Prepper

I asked you a serious question, you responded in a robust and candid manner, so I feel obligated to say more than; “thanks”. Maybe this post will be helpful to all.

Your answer got me thinking. I don’t want to get bogged down by the technical parts of the conversation. However, your statement “Did someone inside the government know of the attack and fail to act, probably!”, got me thinking.

I am personally dealing with a government bureaucracy right now. The reality is, in my experience, that bureaucrats become mind-numbed robots over time (even if they are truly good people). So what does this have to do with prepping? It’s a matter of task and purpose. Unfortunately I think human nature and redundancsy favor focusing on the task rather than the purpose.

When I was a young infantry officer I learned this lesson the hard way on a field exercise. My platoon was training on how to attack a trench line. We practised this over 48 hours. We even conducted a live fire exercise in a trench line. Both my Company and Battalion Cammander observed my platoon execute our trench clearing techniques and I was told we were, hands down, the best in the Battalion. That evening we received our orders for the force-on-force part of the training. We were to raid an enemy communications site, destroy their communications capability, and guess what? It was a trench and bunker complex. We knew we were ready. We came up with our plan and walked all night to get to the objective. Just before dawn we raided the communication site. My platoon was a well oiled machine. We sliced through the enemy like a hot knife through butter. We destroyed the enemy force without a loss and quickly moved to a safe distance to consolidate and reorganize (you never stay on the objective in a raid as you mey get hit with artillery or a counter-attack).

At this point the exercise was over. We dropped our kit and began our after action review. The Captain, who was evaluating us, asked how I thought we did. I was very happy with our performance and told him so. At this point he directed our attention to the main bunker on the objective. “What’s in there lieutenant?”, he asked me. I jumped down in the bunker and my heart quickly sank. There was a table with multiple radios, maps and enemy communications data. It was all untouched. We had failed to accomplish the mission.

The point is; DO NOT get so focused on the task at hand that you lose sight of the purpose! Prepper posted about “Why we prep?” recently. That is spot on, but it is at a macro level. ALWAYS keep your purpose in mind in everything you do! It is too easy to get caught up in the task at hand.

My platoon cleared that trench like experts (task), but we failed to destroy the communications equipment(purpose). Prepping is a hobby to many of us. This can also lead to problems regarding task and purpose. For example, I love guns. However, I always need to keep the pupose of my purchases in the front of my mind. It is easy to get carried away and buy “cool guy gear” (task) and forget why I am buying the stuff in the first place (purpose).

Hopefully, that is a bit better than “thanks for your reply.”

JeSter