The Area of Operations & You

So, during an emergency, where do you expect to operate? If you’ll be in and around your home, then, at a minimum, that is your AO. Will you walk down the driveway? Then it’s in your AO. Will you be checking on neighbors? AO. Will you drive down to the hardware or grocery store? AO. Your AO is anywhere you expect to be during an emergency.

This obviously opens up a Pandora’s Box of additional questions. There are going to be contingencies such as getting home from work because you work an hour away in the big city.

Or picking up the kids because they’re school is on the other side of town.

Or picking up Grandma or Aunt Edna because the power has gone off, it’s not coming back on, and she lives on the other side of the county.

Does that mean that you could have multiple AOs? One for your home, one for your office, one for your bugout cabin or retreat property? Yes.

If you have kids away at college, then you should prepare an Area Study to help them get back home during a worst case scenario.

So how big is your AO?

One of the most common mistakes is starting with too large an area. Students often come to the Tactical Intelligence Course with an idea that their AO needs to be a half mile, or a 1-mile or 2-mile radius around their home. That’s a big area.

Students who make this mistake get bogged down by a tyranny of information.

So instead, think about the scenarios you believe are most likely. Make a list. Think through your actions in these scenarios.

What you do and where you do it will be your AO.

As an example, here’s a picture of AO LONGHORNS, outlined in yellow for visibility. This is where I expect to be during an emergency, whether it’s a hurricane, tornado, flood, riot, or any other natural or man-made disaster. I’m not going work. The kids are home from school. We’ve picked up Grandma and we’re bugging in because this is the big one.

Inside this AO is my neighborhood, some neighbors to the east just outside the subdivision, and a small farm to the north.

My recommendation is that you start with your worst case scenario AO, so if you’re bugging in, that’s your home or property or neighborhood. Or if you’re bugging out, that includes where you are then, the routes you have to take to bug out, and then finally your destination, where ever that may be.

And by the way, anyone who plans on bugging out without doing an Area Study and route analysis is making a huge mistake. We’ll talk more about that later.

So your first step here is to identify your worst case scenario — feasible, not talking about a zombies and a nuclear holocaust here — and then think about what you’ll be doing in that scenario.

Let’s just over here to Google Earth and I’ll show you how to draw this out…