Paratus

Food Tests, continued

Food Editor Aaron has tried another reconstitutable meal, another Mountain House "Pro-Pak" entree.

His observations are below.

Communications, generally

This is a huge subject, and one I've only hit lightly so far in this blog. After considering some new equipment, and getting bedazzled by what's out there, I decided that the slow, easy approach would be my best hope for getting this material out.

This post will look at some simple communications strategy, and some classes of communications equipment. It will look at what you DO with comm equipment, and how to get the best use out of it in the field.

In following posts, I will take each class of equipment and look at examples of it, with some comparison of features.

Communications is simply the act of exchanging information. That's all it was ever meant to be. If the information to be exchanged can be put into spoken words, it may be exchanged by wired or wireless systems.

For our purposes, all information that is exchanged is assumed to be exchanged in the open. You and I do not have much access to equipment that can scramble and unscramble voice communications, and it (encryption) adds an unreliable layer of complexity anyway. I'm sure some comm freak will shit in my mess kit over this, but I do not presume I'm smarter than the average military commo NCO, and wouldn't try to outsmart anyone's ability to de-crypt my comm.

I will be happy if my comm bridges whatever gap of distance and intervening terrain and is understood by the recipient. I will be happy if my comm equipment holds up in the field, and if the batteries last long enough for a mission (or are easy to replace without having to re-program the equipment each time).

First, we have a comm plan. It starts with the simple: if you are close enough, I will call you over and we will talk face-to-face. If we are not close enough, I will send a comm alert signal, which will alert you to the coming message. I will transmit the message, and you will transmit back that you copied it. Even the old-day CB freaks did this: "You got your ears on Rubberduck?" That's the alert signal. Then a message, "Rubberduck, this is BullPusher, meet me on 21." That means shift to channel 21. Then Rubberduck and BullPusher ratchetjaw (basically BS with no attempt to be brief), then Bullpusher ends by saying "That's a 10-4 (agreed to), Rubberduck." The conversation ends. Not very military, but it worked. That's a comm plan. You learned it in the first half-hour after you first turned on your CB.

Military and police dispatching is much the same, in that they both use a standard comm plan, or "radio etiquette". In police comm, the dispatcher calls the unit: 'Four Adam Twelve?" (Fourth Precinct, Adam shift, twelve-district) The unit answers, "Four Adam Twelve". The dispatcher gives the dispatch, then the unit says, "Four Adam Twelve, copy." Military dispatch (control) is a bit different, but still follows a specific plan. The controller calls, "Birdman one-two, birdman one-two, birdman control, over." Note that military dispatchers end with "over", to specifically indicate that their call is done. The unit answers, "Birdman one-two, over".  The controller dispatches, "Birdman one-two, your target is two o'clock, six zero (miles out), five-five-zero (550 knots) at two five thousand (25,000 feet altitude), turn right two six zero". You notice that the controller requires the interceptor pilot to know the order of the information figures, but spells out the numbers in units of less than ten. This is done for clarity's sake.

In the field, we will use either the police or the military system, but we will use a system. The field commander briefs that and makes sure that all the radio-bearing troops use the system correctly.

The next comm plan would use wired communications, i.e. phone and internet. The security is only moderate, but the plain old wired phone has some security, if used properly. The internet has some, but can be traced later if the receiving computer is seized. A cell phone should never be used, as the cell system could be programmed to alert a watcher that it is being used, and what's more, your position can be tracked by a GPS chip in the new phones (close enough to call an airstrike on you), or with an older phone, at least as close as the cell tower nearest to you. If one of your troops has a cell phone and it would be mighty tempting to have, to stay in touch with loved ones, then your mission HAS been compromised. You need a plan for that.

Wired comm is your best bet for longer distances. Buy up some long-distance cards and put them in your kit. Buy the kind that are over the counter and you don't need to give a name. Make sure that they don't expire AND THAT THERE IS NO MONTHLY CHARGE TO PAY. To make communications, send a comm runner well off your route of march to find a phone and use it, BRIEFLY, then return to the unit. Your wired comm plan should be to tell those expecting calls when to expect them, AND THAT THERE WILL BE NO CALLS FROM YOU EXCEPT AT THOSE TIMES. Actually, this plan works well for radios in enemy country as well.

