Citizen S2: Building an Intelligence Shop - A Primer

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground these days we have to do a lot more with less and as people begin to sort of organize their communities and try to prioritize coming together as a team we find that we have a lot of questions sometimes starting most broadly we have the question of how to grow a community more specifically than that we have the question of how to organize that Community for a common good or a common defense and even more specific than that we have general questions of how can we fit into this sort of overall plan and overall goal and how can we put our skills to good use So today we're going to cover a very very Niche topic and answer some questions and maybe get some ideas flowing on how to set up your own prepared citizen-based S2 shop or intelligent shop now before we get into the meat and potatoes of this I really want to stress that perspective is everything and you really have to manage your own expectations. Moving forward with whatever you might want to do since there is no one size fits all way of organizing things or setting things up we really have to understand the scale of a few different things this may get a little abstract for a moment so please bear with me as we can see from this chart uh that is very Loosely based on mazlo's hierarchy of needs we have a lot of different room to maneuver here depending on what you want to do and what your needs are just to put things as simply as I possibly can if you're wanting to set up your own S2 or intelligent section shop remember S2 is the the Army's way of saying the intelligence section of a military unit is different from other branches N2 is Navy J2 is joint environment things like that. But just as a little brief bit of nomenclature S2 usually refers to the intelligence section so for those of you who are trying to set up a prepared citizen intelligence shop it's probably best to consider three main things the first of which is the emergency itself uh you really want to understand that if if you are a small one or two man intelligence shop that is serving your family or your local community and it's your job to figure out what's going on and what's going to happen next you're probably not going to be super effective if your if your mission is to tackle one of these higher level nation state problems right one guy is probably not going to be able to put together an entire intelligence briefing detailing like a 911 style event or something it's just not going to happen and if it does happen it's going to be very very condensed if you think about the way that I myself do the wire reports for those of you who are aware of those um sort of new Daily News updates sort of things I cover International and National Level news a lot of times and you know the details are very few and far between so you have to realize that the nature of the emergency is going to dictate what your level of response is going to be I'm going to have a very different Outlook if I'm trying to tackle a nation state level problem like a Chinese spy balloon incursion or a uh terrain being held by a foreign adversary sort of thing that's going to look very very different as to like say a hurricane or some sort of other natural disaster not only is it going to look differently based on the content of the emergency. But it's also going to look differently depending on the scale of the emergency itself so if you have a localized Community emergency that's going to have a very different uh Outlook than say a national level incident that you may not be able to get that much information on the other two things to think about which are probably a little bit more directly helpful are the physical terrain that you are trying to Monitor and the number of people you have to help you these two features really impact the fourth unspoken sort of problem that you're going to face which is time for the physical terrain you really need to understand and nail down and figure out how big is your area of operations for most military intelligence and even civilian intelligence work we pull out a map and we say you're responsible for all of the intelligence that happens in this circle on the map uh this is your area of responsibility it could be a state it could be a county it could be even just your own little street. But you need to figure that out pretty quickly now here's the challenge when it comes to the prepared citizenry side of things your AO is the whole planet usually you're generally not going to have like a military hierarchy here right so this is where the doctrine kind of veers away from the reality of life you're usually not going to have an S2 shop a prepared citizen you know shop for say Colorado. And then another one for say Wyoming and then a whole other one for like Illinois you're not going to have that generally speaking if you have a larger group of of friends and family that you're trying to kind of organize a little bit better you may have uh a little bit more clearly defined barriers a lot of times this just passively is just Instinct right so if you got a lot of friends that are kind of dotted around the country and you hear of something happening that in an area that is near one of your friends or family members you contact them because they are in that area of responsibility so for instance if I knew someone out in California and I had uh there was a pretty big Wildfire going out there and uh they were uh near the area or at least within an hour's drive or so I'll contact them and see what they know because that is their area of responsibility they would probably uh have a lot more information because they're closer to the area so again this is very passive it's very nuanced it's not very clearly defined a lot of times. But generally speaking you know if your job for your family is to monitor everything then you're not going to be able to monitor very much so it's very helpful to have people in other states or other uh even cities in your in your own state that can help kind of monitor things in a similar fashion to you in their area so in a perfect world we could have an intelligence shop set up with all of these people uh involved in different areas of the country all linked together and all sharing information in a very highly efficient way that's just not a reality right now and if that level of organization does come about someday there's probably going to be other you know problems that arise from it. But generally speaking speak your your area of responsibility needs to be a little bit more clearly defined than just saying the whole planet even though that's probably what's going to happen most of the time another thing to consider is Personnel Personnel Personnel Personnel is going to be very important for the prepared citizenry why because we're all volunteers usually you can't pay people to set up an S2 shop like if you're trying to to to set up a more prepared citizenry Community you're trying to you know get people together friends family co-workers you're probably not going to be able to pay them so you're going to be dealing with volunteers and that's not necessarily a bad thing there's there's actually advantages to going with a volunteer um sort of organization. But it just means that you're you might not be able to rely on a person to sit in sit at the desk when they're needed to most right uh because they've got to take care of their own family and things like that so you just have to factor that in because that's going to become a problem uh when trying to set up any sort of prepared citizenry group or Community you know watch or anything like that you you have to understand the nature of volunteers it's not necessarily good or bad it's just something to plan for you have to realize that so with all of these considerations you know setting the ground work for how this works uh what are the criteria that I'm using to set this up generally speaking I'm assuming a very specific very Niche uh idea here so just bear with me again uh I'm assuming that this is going