Defining Your Stronghold
A stronghold is, by my definition, a fixed base of operations whether a home, a bunker, a fortress or small town. It is difficult for me to imagine a large city being referred to as a stronghold because of the impossible logistics of securing a large area with a large and diverse population having points of ingress and egress equaled only by the points of a compass.The advantages of a fixed base are many, but it is not without drawbacks as well. Terrorists don't hold territory and this is what has made fighting them next to impossible for our conventional forces. Special forces could make quick work of terrorist training facilities and leadership except for the impossible rules of engagement that are currently leading to the epidemic of suicide burning through our returning troops.
Defining places your stronghold might be reconnoitered from, the directions of likely primary attack and directions of likely flanking attacks will apply to whatever stronghold you decide to defend.
Patrols should be performed well outside the perimeter, circling along routes that result in the least evidence of their passing. Crossing approach routes close to areas most likely to show evidence of strangers. These patrols should be beyond the points of likely reconnaissance to improve the chances of seeing Recon teams, but close enough without ever entering the observation area to notice any evidence of human presence. When initially scouting these Recon spots, it might be good to put some very subtle things in place whose disturbance would be likely but probably not noticed. The same path should never be used twice by patrols and due attention to natural choke points must be paid to avoid becoming victims.
Any defensive posts or watch posts should be able to protect each other without providing an avenue for someone in a compromised post to take over other posts. Have a variety of “safe and well” signals to be used between posts to make it more difficult for observers to emulate an operational post they have compromised. Since nobody I know has an invulnerable castle, I suggest making the obvious approach attractive enough that a first probe of your defenses is likely to happen there. At least one flanking approach is going to be exploited at the same time if your adversary has any military training at all. Identify as many possible points of entry as you can and prepare to defend them either visibly or discretely. If an attack comes, resist the urge to commit all of your forces to the front line because this will leave your flanks open to easy penetration.
Your Personal Stronghold
This is your last line of defense before having to flee the scene. 90 percent of your efforts should be directed here.
Have an escape route even from your home in case of overwhelming force. Be prepared to abandon your home before your casualties mount so high you no longer care. Stash some bug-out supplies on your property but out of sight of your home in case you have to cede it. These probably don’t have to be long-term supplies because looters will get bored with your home after a few days of plunder and head off to greener pastures. You just need to be able to hide out nearby with the means to purify water and some foods that don’t have to be cooked. Abandoning all your primary preparations is a bitter pill, but easier than digging graves for your loved ones.
The possibility of having to temporarily leave your home is a good reason to have the bulk of your supplies buried on the property so that looters will not destroy everything you own.
If the stuff in your garage or barn wasn’t valuable to you, you wouldn’t have the building. You still need to do some thinking in advance about the circumstances you would cede the contents of outbuildings in favor of defending the house. Give some thought to how you would fight someone who takes over your barn if you are still in your house.
The larger the area you need to defend, the more costly it will be in terms of materials and manpower, These additional costs apply to establishing, maintaining and ultimately defending your perimeter. Having some obvious things near enough to the perimeter that someone on your property will be curious before they reach your house but out of sight for someone on the roadway is a good idea here. Things with silent alarms (buried pressure switch or a tilt switch) so that you are alerted (perhaps in the house and the barn) before the intruder even gets close to the house.
If you foresee fighting attackers at night, think about those little magnesium sparklers sold at every fireworks stand. They burn very brightly and for several minutes. I can see dumping a shovel full of dirt to mound up here and there in the avenues of approach identified above. On the side facing away from the house, you might lay some foil to act as a reflector and a handful of sparklers along with an electric ignition source so you can fire them from within the house. Intruders looking toward the house will have night blindness for fifteen minutes or so while you are unable to see the sparklers directly from the house due to the little mounds of dirt. Meanwhile the intruders are lit up like daytime. This same effect can be obtained from LED strobe lights as well.
All of the approaches to your house should be carefully studied in advance. Both from your home and from well outside the perimeter. Can you see anything that provides potential cover for an intruder? Will they be able to see it? Is there anything that you can do so that an intruder will think an object is cover, but you will know where it can be shot through?
Alarm systems
One of the first questions you should ask yourself is whether the alarm system is to prevent burglary or to protect the people in the home. If you are trying to prevent burglary, consider a few things about home burglary. The kind of people who burglarize middle-class homes don’t pick locks. They generally knock to see if someone answers the door. If nobody does, they kick the front door down. All residential front doors can be kicked down. It can take two or three kicks, but they all come down. Once inside the home it takes less than two minutes for a burglar to spot everything of value to them in your home. This includes the jewelry hidden in the toilet tank and the weapons stashed in any place you want to imagine stashing them. A very good rifle safe with walls that can withstand two hours in a house fire will stand up for five or ten minutes to a couple of guys with pry bars and sledge hammers. If you use one, you might want to frame it into a closet space so burglars will have more trouble getting leverage.
