Introduction + Area Study Template

Hello and welcome, everyone, to the Area Intelligence Workshop. I’m Mike Shelby and I’ll be your instructor for this course.

I’m glad you’ve made the decision to start work on your Area Study because it is the foundation of all emergency preparedness and security planning.

I had a guy tell me one time that he didn’t need local intelligence because he was already prepared.

And I didn’t bother arguing, but I did wonder how he was arriving at his decisions and what he was basing his expectations of the future on, if not local intelligence.

Partial information. And so I’m just going to guess that the guy, at best, is not as prepared as he could be, and at worst, he’s all prepared for the wrong things.

I don’t want to be that guy. And the good news is that none of us have to be that guy.

And so I’ll be guiding you through the work of intelligence, building an Area Study in this case, because local intelligence allows us to be maximally informed and make good decisions about our security.

Occasionally a student will come through one of my physical classes and say something like, I’ve bought a half million dollar retreat property but I don’t know the area and I don’t know my neighbors.

And I imagine a lot of people are in some similar predicament. So let’s get that fixed.

I was an Intelligence NCO, so a non-commissioned officer. I was a sergeant, E5. Go Army, by the way. All-Source Intelligence guy, so my job most of the time was looking at various information from human intelligence, signals intelligence, imagery, open source, and other forms of intelligence to put together the puzzle, to develop the enemy situation and figure out what they were doing in secret.

I spent part of every year from 2006 to 2011 deployed to either Iraq or Afghanistan. Around 40 months in total.

And today I’m the CEO Forward Observer, an intelligence services company, and Gray Zone Activity, our field and classroom training company.

Now lastly in the introduction, let’s briefly go over the top three mistakes that people are making when it comes to preparedness.

First, they make decisions on inadequate information. And this becomes a problem because it’s like trying to navigate through an area with only partial driving directions. There are 10 turns you have to make and you only know three of them, so probably a good chance you’re not going to get where you want to go and an even better chance you end up somewhere you don’t.

Second, they ignore conditions at the tactical level. We hear about the threats of EMP, or grid down, hyperinflation, war with China, a massive cyber attack, etc., but the truth is that we’re not actually preparing for those things. We should be preparing for the tactical level effects. How do these things affect us at the local level?

And finally, they don’t do an Area Study. The Area Study is that tactical level intelligence product that provides insight into the things that surround us. That includes an area’s threats, hazards, and vulnerabilities, but it also includes the assets, resources, and opportunities.

For me, there are two things that make up true preparedness. 

The first is having accurate expectation of the future. Once I know what’s likely to happen, I can direct my attention, time, and resources to dealing with those events or conditions. I can be deliberate in how I prepare for specific events at the local level. Otherwise, I’m just sort of guessing. I’m just sort of playing at preparedness.

And the second is that my stack of assets is bigger than my stack of threats. If I can develop specific resources, assets, and opportunities that counter specific threats, hazards, and vulnerabilities, then I will be prepared. And if someone is not identifying these six things, then I can guarantee they’re not prepared because I know how this works. And if you don’t already, then you will by the end of this course.

The rest of this workshop will follow the order of the Area Study Template, which you can download below.

And in the next video, we’ll start filling out the Overview section of our Area Study. See you then.