to help you the most if three criteria are met the first criteria is some sort of contingent situation be it a man-made disaster a natural disaster something happens around the world that uh you probably around your country. But it could be a world event uh something happens that is a groundbreaking you know event that is not impacting your local area but it's still going to require you to probably go home for the day go get the kids from school we're now in a sort of emergency mode sort of thing it may not be a total apocalypse like thermonuclear war or anything. But there are there have been plenty events over the past few years uh that maybe don't reach quite like a 911 you know scale of of utter National Panic right uh. But may require you to say oh you know well systems are down at my office today so I might as well just go home for the day and and see how I can help that's criteria one criteria two is your personal security is good to go we don't want to be slipping into an S2 intelligence role if our personal security is not good to go sometimes we slip into the the mindset the the rut of thinking that you know if all I've gots a hammer then every problem is a nail I'm the first person to admit that my first thought when an international or national event goes down that is a big deal my first instinct is not to slip into my intelligence role this is my profession basically and that's not my first response my first response is personal safety am I good to go in my local area am I safe is my family safe you know take care of the basics first right if that criteria is met then we can move forward with some of the other stuff and this is quite helpful because a lot of times especially in 2024 moving into these strange new fifth generation War Warfare kinds of times we're having a lot of disasters there are a lot of very big emergencies happening every day all around the country and they're not necessarily impacting one specific area this is more uh reflected by cyber attacks right a lot of us can you know be sitting in our cubicle one day. And then Cyber attack hits the company you're working for and you're basically toast for the day so you have nothing to do they send you home because there's nothing to do you can't even access access your computers or anything so you might as well go home and work on some prepared citizen stuff and that leads to the third criteria many Idol hands remember if our personal safety is guaranteed there's probably going to be a lot of people with a lot of things to do for instance even in a very very severe emergency where um you even activate your local community preparedness Defense Force right if you've got a bunch of dudes with rifles and things who have nothing to do because there's a dis faster so they're they're they've got some free time on their hands. But they're also the disaster is not directly impacting your area just yet do you see how we can maybe get into a situation where we have a lot of Idle Hands I know a lot of people somehow think somehow you know we're getting away from this mentality. But a lot of people on the Internet seem to think that when the lights go out they're going to go grab the rifle and be an infantryman and that's just not necessarily a long-term solution it's a good thing to be prepared for sure. But not everybody's going to slip into that role and I would be willing to bet that a lot of dudes who think they're going to go you know stand in their driveway with a rifle when the power goes out I would be willing to bet a lot of those dudes who actually think that's what they're going to do they would probably be better served doing something like this so this has happened quite a lot where we have a lot of dudes who may be trained for something and maybe they're maybe they can't fulfill their Community role maybe the power's out the water's not working you know water treatment's not working uh. But there's not a lot of crime uh going on yet or they're in a remote area you see where we're going with this we can have a lot of Idle Hands we have a lot of people who the disaster that they prepared for isn't the disaster that's occurring so maybe we can slip into a role like this so these are the three criteria we've got a disaster happening that's more of an everyday variety that's more of a it's a serious event. But so it's going to require you to to step away from your you know main life you know your main profession maybe but it's not severe enough to where you're going to be you know an infantryman up there on the BM right so that's the first criteria second criteria is your personal security is safe you're in an area where there's not a lot of crime it's not going to H you know things aren't popping off really like you expected and because of one and two the third criteria is you've got a lot of people who want to help because because they either trained for the wrong thing or they they're not cut out to be an infantryman or maybe that's not their role or maybe the disaster doesn't call for it you know so maybe that's sort of the way things uh work out so these are the three criteria that I'm kind of starting with uh right right out of the gate for whether or not this process is going to be helpful for you so keeping in mind all these criteria all the disclaimers all the thinking that you have to do ahead of time as to whether or not this is going to be beneficial for you if you've gotten that out of the way and you have a really specific question namely how do I set up an S2 shop and what are the roles and responsibilities of people that may come into my group or come to me and say hey I've got some time my rifle is getting dusty over here because this disaster doesn't call for it so what can I do to help you how can I build an S2 shop in an emergency and delegate a lot of these roles and responsibilities to people who may show up or may want to cross train or whatever so right up front before I get into this this is just my pure opinion it's very Loosely based on how professional military uh intelligence shops are sort of arranged. But you're going to have a lot fewer people so you have to modify things quite a bit and this is essentially what I would do if I ran the zoo with regards to how to set up an Intel shop if I had a team of four people so we'll start with the first person uh just if you had just one person just yourself and we'll go from there assuming that you get more people um so starting with the first person person one we're going to call this person the lead analyst this would be somebody like me this would be like a one person whose job or talents or skills lie in the intelligence S2 world not a lot of us out there not a lot of people want to um not a lot of people have this kind of military intelligence experience there's a lot of people who are trying to get into it uh and I'm I'm probably going to have to do a a whole series on that. But let's just assume for a moment that you've got just like you may have a radio guy you may have a drone guy well if you have an Intel guy in your group or if you find yourself being the Intel guy of the group this is you person one so if you're by yourself and it is your job to be the Intel guy for your family your co-workers your small group um I'm afraid to tell you that you're not going to be that effective you're going to have to realize that your expectation management is a thing so for me my personal opinion is I would prioritize three things comms battle tracking and basic ipb or uh intelligence preparation of the battle space or intelligence preparation of the operational environment or an area study. However you want to phrase it they're all slightly different things um you know but generally speaking these are the three things I would focus on comms first you're going to have to prioritize that first because and this is a very strong uh difference between the professional military world not a single intelligence analyst anywhere in any military in the world has to care or know a lot about radios because it's handled for them generally speaking if you have a military