At some point you may have a tendency to ask yourself, “Have I prepared enough?” and “What more can I possibly do to prepare” for the day when stuff hits the fan?
Whenever I am asked these questions, I tend to fall back on my military experience and answer, simply, “You can never prepare enough.”
As in the military, we could never really “train enough,” so the same principle applies to prepping and getting ready for a life much different than the one you are currently living.
Make no mistake, until you’ve actually had to live “off the grid” or in a pure survival mode, there is no way to ever really know what it’s like. It’s the same for combat; until you’re actually in combat, there is no way to really know what it’s like, how you’ll react, whether you’ll make the right decisions under fire and so forth. In Afghanistan, for instance, I spent many nights shivering in a not-too-warm sleeping bag underneath the cover of an RG-31 mine-resistant armor-protected (MRAP) vehicle, and days humping mile upon mile with 80 pounds of ammo, gear and ballistic vest at an elevation above 9,000 feet. And when the bullets started flying or one of our convoy vehicles was struck by an IED…well, let’s just say those were some tense moments.
But training helped me prepare for such scenarios; military planners like to train troops as realistically as possible, so that if or when they are deployed in a real situation they will (hopefully) have had enough of the realistic simulation to react property (and most do).
So, with that principle in mind, constantly preparing – “training” for the day when stuff falls apart – works the same way, in theory. By putting yourself in simulated situations – planning your bugout route, how you will communicate in an emergency, what you’re going to take with you, what items you’re going to stockpile, practicing self-defense and first aid – you will be better able to handle the emergency when it comes.
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People who don’t constantly prepare and train for the day when they will have to use their equipment and skills to survive just won’t be ready when the time comes. It would be like putting untrained troops into combat; there is no way they would survive against a force that is trained (which is why our troops always prevail against lesser-trained, inexperienced terrorist “armies” and so forth).
Ken Jorgustin, writing at Modern Survival Blog, notes:
[T]here are certainly some very reasonable goals and milestones that you might set for yourself such that when you reach or exceed them, you might consider yourself to be reasonably prepared.
…I said that ‘it’s never enough’ because I consider preparedness in general to be a life long way-of-life in which I am always gaining new preparedness related knowledge, learning new related skills, and acquiring new related things to support them.
He’s right. That’s another thing about constant preparedness training: The more of it you do, the more things you learn, the more mistakes you correct, and the more proficient you become at the various survival tasks.
So the bottom line is, if you ever think you’ve put in enough training time and that there is nothing more you can do to “prepare,” think again. There is always something more to be done, another skill to refine, a bugout plan to review and practice, and so forth.
Plus you should constantly review your supply situation, making sure to rotate stored food and water to maintain freshness and check equipment regularly to ensure its functionality.
And remember, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” (via bugout.news)
Here is a short video on how to prepare, physically, for when you may need to bugout:
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