I consider my alarm system to be an intrusion alarm. It is there to let me know I am under attack. It should wake me up when someone breeches my perimeter as early as possible. In the case of a night time intruder, never turn on any interior lights. You should know your house well enough not to need them. If the intruder is inside the house, don't turn on outside lights either because you will be highlighted against any windows if you step between a window and the intruder. If the intruder is outside, turn on all the outside lights and they will be blinded to pretty much anything inside the house while you can easily see everything outside.
All exterior doors should have alarm circuits. You can get a three foot long drill bit with a hole through the tip. Using this, you stand in the doorway and drill straight up into the attic. Once the bit stops spinning, your assistant slips the ends of a pair of wires through the hole in the bit and when you pull the bit out, you have the wires for a magnetic reed contact (get a drill bit sized the same as your reed switch). The corresponding magnet is recessed into the top of the door with a shorter bit, so neither is visible from inside or out when the door is shut. The windows can be individually wired, but this is tedious, expensive and not very attractive. Instead, consider a device called an audio discriminator. It is designed to differentiate between normal sounds (even very loud ones) and that of breaking glass or splintering wood. One of these located in every room with a window will do the trick. They are more expensive than window sensors, but the cost of installation more than makes up for that.
I am not a big fan of interior motion detectors. Unless you get dual-technology detectors like ultrasonic and passive infrared where both have to trip simultaneously in order to cause an alarm, they are prone to false alarms. They also require that a bad guy actually enter your home before they set off any alarms. Even in the polite society we all enjoy today, this is later than you need to be alerted.
All of your alarm systems don’t have to set off sirens and flashing lights. When you install a sensor, give some thought to what makes most sense on a case-by-case basis whether the sensor is inside your home or elsewhere in your system. Some alarms should be entirely silent. An alarm in your garage might just beep inside the house and activate a microphone in the garage so you can assess the risk and plan your response while the intruder is unaware they have been discovered.
Defense in depth is an important concept and is discussed in another paragraph, but ideally, I want to know when someone crosses my property line. Motion detectors, electric beams and other outdoor detection methods should probably not set off an alarm per se. They are terribly prone to false alarms. My Father had an electric eye on his long rural driveway. When he installed it, I was able to talk him out of wiring it into the alarm system. Instead we connected it to the doorbell. We discovered that insects were attracted to the infrared light source and would cause fluttering rings of the doorbell which Dad soon learned to recognize and ignore. If it had been wired to the alarm system, there would have been no difference between a moth and a Mack truck. When setting up sensors outdoors, remember where ambushes are set up for travelers and look for choke points where most people are going to have to pass.
If you have access to cheap ham radio or FRS/GMRS radios, you can put together some remote alarm sensors that might broadcast tone to your house in the case of someone tripping one of your remote alarms, making use of one of the recon posts you have identified, or even entering the abandoned house down the road. These radios can send a tone to you, or just key the microphone so you can gather intelligence from the voices and content of conversations you overhear. All of this can be done without them knowing they have been noticed.
Go to your local electronics store and look over the options for home alarm systems. They sell a little adjustable vibration sensor designed to be stuck to the glass on the inside of a window. I have used them as vibration sensors on a variety of projects. Don’t stop with any one or even all of these ideas. Your family is worth your best thinking.
A Couple of Final Thoughts
In the information security business, we use this term for systems that depend upon mediocrity and non-standard access methods. While certainly not a solution, it should be considered as a part of a security in depth approach. Applied to the physical security of a home, this would mean making your home look less attractive. This probably presents more problems for the defenders than any benefits, but windows facing the roadway might be boxed in from the inside so that light doesn’t penetrate from inside. These windows might be broken out in a way to look like looters or vandals had been responsible. Black charring could be added above the windows to give the further appearance of a burned out shell not worth the time of looters.
Can you make your stronghold look too costly to attack or will that just make your home look even more attractive? There has been a lot of writing about huge marauding gangs in a post-apocalyptic America. I think such gangs will flash quickly and fade even quicker. They will not use resources conservatively and thus it will require an enormous logistical ability just to keep them fed. After a month or so, I think the intruders you will likely face will be quite skilled, small units. Good luck!
Don’t cut your grass as short as you normally would, but do cut it or it will provide cover for the curious. If you have a dirt or gravel drive from the roadway, try to brush out your tire tracks each time you use it. By all means, keep the gate locked, but use an old rusty lock even if you have to “paint” the lock to appear rusty. Consider planting some buffalo grass in your driveway approach. Once established it will grow in yellow clay as hard as concrete and you can drive back and forth on it with minimal damage. If postal service stops, you have no need for a mailbox, so get rid of it.
As we get older, our lives tend to take on routines. An intruder’s reconnaissance team will thrive on the routines you establish. Try to consciously change your routine as often as you can. Some people actually turn a specific light on when they are away during the evening. Others use those lamp timers, but even that timer establishes a routine a careful observer will note and determine what it means.
Booby traps are very illegal and even in a SHTF situation, you might end up hurting a group of children who are simply hungry, so I would strongly advise against it except in cases where attack is imminent. If you give up being human in order to survive, you have given up everything and may be better off dead. Of course, if you are engaged in a battle or fleeing bad guys, traps of all sorts can be used to thin out the herd and make the survivors more reluctant to pursue you as closely.
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