analyst or even a civilian analyst or an agency analyst if they're somewhere they're going to be there with a commander or a boss or a supervisor or something and that person who's in charge of them is going to have a radio so it's all taken care of generally in the prepared citizenry space we don't have that luxury so as I've said and will continue to say if you have information to pass if you have intelligence if your job is in the information space and passing information or passing intelligence in some form or fashion you have to personally be able to transmit that information to whoever needs to get it that's your responsibility in the prepared citizenry space Not So in the military world. But here in the prepared citizenry space it means that you have to so the lead guy if you are the only Intel guy for your people or your group or wherever you've got to also be really Johnny on the spot with the radio you've got to be really good at transmitting that information and that means you've got to bring the radio that is your job unfortunately I wish it wasn't so. But it is you've got to bring the radio you've got to bring the batteries first and foremost is comms and you may not think about it but comms is actually part of the Intel world too because as you establish links with other people you're Gathering intelligence so you've already kind of jumped ahead in the Intel cycle uh for those of you who haven't you know are not aware of the Intel cycle I have a whole specific video on that detailing that uh in pretty good detail. But generally speaking and the prepared citizen world if you're using something like you know the ghost net uh you're starting to develop intelligence Networks you're starting to develop intelligence sources you see where we're going with this so you may think that radios are just you know BS or like ah this is awful you know this is something I don't need to learn how to do no if you're in the information space in the prepared citizenry world this is a top priority at least that's what I think and the reason I think that comms is super important is because it directly helps you with the second one uh the second idea which is battle tracking you need to be able most of your Intel work is probably going to be battle tracking some event going on around the world and you uh battle tracking and moving icons around on a map and figuring out how the situation is going and getting into the open source intelligence world with that sort of thing again I have a whole video on Battle tracking don't need to go into more detail now. But essentially if all you can manage is getting a radio up getting links up and and some limited battle TR of what's going on outside your area or even with inside inside your area that might be all you can do as one guy uh because battle tracking is a full-time job it's very intensive it's usually a two to fourman job in the military if you're doing it in like a professional talk or tactical Operation Center. But as one guy it's going to be overwhelming uh if you get behind five minutes if something's going on like a riot you're trying to track where the where the Riot's developing where crowds are moving to oh it's a nightmare M to do as one person. But you may be stuck with it right a third criteria to track or do because this is your responsibility is ipb or intelligence preparation of the battle space again I'll have a whole video on this. But uh this goes by a few different names uh you can call it intelligence preparation of the battle space intelligence preparation of the operational environment you could even call it an area study. Although an area study is sort of like ipb on steroids so they're all kind of different things but basically you need to be aware of what's in your environment and how that affects the battle space and you should have done it beforehand you should have done this before the contingency happens so Now's the Time now is the time to do the ipb of your local area your intermediate area. And then maybe on maybe a state or national level again there's varying ways to do this it's all opinion on which is the best way to do it all ipb products are going to look different there's no real one way to do this it's just based on experience and your priorities of what your uh what your group is trying to do so again just as one guy you're probably not going to be able to do that much you're probably going to be able to do comms battle tracking and if you had to some combat style rapid ipb again uh there's varying ways to do this. But you know that's probably all you're going to be able to do as one person so that's person one well say you've got somebody else who's willing to help you out and you're now a twers a a Twan Intel shop what can you do with a second person well again I hate to break it to you. But not that much more uh having a two-person Intel shop is pretty much going to be able to allow that first person some rest remember we're usually going to be doing this in our spare time usually by people who have a full-time job and a family life to maintain so that first person is going to get burned out like hard you know if they're the only Intel person for their area over their group and they don't have anybody to help uh help them out so again if they try to do too much um it's it's going to be a problem so a second person helps out now the second person we're going to call the coops person or current operations person again in the professional military world you're going to have a whole department that handles coops you may have a whole desk of three people 24 hours a day that handle just Coop stuff so it's eventually this is all the current operations everything that's happening right now so hopefully if that person is is up to scratch you can shift that person one the the lead analyst can shift that battle tracking job over to the coops person hopefully uh that would work out pretty well and that can be their job some of the other things that the coops person could do or should do is manage the the event log or deck log depending on how you want to view it essentially just a a a log and a notebook you know three- ring notebook or or a pocket notebook or something that says at this time of day this thing happened it's part of proper battle tracking it really is. But a lot of times the event log gets left out if you're the only guy you're trying to move pucks around and like aack or something the event log gets like either forgotten or just deprioritized so uh if you have the time if you've got an extra person person two can just do Co stuff they can do battle tracking and they can manage the event log and if they're able they can help write some reports because again they are the person who's going to know what's going on again it doesn't sound like very much right well just having two people to kind of Bounce these things off of would be really helpful that way person two can do all the battle tracking they can sit there behind their computer and just you know move icons around on a map they can manage aack if you're running aack on like a server or something and the cool part about this is that all of these jobs can be done remotely I I'll get to that in a moment. But you can have a person say hey I'm going to monitor Twitter or X or social media for this Riot which is going on and I'm going to update the positions of the crowds on attac for you okay cool well that frees me up that frees the lead analyst up to do something like dig more into ipb get briefings together uh do a little bit more deeper analysis start writing the bulk of the report reports if if you've only got two people do you see how you can now start to provide some uh producible reports some products that you can actually create and send or post and and and distribute to people so so now we're starting to to actually look more and more like a a legitimate professional intelligence work again with just one person it's going to be very challenging to do um you know it's going to be very very hard to run a Professional Organization if you're just one person you know