WWIII Contingency Planning Pt I

Make Yourself Ready For War

I’ve been trying to avoid the news recently. It’s a soft New Year’s Resolution, and I’m doing really well with it. However, a couple of things coalesced in my mind over the past few days:

1. I’ve been reading about the start of WWII and German rearmament
2. The talking bobbleheads on the news have, in various ways, talked about how “we” – which I guess is the UK, followed potentially by “The West” and everyone – should be preparing for World War III in the coming years.

Now… If you check the archives, I’ve always been a casual prepper type. It’s a game and an extension of contingency planning;

• What do you do if you have to leave home for a while?
• What do you do if business dries up and you’re out of money?
• How do you plan your financial future if there’s a crash and everything drops?

So it’s a bit of a fun – if you let it be – exercise to plan for various disasters. For the most part, they don’t happen, but you find yourself better off for doing this than if you didn’t.

For instance, Covid did not wipe billions off the planet. It did kill a lot of people. Furore about who did what and vaccine effectiveness/lethality continues to this day.

I decided early on during the pandemic that I didn’t know who to trust or what to do; so I came up with a learning plan and action plan. I spent a whole lot of time researching the disease, diseases like it, and the vaccine, how vaccines work and so on.

(I then proceeded to shut up about what I found and the conclusions I drew, which – a lesson for another day.)

And then I survived Covid and its ramifications.

But let’s talk about World War Three, without resorting to blame-game, unlikely scenarios, and delving too deeply into the politics of the thing.

What Will WWIII Look Like?

(In Terms Of Pirate Nerds Reading This Blog Needing To Know)

The following is amateur conjecture based on current events:

World War III will look nothing like WWI or WWII

Weaponry is very advanced now. Manpower is very costly. Drones are laser-precise and can hit targets from thousands of miles away. This isn’t to say there won’t be boots on the ground in war; obviously there are right now in the Middle East, Ukraine, and elsewhere.

However, commenters tend to the assumption there’ll be mass drafting and several years of sitting in trenches as in WWI. That seems unlikely unless you’re in a particular hot zone. (If you are, then there’s a clear and obvious action plan available to you.)

I don’t think The West is going to be in one of those hot zones. So you’re not necessarily going to have to go Rambo… or are you?

Insurgencies Are Cheaper Than Armies

Mass unrest tends to be somewhat controlled and targeted. Take it from a guy who wrote propaganda for a couple of governments professionally; the well goes very deep into who funds what little group and what they pay for.

(I’m just a peasant, btw. Writing materials to win over groups of the electorate. Don’t blame me.)

With that said, and again avoiding the politics of who-does-what; know that it’s very expensive to fund an army for your country to go and fight people across the world and then motivate said army to destroy/conquer an area.

Again, not to say it doesn’t happen… but it’s very expensive.

What isn’t expensive is to pay to sprinkle a little anger among a disenfranchised group within a nation and cause them to fight the government, each other, or random people.

You see this play out time and time again; and it’s occurring pretty much all the time somewhere in the world.

Your action plan for this: Move to a safer area, secure your property, take precautions, etc.

Economic and Technological Warfare is Future Warfare

I wanted to add psychological warfare to this, but it’s sort-of covered by the above part in a coded way; don’t let yourself get swept up in stupidity or other negative emotions.

Your responsibility is to secure your safety, the safety of your family, and then you work your way up. Ideals come only at the point the former are secured.

Now, with that said… assuming you don’t live in a hot zone, and you don’t live in a place that’s subject to riots, looting and whatever else comes with insurgencies, the next way you’ll be affected is economically (and technologically as an aside.)

This; maybe extend to politically as well but keep it within context.

Let’s just take the current example; Houthi Rebels in Yemen start blockading and sinking supply ships in the Red Sea. Or, Ukraine crop fields are being turned into discarded shell depots by the Russians.

Both of these will never involve you going Rambo, but both will have a huge potential effect on global supply chains.

Life gets more expensive, scarcity goes up; your bottom line is life will get harder in a number of ways.

This isn’t to doom and gloom; what can you do about it?

You can do absolutely nothing about Houthi Rebels in the Red Sea if you live in Wyoming or Madrid or wherever. You can be smart with your money, have fail safes and otherwise prepare yourself.

Which… annoyingly we’re going to cover in the next instalment in this series of posts. I’ll call it a personal rearmament plan.

See you in the next one.