival. Obviously it applies to city survival. Commit to it and you will live. To gloss over parts of it is to suffer extreme consequences.
Chapter 2
Combat in Built-Up Areas
Warfare once took part largely over natural terrain, including mountaintops, rolling hills, jungles, and barriers such as rivers and lakes. However, most battles are now fought on urban terrain, which consists mostly of man-made features. Chiefly, these are tall buildings, rows of solidly built, difficult-to-breach concrete factory buildings, rows of flammable dwellings two stories high or less, wide open four-lane highways leading to places commanders don’t necessarily wish their infantry to go, and elaborate sewer and subway systems.
In the eyes of the military leader, city buildings provide cover and concealment to the enemy, block potential fields of fire, limit observation, and severely limit use of armor and artillery forces, which cannot elevate or depress their guns sufficiently to reach many targets. As a practical matter, only high-angle mortars are thought to be effective in city terrain, and even then three to five times as many of them are required.
In spite of this great disadvantage, arrogant commanders often order their troops and armor into cities when encirclement—trapping defenders in a city—might possibly be a wiser tactic. Cities have grown so large and of such strategic importance that commanders no longer have the advantage of starving them out, many experts claim. Grozniy in Chechnya is a good, fairly recent example; rebels there got more than 100 Russian armored vehicles before it was over. But, nevertheless, we often wonder at the bravado with which generals sacrifice their men and equipment engaging in city warfare.
The end result for city survivors is about the same. Either they must avoid hostile attackers, or their own defenders might become hostile and create as many problems as the attacking infantry.
The North Vietnamese tunnel system and our tunnel rats got a lot of publicity, but starting as early as the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) defenders actively used underground workings to either infiltrate or exfiltrate cities. Some people estimate that the defenders of the Warsaw Ghetto could have held out against the Nazis as many as 30 additional days by clever use of Warsaw’s extensive sewer system.
Underground works are currently one of the first places attacking soldiers attempt to secure. Unless completely walled off and cleverly camouflaged, interconnecting sewer works and utility tunnels are not places of choice for city survivors to take refuge. Modern urban soldiers with good leadership no longer make uninformed snap decisions regarding underground terrain. Reportedly, survey maps of the world’s major cities underground are part of our covert military information-gathering process. Saddam may be rightfully paranoid about our efforts to find out about Baghdad’s sewers.