you you really have to sit expectations with two people it's a little bit better you can run a a a decently okay Intel shop with two people as long as you're Community has expectations set so with three people. Though now you can start to get cooking with gas because adding on a third person to your team if you have uh a third person who's willing to come on board and work in your prepared citizen Intel shop uh that person can be the production manager uh and really their main job job would be to do all of the uh consumable products they could manage everything that your shop produces and sends out to other people generally speaking if you've got a total of three people that are willing to work on Intel stuff in your community that means you're you're talking like a larger Community because from my own experience you're not going to have that many people in an Intel shop you may have one guy for aund person community and that's just going to kill that person you know who's stuck doing the Intel for a 100 man Community you know that's pretty big uh that's a lot of work. But if you're starting to get into three people you're talking a much larger Community than that but let's just go down the rabbit hole and continue on again this is my what I would do situation if I had three people so that third person could be the production manager again echoing how things are done in the real like professional Intel world you could have a production manager whose job it is to manage all the products so they could um handle your one sliders basically your onslide PowerPoint uh documents to where if something happens you guys have maybe SE I've done them very rarely. But uh if there is a an emergency situation you've got this one slide done on PowerPoint uh in which case you can have just a one slide overview of what has gone on what the situation is you know overlaid on a map sort of thing and you can have that person the production manager manage that they can make sure that your on slider is good at all times so that if anyone comes up to you and asks you something you've got a pre-made intelligence product for them very professional very slick operation along with that uh depending it depends on how you might want to do it we can get into the weed of this later. But you also want to make sure that person's in charge of the two-minute drill um you may want to have your coops guy doing your two-minute drill. But you also if things are getting pretty heavy and you're and you're and your Battle Tracker person is overwhelmed and overworked they're not going to have time to deal with somebody because if somebody comes up to your desk comes up to your team and says hey tell me what's going on your coops guy can't look away from the screen like he's going to be glued to his computer right so your production manager can step in and say hi how can I help you today sort of thing and uh your two-minute drill two-minute drill there's also the 7-minute drill again military doctrinal term just the very basics of it is telling everything that you know happened over the past 24 hours and is likely to happen over the next 24 hours so past 24 next 24 in a 2-minute time frame go it's just kind of a short and sweet briefing thing that a commander can come in and get this is more along the line is helpful for a prepared citizenry because a lot of times people are not you know you're not going to have the military organization that you might be familiar with if you're like if you're like a you know a professional military analyst you're not going to have that in the prepared citizenry world. But it's still good to keep that in your in your mind you don't want to sit there and somebody come up to you and ask hey what's going on and you not be able to tell them like that's that's unprofessional it makes you look like you don't know what you're talking about. Even though you may know what you're talking about so so taking some time usually I prefer to update the 2-minute drill if you have it in a script uh like a literally written down to read off or like bullet points notes you know to Loosely read off you could do that you could just keep it in your head I do that most of the time. But if you've got a junior guy you you know somebody who's not that experienced in the production manager role you may want to make your one slider product basically a two-minute drill so have a a PowerPoint slide that the person could essentially just read off of more or less uh and tell someone a very quick recap last 24 hours next 24 hours go uh that's sort of how that works getting into the more um larger level of organizations you're grinsome this is what the production manager is going to do that's their that's going to be their job as well grinsome is the graphic intelligence summary or graphical intelligence summary um think of this as a PowerPoint presentation that gets sent out I mean it can vary. But usually it's a once a week product in most military units I think it's a once a week sometimes once a month it definitely not once a day uh. But usually a once a week intelligence wrap up of what's going on throughout your area of responsibility so speaking in terms of a prepared citizen might use this might be a community newsletter you may want to turn your community newsletter into into a Grint sum uh you may want to start adding these elements in uh if you've got someone who's uh in charge of like sending out a community email newsletter I know that's becoming a lot more popular with with tight with tight earnit communities around the country family newsletters things like that you could do it once a week or once a month and you can depending on the time frame you could put together a a grinsome product uh generally groms are more along the lines for people who are not there they're they for uh people who have not been battle tracking they have not been doing ipb for an area so think of I always think that a grinsome should stand on its own if you're able to take some some grinsome slides take them print them out. And then hand them to someone they should know from that PowerPoint slide you just made everything that there is to know at at a higher level uh that has occurred within your area of responsibility for the past week or so as a slight side note that's generally how I have my Intel updates organized it's a grin sum basically you know if you have more time if you have more people your grun sum is going to be a lot better that's why mine's not like super great A lot of times there's just not a lot of information because my AO is the world and I'm putting together a PowerPoint presentation on what happened around the planet in s days time so you know expectation management right so if you have a smaller area if you're just talking about your local community maybe you throw some things in there from outside the a that's a good grinsome thing to do uh. But we can talk more about that at a later time just wanted to highlight that the production manager that's going to be one of their main jobs because your lead analyst is too busy writing other reports and your coops guy is glued to the computer uh and glued to AAC or whatever to track what's going on around uh around their area another thing for the production manager to do is handle all maps and map production if would be nice if all of us had a map maker cartographer in our team we don't a lot of times even in the military I I had a cartographer in my S2 shop once and uh how many I don't even know how many years so you know it's not something that's common even in the professional military World. However there are a lot of people with a lot more um you know mapping experience than I think in the military sometimes so if you've got a guy who's got really good at at making Maps you don't necessarily have to be you know an arcgis Master you can do this stuff un like Cal too or other offline mapping applications uh you can have this person manage the um the data packages for aack if you wanted to do it that way uh that would be a very good job for this person uh to manage basically you want them to be