What Is An Area Study
I’ve just added this section from the Green Beret Preparation and Survival Guide to Wattpad, and here is the excerpt below. An Area Study is the step many people overlook when they begin to prepare but it gives focus to all efforts.
WHAT
IS AN AREA STUDY?
An Area Study is simply examining your environment
with the perspective of evaluating assets and threats so you can properly
prepare. An Area Study will allow you to tighten down your preparation and
focus on things in order of priority. It’s not just the environment but also
includes yourself and your team.
In Special Forces, prior to deploying to an Area of
Operations, we conducted an Area Study of that location. You must conduct an
Area Study of your Area of Operations (AO). This means studying your home, your
work, school, and any other locales where you and people on your A-Team spend a
significant amount of time. When taking a trip, you should conduct a travel area
study, examining the route you will take, your destination, and your route
back.
There are so many cases where a thoughtful Area Study
followed up by the appropriate preparations would have saved lives. Preparation
is so much better than reacting. Which is what we’re doing now.
Area Studies can have non-emergency uses, such as if
you’re considering moving to a new place. An Area Study can provide valuable
decision making data.
Think about it. You live in a tsunami zone. Have you
actually driven your evacuation route? How long does it take? Have you figured
out the quickest escape route on foot, when an accident caused by terrified
people blocks the road or everyone in your neighborhood flees at the same time
on the same route creating a traffic jam? You work on the 40th floor of a
skyscraper. Do you ever look around and ask yourself: how do I get out of here
if the normal means of egress are blocked? While schools run active shooter
drills, what about the work place?
You’ve begun your Area Study and didn’t even realize
it by doing Task Two. Some of the core questions are already answered: How
close are you to the nearest military base? Nearest police station? Firehouse?
Hospital? Do you know where the closest emergency room is? How long will it
take to get there? How quickly can an ambulance respond to your location? When my
wife and I lived on a winding road that was difficult and confusing to travel,
during one medical emergency my wife had to be driven to the nearest largest
road to meet an ambulance as it came toward us, saving considerable time and
perhaps her life.
You want to examine your environment for a lot of
things. What can harm you? What can help you? What can hide you? What are your
enabling factors? What are your disabling factors? What is the terrain and how
can it help you or hamper you in movement? What are the roads, trails, rail,
etc. What effect does your environment have on you? What effect will you have
on it?
You don’t have to answer these questions right now,
but you will soon.
In essence, an Area Study requires you to invest some
time and energy on research and to look at your surroundings from a different
perspective. It can actually be a fun experience and allow you to see the world
around you with a different perspective. Get your A-Team involved because we
all look at things a little bit differently.
When my A-Team traveled, the engineers would be
looking at things with a unique perspective. When they saw a bridge, they were
mentally calculating how to blow it up. When they saw a stream, they were
thinking how to provide a water supply to villagers and irrigation for fields.
My weapons men would look at terrain for fields of fire for direct and indirect
fire weapons. And cover and concealment for us. As a survivor, you have to look
at your environment in terms of what you can use and what can be a threat, what
can be scavenged and much more, which requires you to assume a different
mindset for a while.
We live in a variety of natural environments. There
are also a wide range of human developments from urban to remote rural. Thus
one size doesn’t fit all.
Doing an Area Study is critical so you can tailor your
preparation (and the information in this book) for your specific situation.
Some threats are going to be of much more importance for you to prepare for
than others. For instance, if you live in Oklahoma, the threat of hurricane is
nonexistent (so far), but tornados and earthquakes are likely.
The first step is to start with the most important factor: you and those in your A-Team.
More to come.