If the unit you're operating has more than four troops, one will be the designated base station operator, and will stay with the equipment, monitoring as many different modes of comm that you have. In wartime, these might include CB and FRS/GMRS radio, VHF Marine radio and shortwave. If you have police scanners, those will be monitored as well. The dispatcher will have firm instructions who to contact and who not to. The dispatcher will have the understanding that one, single, unnecessary transmission might be the one that gives the position of the unit away and leads to combat or capture or death.

In peacetime (disaster response), the comm is the same, but cell phones and satellite phones may be added, as well as Internet if available. Marine Single-Sideband may also be used (more on this later). Partnering with a ham radio operator might bring the availability of phone-patch via VHF-network to the wired phone system, even if cell phones are down. In peacetime, the CDMA-based data networks are available. These are low speed (the "1X" system, at 40-60 Kbps), and the newer "3G" system (or EV-DO) that Verizon pioneered and now several cell companies operate for a fee. It is 300-600 Kbps, almost DSL-speed), and it operates either a CDMA-based PDA-phone (smartphone) or as a wireless card for your laptop. I have a smartphone, the Samsung SCH-I730, which runs Windows Mobile, has Wi-Fi AND 3G access, and will do 95% of the things that a laptop will (except it has only a 2"X3" screen).

The key in peacetime disaster comm is networking partnerships, partnering with those (in advance of the disaster, preferably) who will have the comm, so that between the partners, all the comm is there and all the comm needs satisfied.

In wartime, the key is communications security, and after that, sufficient comm to accomplish the mission, AND THAT IS ALL.

Napoleon said that an army travels on it's stomach, a reference to the logistics of supplying the food an army lives on. Today's army travels on it's communications gear, because multi-role missions and combined arms offensives are more dependent on comm than anything else. I don't care how many good snipers you have in your unit, one radio or cell-phone blabbermouth can get all of them, and you, killed before you reach your first objective.

Loose lips STILL sink ships, and field units as well.

Blog reconfigured

An alert reader spotted a FUBAR in this blog: I had no way to go back more than 10 posts or so in the archives (the length of the front page, apparently).

Since Rivrdog Blog was correctly configured, I checked the two configuration and design pages side by side, and figured out what I'd done wrong.

The blog is now correctly configured to go back to the beginning, in November of 2004. The Archives monthly list only goes back a year, but by clicking on the word "Archives" in the sidebar, you open a page that contains ALL the months of publication.

The Category Archives also show up now.

Apologies to all who have missed out on an older article. They're all there for you now.

On a related note, trackbacks have been disabled. I have had a very prolific Russian spammer driving me nuts with trackback spams, and so there won't be any more. Permalinks still work, but you won't get the usual double-bump from tracking back anymore. Sorry. When TypePad gets their trackback spam filter up to speed again, I'll turn them back on.

"Long-Range" Poultry

You've heard of "Free-Range" poultry? I'm sure. The yuppies who insist on it haven't a clue about raising domestic animals, and they've been sold a bill of goods that the chicken that gets no additional protection from disease, and has to forage for it's own food instead of having it brought to a trough, is a better chicken.

Say good-bye to your "free-range" poultry, Mr. & Mrs. Yuppie, their death warrants have all been signed by Judge H5N1, which will likely execute them all this year. The problem, of course, is that out on the "free range", wild fowl can and will mix in with the poultry flocks, and the Avian Flu strain H5N1 will transmit to them even before it transmits to better-managed flocks. It may even be possible to maintain some chicken production during the Avian Flu, if it's done totally indoors.

For most of us, though, chicken will become a very scarce commodity shortly (for the "free-range" afficionados, almost immediately). Fox news recently reported that H5N1 will likely hit US poultry production this Spring. Poultry prices will soar faster than gas prices after a hurricane.

In this Rivrdog Blog post, I advised how to measure your poultry-products use and prepare to lay in sufficient frozen stocks and sufficient substitutes to get through the avian pandemic. Problem was, I didn't have the data on what was really available for pre-processed and substitute poultry products.