able to incorporate the major uh battle tracking items into the map so you can kind of see how person two and person three can kind of work really close together sometimes the reason that you'd still want person two to have a relatively or it looks like they've got a light workload is because they're glued to their screen they can't really they can't really leave right they can't really go away they're they're they're on watch right so person three being able to take all right every half hour let the production manager um meet with the coops guy to figure out what's going on take some notes prepare the two-minute drill prepare the one slider update the one slider and uh get your you know start thinking about the grin suum and also uh start thinking about maps and things that go on maps right since person one and person two are going to be pretty pretty dang busy person three is usually also going to handle the bulk of report writing why is this because they've already done it usually if they're going to be handling the one slider if if they're going to handle the two-minute drill and the grin some they've already got the bulk of the work done in their head they might as well just put it down you know and start and start incorporating this all Al together um you could offload some of their work if if a lot of stuff's happened and the lead guy has has done a lot of the ipb and the lead guy is sitting back and doesn't have that much work to do anymore uh they can take the one slider they can take the two-minute drills generally that's how it works uh most of the time it all it also all depends on experience if you've got a really super experienced lead guy you may want him to handle uh all the two-minute drills the the work from like meetings with a commander or something if you get called in to like a higher you know organization if you've got to have a a more um more say deliberately aison relationship or you're trying to meet with another group or another agency or company or whoever right uh you may want to have your your your more experienced guy handle that meeting so that you don't send your less experienced guy to to be the face of your group right again professionalism is is kind of a big part of this as well so uh generally speaking you probably want to put off a lot of the a lot of the not time sensitive. But definitely still necessary work onto a third person if you can so that frees up the lead analyst to do things like um most of the time I would see the majority of the grin sum be compiled by the production manager whoever you want that to be. And then your lead analyst come in and write all the analyst comments right so the the the slide work the the busy work so to speak can be done by the production manager so that you don't waste you know your lead guys Time by moving pucks around if you've got a junior guy that needs the experience you can put that on them and have them build the slides build the maps make everything nice and pretty and leave space on the slide for an analyst comment box that the lead analyst can write I did that myself for a few years it worked out really really well it was very efficient very timesaving and and as time goes on as your team starts to get more experience you can let other people take a crack at it you could also get to a certain point to where your lead analyst is not even touching your grinsome at all they're just looking it over giving it a good blessing and. Moving on um just making sure that there's no nothing crazy in there because a lot of times some Junior guys may have some some pretty wild assessments that may not entirely be you know the the best sort of um way of looking at things so you may want to make sure that they're not being super crazy in a product that's going to potentially go out to dozens hundreds or even thousands of people right so that might be how you handle that sort of thing so again person three if they are more experienced if they're like on par with your lead analyst person three the production manager can also be like the liaison the guy the buffer between the outside and the rest of your team most of the time this is going to fall on the lead analyst because well your lead analyst is like the core of your Intel shop generally speaking and since they have more experience they have more ability to push back against BS make sure that you know the BS doesn't flow downhill under the rest of your team Your Leader your highest ranking if we're going with the military idea here that's probably going to be how this works doesn't always work that way in in in real life. But in a prepared citizenry role your Johnny on the spot's going to be your your lead analyst but that could easily switch over to your production manager who can be more of the commander sort of thing of the team if that's the way you want to run things that's perfectly fine now fourth person fourth person now if you're talking a four-person team that's probably the limit that's about as most as I would want to handle in a in in an Intel shop and an S2 shop in the prepared citizenry world uh you could double it and have an eight person team and just do 24-hour operations. But generally speaking four is a great number for a a prepared citizenry uh Intel shop any less than that you're going to start running into problems your guys are going to be pretty stressed they're going to be overworked. But any more than four you might start running into some internal problems right you got to remember this isn't the military nobody's giv us orders we're all here volunteers like most of the time everybody's got day jobs to to work most of the time a lot people are a lot older too so you know you you you might you let me put it to this way you have a higher chance of personalities getting getting in the way of of work in the civilian sector than the military sector in the military sector you can say hey look what's on my collar shut up and do your work uh that's not entirely the best way of doing things. But sometimes it's necessary sometimes very rarely but sometimes it's necessary do the job because I said so sort of thing that's very very hard to do in the prepared citizenry World we're all just regular taxpayers there's no rank here nobody's got any rank this is not how this works so again a 4 person team of volunteers is great because then you can start offloading a lot of these other jobs uh based on the people that you have you could do two and two you could have a total of four forget the production manager forget person Four's job and just run a lead and a coops 24/7 if you had to. But in a perfect world assuming that we have you know we're just doing N9 to5 stuff or basic incident response so we're getting four we're getting the band together for two to three hours a day if necessary right uh person four and again in a perfect world could do fooops or future operations we also call this plans it's technically separate. But whatever we'll go with right this person can handle everything that's going to happen in the future right so they could start working on ipb for areas that operations are going to be occurring in um speaking more of a prepared citizenry role if you've got like a disaster going on they can help expand the ipb because I would be willing to bet that most of you out there your ipb is never complete well for one that's just a fact ipb can go on forever. But most of you will probably find yourself operating in a situation where your ipb is not good enough it's not sufficient it may be the bare minimum. But it's not sufficient so your fooops guy can handle that anything that's going to happen in the future that can be on that fourth person it's sounds like it's not a lot. But what the the next part of their job is going to be pretty time intensive and that's collection manager again in the military world this is normally a a person or a department that handles this usually it's one person with maybe one or two underlings. But your collection manager is going to be responsible for you guessed it collections intelligence collections so all of these guys are going to need they're going to need information they're going to need the information to process and they're going to need someone to give it to them it would be fantastic if they didn't have to go out and get it themselves generally speaking your coops guy is going to be battle tracking uh which has a lot of uh overlay because what does battle tracking mean for the prepared citizenry generally it means sitting on social media and trying to find details of what's Happening battle tracking also means tracking friendly units tracking your own people things like that. But if you need to get a drone up you know that needs to be on that one guy so drones and local you know unman aial systems being used more commonly in the prepared citizenry space is fantastic. But it really is a full-time job if I had a guy with a drone and he says hey you know I want to help out you know the S2 shop this is what your job is you're collection manager and you're not just going to be sitting there flying your drone around you're going to be managing all the requirements that we have uh for collections so uh if your drone is a good tool to use for that uh fine. But your job is going to be matching an asset to the requirements that you that are given to you by the production manager the lead guy and the coops guy gener it's probably going to be the lead guy really so again your person four here if you if in a perfect world you've got a fourth guy to add to your S2 shop your Intel shop that person is going to handle everything they're going to be looking forward into the future right so they're going to be looking forward into the future with operations with any drone work that may be done on a small local level if they've got a drone that would be a great role for this person to fill um. But it's not not just drone work it's all other sensors too so you know imagery satellite imagery if they can start downloading satellite imagery for the production manager oh that'd be fantastic right if they can manage um maybe thermal feeds if you've got like a thermal optic maybe set them in an observation post and that's their you know collection you know they're actually not just going out there and tell like racking and stacking collection right they're actually getting it themselves so so again this is going to vary quite a lot uh in the real world here. But generally speaking I think starting with thinking along the terms of this is your drone guy that might be a better way of thinking about it uh because I think that's probably how it's going to work out most of the time uh if you have a fourth person that fourth person can also handle if if they are um if they're so inclined they can handle all of the logistics as well again future stuff so logistics for the S2 shop now we've got a four-person team four people need some management right they need some Logistics they need some assistance and all of these people are going to be very very very busy person one and person two are going to be the busiest person three is going to have the most flexibility in their time. But they're still going to have um uh a lot of reports and things to do the only issue is that uh person three is going to be able to flex more than person one and two person two is the least flexible in their schedule they've got to sit at a laptop basically and watch like that's their job person one is going to help them do that or they're going to be you know moving and shaking around and they're going to be handling a lot of very time sensitive stand here handle this sort of thing um they're going to be standing over the co-ops guy shoulder a lot of times they're going to be the most flexible in terms of the job they do. But the least flexible in terms of time your production manager they can they you know if they've got time they go take a nap if they want and work on the grin some later at night if they choose to that's their prerogative nothing the production manager does is going to be super times sensitive except for the updating of the products that the lead analyst needs to not look like an idiot right so you don't want your production manager to you know just you know goof off all the time same thing with your Foo Ops guy you know chances are most of the time you're probably going to have uh one of two kinds of people in fuops doing the the plans sort of thing either it's going to be a drone guy that's all they do you know they're flying around they're managing uh the battery management they're handling all the energy needs uh for for the team here uh or they're going to be a purely Logistics guy so maybe I should have labeled this as fuops plans or Logistics because you don't tend to have much overlap between the two. But either way we're starting to get into Unicorn Land because I don't think think that many people are going to be able to put together a team of four guys to work on just Intel stuff so that's how I would arrange a team if I was given cart blanch to do what I wanted uh and I had myself plus three others to form a an S2 shop uh you can handle pretty much any sized AO with this uh you can do a lot you can do a lot of stuff you can be a really highspeed uh Intel team with four people uh because you've got the ability to do some hard-hitting analytical work some battle tracking some uh producible reports because you know Intel that doesn't go anywhere you know Intel that you don't telling to anyone is useless right and you've got the ability to think into the future and plan for for other events right so that's our job right we're not supposed to be journalists as Intel guys we're not supposed to be journalists we're supposed to be intelligence analysts we're supposed to take in information process it and provide an analysis that helps a another person a commander a force whatever figure out what's going to happen into the future and make plans off of that we're not supposed to just be journalists right that's not how this works so sometimes it ends up that way a lot of times it looks that way. But really we're supposed to be above that we're supposed to be a little bit more forward thinking because journalists are supposed to tell you what happened but analysts are supposed to tell you what's going to happen so there's a big difference there it may not seem like much. But there is a difference there so if this was the team let's let's briefly digress for moment and discuss survivability so what happens if boom person one goes down person one is either killed wounded or captured what do you do well with a four-person team you can easily Flex so if the lead analyst goes down gets killed or whatever uh something happens to them they're not able to fulfill their their job anymore the kops guy can slide right over and and fulfill that lead Analyst job why would I do it this way well because the kops guy probably knows what's going on more than anybody else so so they're able to stay on top of things and they're able to to start working uh more with leadership or with other people uh it's their their battle tracking job is going to suffer. But again you have to remember person one and person two's job was done by the same person it was done by just one guy if all you got one guy so it's not that hard of a job to to slip them back together and make it so that you're essentially just running with a one person team again then if time allows uh you can move the production manager up to coops. And so on and so forth or however this works out uh in the prepared citizenry space you know in the military it's devastating if you were to lose a member if you had a four-person Intel shop in the military and one guy gets killed that's going to be pretty devastating um you know we try to cross train as much as possible to eliminate this uh eliminate the impact or reduce the impact you're never going to be able to eliminate it. But generally speaking in the prepared citizen world this may tank your whole team right but again if we're trying to be military thinking in terms of what what our jobs are if your lead analyst gets killed your coops guy can slip over into that