I hollered "help". That's all it took for my Food Editor and his wife to immediately run to the store and scope out the available poultry products, do some basic kitchen and storage tests, and whip up a report. Now, that's FAST: the unvarnished truth (no MSM bull), in HOURS!

The first installment of "Long-Range" Poultry follows...

Food News # 2

Food Post #2 -  Mountain House Brand Pro-Pak(tm) Freeze Dried Beef Stew

Hello again, Fair Readers, and to begin, let me apologize for the long delay since my first Food Post.  No, I didn't poison myself.  Rather, tonight is the first night my lovely wife Lisa has been back to work after a 10-day vacation.  And not only does she LIKE to cook, she's GOOD at it, and so...

Why you keep shooting

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UPDATE: 102006 0755 PDT: A reader who wanted to do further work with this post contacted me and asked for attribution of the story. Since the EllTee doesn't keep attribution info, there wasn't any. I did the usual searches, and found nothing under searches such as "stabbed air marshall". I went to Snopes.com, and did find a reference here. It appears now that there is only a minor liklihood that the slashed individual was an air marshal, but instead, was probably just the loser in some sort of knife-fight.

The point of this post is to teach certain tactics relating to a gun-armed individual fighting an edged-weapon-armed individual. The information in the post is highlighted by the alleged attack on an air marshall, but that does NOT defeat the purpose of the article if the alleged attack on the air marshall cannot be established to have occurred.

I'm leaving the post up, but advising that the details of this scenario will have to be changed from real to imagined.

I don't think it loses too much in making that leap, do you?

H/T to Brandon for the jog about this.

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This is going to get graphic. I'm sorry if I offend anyone by publishing these pictures, but I feel it is the only way to get the message across.

I have sketchy info on this incident. It is an incident where an armed sky marshal encountered a person with an edged weapon, and the sky marshal shot the bad guy ONCE, in the K-5, with his 9mm service weapon (unknown what it was loaded with, but they use an extreme velocity, non-penetrating round like the Glaser while on duty).

The wound to the bad guy was evidently NOT enough to deter the attack of the edged weapon assailant, and he grievously wounded the sky marshal with his weapon (see photos).

I know what you are going to say, that if he had been carrying a .45ACP, the blade-killa would have been vaporized. That's debatable, but immaterial in any case.

The key here is that the sky marshal fired ONE ROUND and stopped firing. He may have been trained, erroneously, to do that, but that's an article for another day. That one-shot non-stop was his error. YOU ALWAYS SHOOT TO STOP, AND YOU HAVE ONLY A SMALL CHANCE OF STOPPING A DETERMINED ASSAILANT WITH ONE HIT, NO MATTER WHAT CALIBER YOU ARE SHOOTING! Sorry for shouting.

I once fired a police practice course with a target I haven't seen since. It was a full-silhouette target, with the usual black silhouette, but overlaying that was a red grid of sub-scoring depending on (anatomically) how vital a hit there was. The spine, only one inch wide, counted ten, certain areas in the head (brainstem, etc) counted ten, the heart was a smallish ten zone, but you would have been surprised how much of the area within the usual "K-5" zone was as low as a 3 or 4. We fired a couple of courses at these targets. The first one, we were told to just fire our usual concentration on the K-5. We did, and we got scored.  With 25 rounds, my per-round average was about 3.4  That meant that with one round hit to the K-5, I would have a 34% chance of totally disabling the goblin with that round. Not healthy for me. A different mathematical formula was employed to take in 3-round groups, and my score shot up to over 70%.

Now, we fired  another course on a fresh target. This time, we were told to concentrate our fire centered & vertically in strings of 3-5 rounds (6-shot .357 revolvers). We evaluated the targets after each string. My strings went up into the 90s! I was getting 2 or 3 spine hits in each string, by thinking I was tring to shoot out the assailant's spine. This is a well-known pnenomena called "instinct-targeting", where you think of the actual microtarget you want to hit within the general mass of the silhouette in front of your sights. You think it, and you hit it. It takes a lot of practice. I actually took an instinct-targeting course from a shotgun master from Georgia once, and over the course of a day, he trained me to hit ever smaller moving targets until at the end of the day, I went to the skeet range, and broke a perfect 25 (never having broken more than 14 before).