job a little bit easier speaking a little bit less severely let's just say your your your Elite analyst is out of town say they're traveling abroad they're on a they're taking a cruise or something and Uh something's going down and they're not able to help the Cals are down they're not able to assist well you know this is how you could slide that over likewise if the same exact thing happens to your coops guy well your lead analyst can then just take over the battle tracking stuff so the same exact thing happens in Reverse right so uh your lead analyst takes back over the battle tracking probably forgets the deck log probably forgets the event log um. But if your coops guy has been in the job they probably got a good process so your lead uh analyst and your coops guy can can really be could really be synced up and and uh make sure that if one of them goes down for whatever reason the other can take over their job pretty easily same thing happens for if person three or person four goes down if you lose your production manager or if you lose your Foo UPS guy well your lead analyst or your kops guy can fill fill those jobs as necessary uh it really just depends on your people right again in the civilian world you're probably going to have to deal with a lot of Idle Hands so you're not going to be dealing with people who went to school to be an Intel guy so you know most of the time this is going to be very very personality and personal experience driven and this is a huge problem for the military too like you know even people who went to school like you know I can get some dudes out of AIT or or C school or whatever um getting out of their their their trained to be a professional analyst and they're landing on my team and one of them they both graduated they're both here they're both exactly roughly the same age and they're um both got the same level of experience which is probably none and they're sitting here on my team and one dude's a rock star and one dude's an idiot you know I hate to say it that way. But that's the way the military is so even the military which has a rigid training standard you get wildely different people like and this happens in country too you know you could go on a deployment and find out hey look when we get down range don't let you know private Snuffy over there he is not to touch anything like put him over there to lick the window like that's he ain't doing nothing right unfortunately that happens and in the prepared citizenry space that that may happen a lot more often than you might want to believe the difference being is that you can't exactly you know if you're an NCO or a low-level officer you can't exactly send one of your guys home if you're overseas. But in the prepared citizenry space you can absolutely fire people you know you can absolutely say look your job is this you know you're better suited for this over here you know or so on. And so forth It's harsh you know it's unfortunate but it's it's a lot more possible to to make better Personnel decisions uh in the prepared citizenry space than say in the military space sometimes so uh let's go ahead and wrap this up with some some notes and some other considerations to think of uh I know this has been very very information dense so let me throw some more ideas at you um the first of first consideration you might want to really re rethink I know I said at the beginning and I've talked about it throughout this. But really the size of your team and the size of your AO you know a fourman team could do a lot but you're probably not going to have a fourman team you're probably going to have to take these duties and responsibilities and spread them out you know you may have more people. But people who are able to do less so for instance you might be the lead analyst you might have this is your job right this is your role in the prepared citizenry the lights go out everybody puts their kit on this is what you do right that's all well and good how can you put other people to use if uh if they want to help out or if they can help out you may be able to sit somebody down uh for really you know a couple hours a day this kind of ties into the next thing to think about which is volunteers um so I'll cover them kind of. At the same time you're dealing with with a volunteer Force so you may have somebody who's able to give you four or five hours a day you know and that's it they've got to go get some sleep they've got to go maintain their family life they've got to go do some other stuff so as long as you're you know managing that from the very get-go so that somebody's not leaving you you know during the middle of you know crunch time you know that would probably be a good idea so a lot of you might be tempted a lot of you might be tempted to say all right here's our scenario we live in a moderately sized city in the United States of America some event has occurred and we know that riots are going to be planned for the downtown area that night well you might be tempted to call in your team you know assemble The A Team essentially uh too early you might you might uh be tempted to uh assemble them you know right as you know Sunset occurs uh and that might not be such a good idea if you've got a total of three people let's say you've got person one two and three you may want to have that third person uh or whoever's you know got a better schedule you may want to have them show up to work a little bit later you may want to have them punch in say at midnight if you're planning to continue this throughout the night uh so that they can get some sleep. And then the the second person can go home uh that might be how you want to handle things you know personnel management managing volunteers is a huge consideration speaking more broadly and and kind of uh along the lines of the first bullet point here you again you really going back to what I said at the beginning you have to understand and and consider the nature of what you're doing here you you don't want to get into Fantasy Land too much unfortunately in the prepared citizenry space we're leaning a lot on Military experience most of the time we're leaning on you know how the military does things there's really not that much Doctrine out there on how to run things in the prepared citizenry space if you're trying to just be an average person who's taking an interest in protecting their Homeland protecting civilization in these crazy times there aren't that many manuals for you to go by so you might find that if you've got a four-person team you are expected to do a lot more work than is is well fair for one. But also a lot more work than is feasible so you know I I really hesitate to to say how realistic this is I'm just telling you like I like I said in the beginning this is just what I would do if I had uh my choice of how to do things I would have a four-person team and that's about it because if you're starting to add more people to your team yeah you can manage an S2 shop that's larger I mean yeah you can have I mean a 100 person Intel unit if you wanted. But it what cost and generally speaking in our I find it I don't I can't imagine any scenario that would occur where you're going to have a 100 person Intel unit as a volunteer prepared citizen entity if anything you're going to split this off in have two so if you're lucky and you're able to have a four-person team and say you get more people say you've got a larger community and you've got hey I really like what the Intel guys are doing I want to go be on their team you know I want to go do what they do you're welcome to. But you may want to start breaking these out into different different groups right four people's good for management it allows the the lead analyst to to be a good manager for the rest of them to be a good leader right and if you've got say a stronger guy running co-ops as they get experience as this team becomes more of a team gets more experience you may start to identify someone who has who has good leadership potential and you can take them off of your team to start another team right so that's how you that's how I would do things I wouldn't increase the S personally it's just my opinion I wouldn't increase the size more than four people maybe six people if you or maybe eight people if you wanted to do 24-hour operations. But Eight's pushing it you know I think that generally speaking four to six people is probably the the most you're ever going to get now this can change of course because we now have the potential for remote work you know um the internet's a thing of course there are a lot of situations that are going to require you guys to get together they going to require this team to get together and the internet's not going to be an option you know that that's the one of the worst case scenarios. But in most situations the internet itself like is going to be available so you might find that you know a riot is a good example if you've got a riot going on in a city you know and one of your your guys is in that City well maybe you can assemble the team and help them battle track you know their own City you know that might be a way of doing it so you don't necessarily all have to be together in the same place to do this work it's best if you're you again thinking of what I would do if I had you know re of things I would probably want all four of these guys to train together as a team uh physically trained together Patrol together do things like this together so that they can identify each other's strengths weaknesses we could find out who's reliable for some things who's not reliable for other things. And so on and so forth generally speaking I guess what is it like management 101 you don't want to take a guy you don't know and let them go work remotely without you knowing whether or not they are going to work remotely I know a lot of companies just seem to just ignore this because most work that's done in the commercial space or business world is useless work. Anyway but if lives are on the line and if you're talking about a serious dedicated volunteer for I want the three guys working with me to know me and I want to know them and you know train together and if you guys have to work remotely I want to pick the guy that's probably the best best fit for that to go work remotely you know rather than just saying hey Timmy go take this laptop and you know help me you know do this from from your home over there all the way across the other side of the state so again we may be separated by distance some sometimes uh. But generally speaking most of the time you're probably going to be working with people that you know uh close together not always an option it's I tell you it is really hard for some for some areas of the country for some people it's really hard to get four people together in the same room they don't want to kill each other uh these days. But again playing a little bit of fantasy here if if this if this was an option this is how I would do things sort of like I mentioned with regards to the survivability of this this team Arrangement you probably want to have a lot of flexibility again this is just sort of implied. But I feel like the this needs to be stressed because you're not you're probably not going this is just a template you're probably not going to emulate this directly right you're probably not going to have one guy a lead the lead Analyst at his desk and the coops guy at his desk and the production manager no you're probably going to split these roles up just me thinking if I was a lead analyst and I had done all the stuff and I managed all my coms I can automate Communications very easily with stuff like the ghost net you know uh with js8 call that's fairly automated I don't need to sit there and watch that you know all day long with my face glued to the screen I can help out the production manager and do the one slider do the two-minute drill I'm going to be giv the two-minute drill. Anyway so I might as well do it right so there's going to be a lot of crossover in the real world not as much you know clearly defined nice colored boxes here in the real world world this is just a template that is very Loosely based on how professional Intel shops are organized in say the US military varying by branch of course this is most important to consider with this last bullet point Murphy's Law if something can go wrong it will go wrong and this is going to happen so chances are something's going to happen that would be an absolutely perfect battle tracking opportunity and your battle tracking gun is going to be on vacation you're going to have an absolute perfect situation where you know you're you're trying to grow your organization you're trying to grow your community and you've got this other big community that has uh uh you know they're trying to like work with you guys and you're trying to like shake some hands or maybe you've got a trade show coming up maybe you've got you know a range you're trying to do a presentation for or something and your production manager is going to be like out of action or something like that so cross training is very very important any want any analyst can fill any of these roles really so it's not really it's not really based on um training or experience that does play into it a lot. But generally it's like what do you want to do you know would you mind battle tracking today or at your coops well would you mind working on the grin some today you know I've got the battle tracking handled I can do that myself no there's no need for a separate co-ops guy to exist. But can you help me uh update this week's grin some slides that would be perfect right maybe maybe you maybe you're just a loone analyst right and you've you're just an Intel guy right and you're out in the woods with a bunch of other dudes and you've got a grunt who brought his drone well now you can take advantage of him right that's how this works in the real world if you had a good leader if you're in an organization that's a little bit more rigidly organized right you would say hey can I can I steal one of your guys can I steal your drone guy for the weekend and uh I I can put his products to good use if if he if he can work for me or work with me then can take the images and stuff that he does and I can put together an Intel product for us see that's how you can work a lot of this stuff together you don't necessarily have to do all this other formalized stuff so it can be it can scale to be as simple as you want or as grandiose and complex as you want again this is largely going to depend on your mission your environment the area of oper you know operations how many people you have and what do you want to do that's why there's no one cookie cutter situation for any of this this is a really big gargantuan topic to start with. But hopefully this helps uh figure out how you might want to start organizing things so that's pretty much how I would do things I know that this is a lot of information to take in I know it seems like a deep dive. But trust me this isn't even a deep dive this is an introduction to the topic there's a lot more that you can go down and I can have a dedicated video on each one of these jobs here so I may do that at some point if you guys uh are interested in that. But generally speaking this is what I would do I don't think this is strictly my opinion on how to do things uh this is you know Loosely based on what the military does and pretty much every Branch um. But the part where my opinion comes in is where this is adapted for a largely citizen-based you know volunteer force and not a military you know you know organization so again I know this is a lot to take in. But uh I think this is probably a good start so I think call it for today and let this soak in like a hard rain and uh we'll see what what else is is more helpful to tackle next uh again a lot of this is all theoretical a lot of this is all untested uh. But generally speaking this is probably a good way to go uh if you're looking at this very very specific topic so so that's all I have for now thank you guys all for watching thank you for all of your support and we will. See you next time and as always fight in the shade.