Instinct-targeting, combined with firing multiple rounds, will turn a 9mm or even smaller caliber weapon into a guaranteed stopper. Your goal should be to develop a double-tap, in which you hit the spine with both rounds, then a single round to the head of the then-falling goblin, in which you are microtargeting his center upper teeth. That will get you the brainstem. Most "Mozambique" technique shooters shoot for the spot between the eyes, but if you hit it, you get the outer brain, and your only damage might be that the goblin won't be able to recite poetry to you as you have destroyed his speech center. You want to destroy the comm-center of the brain, the brainstem, with your head shot. The other danger of a high head shot is that if you hit the upper skull, you risk no penetration to the brain at all, even with a .45! If the angle isn't right, your round may just deflect off the skull. By shooting the mouth, you avoid all that. It's an opening waiting for your round, sort of like Luke Skywalker when he destroyed the Death Star battle station in Star Wars 4.

So, just to show you what a good knife-wielder can do to you, if you let him, check these out:

Sorry, you will probably want to put that steak back in the freezer now...

OK, summary time.

One round, especially if it is a low-power, non-aircraft-hull pentrating round, will not stop a determined knife attacker.

It's a known fact, derived from studying hundreds of knife attacks, that if your knife-assailant is within 21 feet of you when he begins his charge, you can probably NOT draw your weapon in time to stop him before he gets to you, WITHOUT DOING SOMETHING TO DELAY HIS CHARGE.

I'm not an unarmed combat master (yes, you are first going to fight the guy unarmed, then draw and kill him with multiple rounds in a situation like this). I've had the training to do this series of moves, however, so I can at least tell you what I would do.

First, I'm going to shuffle my feet into the combat stance, and then blade my body with my gun side away from the bullrushing assailant. I will assume a slight crouch, and raise my left hand to chest level, keeping an open hand (not a fist). I will have my gun hand lower, at waist level, with a karate fist, and tensed to strike.

The assailant will get to me in 4 strides if I stand and wait, but I'm not going to. I'm going to give ground, if possible at a 45 degree angle away from his line of charge. I will take combat shuffle-steps backwards on my toes, about a foot backwards at each step, but maintaining my crouch and upper-body balance.

Sometimes the first step of a knife-wielder's bullrush is a feint. I will watch for this, and if he stops, I will draw and begin firing with my gun. If it isn't, and he keeps coming, I will prepare to parry his first thrust with my left arm. The parry will be inside to outside, a forceful contact of my forearm upper surface with his forearm inner surface. If I'm forceful enough, I may just disarm him with the parry-strike. If I do, I will step back two steps, draw and fire my gun as he gropes for his weapon. He will be in a crouch trying to pick up his weapon, so the angles of fire are not optimum. Center of upper mass, empty the weapon, try for a head shot on the last round.

If I don't disarm him (probably won't), I will at least have interrupted his prepared chain of knife moves,  and he will recoil to reset before striking again. This is my opening, and maybe the only opening I will get. I have a decision to make: Do I strike a focussed fist blow with my gun hand, or do I shuffle back two steps and begin a draw to fire my weapon? Open targets for the fist blow would be the Adam's Apple or the underjaw or the face, depending on how it presented itself.

If I strike the fist blow, I am committing myself to unarmed combat against an edged-weapon assailant. Risky for anyone below the 3rd Dan, it seems to me. I will go for option two, shuffle back and fire. The shuffling back is the key here, as I have to move backwards and not trip, then draw and fire while moving backwards. YOU NEED TO PRACTICE THIS IF YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE IT AS A PLAN!

The military and some dojos teach a third option: After executing the parry, you roll the parry-arm into a grab of the knife-wrist, lock the assailant's arm straight, then strike a downward chop with the other hand to disjoint the elbow. The assailant cannot maintain the weapon and WILL drop it (unless it's a finger-hole weapon, of course). Choices of fully disabling the assailant vary from that (think K-Bar).

I've practiced that move a few times, in fact, did so in the most recent training I've taken, about 4 years ago. I do not have confidence enough in my ability. I won't use the option. To get good enough at it, you have to have superior grip strength, better-than-average upper body strength, and lots of practice with the focussed chop blow required.

This technique with close-in bladed-weapon assailants is designed to return tactical control of the fight to you, and give you enough time to finish the fight with your gun. It has a large leap of faith in it, and one that most carry-permitted people haven't though of, that of the REQUIREMENT to engage the close-in  knife assailant with unarmed combat BEFORE trying to engage with the firearm.

If you have time to shoot first, you MUST keep firing until you see the assailant fall, not do a "golly-gee, I shot him, why is he still charging?"

This slashed marshal bought his own misery. He bought it with faith in his draw and his "disabling" bullet. He bought it with his ignoring of the rules of the combat he found himself in. His superiors may have paid for part of it by their stupid, politically-correct insistence on the ineffective bullets and their insistence that he shoot ONE round, then stop to evaluate. I've heard that as policy for skymarshals, but don't know for certain. If it's true, this incident should spark some change, but I'm not holding my breath.

H/T to the EllTee, still thinking like a warrior.

Mac n' cheese 2

Aaron's post on Mac and Cheese generated quite a few comments, so I thought I would build on his achievement with some lessons that I received from cold weather training with the USAF, and two different Winter Search and Rescue teams that I have belonged to, Marquette County, MI and Multnomah County, OR.

All that training stressed "food as fuel". It's well known that your food requirements can double for outdoor work in cold weather. An 18-50 year-old man (militia age) might use 3,000K (calories) a day working at a desk, indoors. Doing moderate work outdoors in warm weather might raise that 1-2,000K, but add in the calorie-robbing cold and you can add another 1-2,000K. Metabolism studies in loggers working out in moderate cold (35-55f) showed that in the "Misery-Whip" or springboard logging days from 1850 to 1945, a logger could eat 6-10,000K for breakfast, another 4-5,000K for lunch and 5-7,000k for dinner and lose weight. That's at least 15,000K and as much as 22,000K. A pound of weight equals 3,200K, so our loggers should have been gaining 5-6 pounds a day. After they had worked at it for a couple of months, their weight stabilized on that caloric intake.

The Army plans on feeding two MRE's a day, and they are 6,000K if memory serves. That's 12,000K for an active soldier. In field research, few soldiers, given the chance, consumed all of the meals, and probably existed in the field on 5-7,000 calories.

Let's say our little army takes the field for a day's operations. How much Mac n' Cheese are we going to have to prepare, per man, to feed the troops?

From my pantry, I retrieved a box of Kraft "The Cheesiest" "Original Flavor" Mac n' Cheese, net weight 7.25 oz. If I make it according to the instructions, with all the margarine it requires, the ENTIRE BOX has only 1,140K in it. About 70%RDA of fat, 50% of Carbs and 60% of the protein. Mind you, the RDA is a minimum-to-maintain figure if you are not exercising. You'd have to eat about 5 boxes per day of this staple, a fairly bulky amount (in the gallons) to exist for long as an infantryman.

It's survival food. An army fights on it's stomach, as a logistician of WW1 observed (may have been Gen. Pershing). Mac n' Cheese might be good midnite rats to keep you making heat in your sleeping bag at night, but it ain't gonna power you far during the day. For that, you need more protein and more carbs, and a little more fat. There are powdered supplements that will give you huge protein and carb numbers with a half-liter milkshake. The body-builders use them to pack on those huge decks of pecks. In a militia situation, we are concerned with keeping our baggage train as small as possible, so in my outfit, we will probably pack and use the supplements. They can be premixed and issued out to be carried in a light rucksack (think seal-a-meal packs). They require no cooking, and will keep 6-8 hours unrefrigerated.

In a realistic S.H.T.F. situation, there will probably be kids and wives in camp. They can get by on the Mac n' Cheese, but if we're going back to the city to take back what's ours, we'll need better fuel.