The Reluctant Partisan, Volume Two: The Underground

The Reluctant Partisan, Volume Two:

The Underground
Concepts, Methods, and Skills for Living in A Collapsing Society

Volume One of The Reluctant Partisan focused on the rural guerrilla skills needed to establish security for retreat locations and rural communities. Volume Two follows the doctrinal construction of an insurgency by covering the underground.

This volume focuses on urban skills needed for surviving the continuing collapse of the socio-economic and political/legal order in our world. According to the US Census Bureau, over 80% of Americans live in areas defined as “urban.” The rest of us have to go to town at least occasionally, to buy groceries (and take the wife to a movie!).

Absent an epic, immediate event, such as an EMP event, or sudden nuclear exchange with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), it is unreasonable and unrealistic to expect a) everyone to move to the country, giving up high-paying jobs for subsistence wages in the boondocks, and b) to quit going into town for groceries and other needs and desires.

With the events occurring in Ferguson, MO and other urban areas, the importance of community defense organizations that allow people to rely on themselves and each other for survival are all too obvious. Whether you’re fighting cannibalistic San Franciscan rioters in order to get home from work, or trying to escape the urban madhouse, from direct-action defense to intelligence collection and assessment; from building resilient, cellular networks of trusted associates, to developing an autonomous economy within—and outside of—those networks, to communications concepts and other tradecraft, Volume Two of The Reluctant Partisan picks up where Volume One left off, and keeps swinging from the floor.

From general and specific discussions of the specific skills needed to establish and utilize a functioning cellular underground in an urban area, to drills and practical exercises needed to master them, along with one of the most popular features of Volume One—the POI that I use to teach classes—Volume Two promises to be better, more user friendly, and more useful in general, than Volume One was.

As we did with Volume One (only better, because I’ve learned from most of my mistakes along the way, and hopefully have improved….), in cooperation with Sam Culper and Forward Observer, we’re going to offer a one-time, limited-time chance to pre-order the ebook version. This is a pre-sale event. Sam will open the link in the FO Store on 1DEC14 and it will stay open until 14DEC14, to order the ebook. It will be delivered to your inbox on 25DEC….Yep, consider it a “Christmas present” from John (except, well you’re paying a small fee for it, of course).

The cost of the pre-order will be $15.00. After the pre-order period ends, there WILL BE NO MORE EBOOK VERSION AVAILABLE!!! The hard copy (not hard cover…) will go on sale 1JAN15, and be ready to ship at that time.

Improvements (besides new information, obviously):

1) This will be a full-size 8.5×11 book, so the small font size will be a non-issue.

2) The shipping and order processing issues we’ve had to deal with recently have been remedied (see my notes at the bottom on these issues), so the book will be to you much sooner after you order it.

I’m currently working on the final revisions on most of the book, with two chapters that I am completely rewriting. This volume currently sits at 450+ pages. It may lose a few, but it’s more likely to end up running closer to 500 pages. It’s going to be a BIG book. It’s been a lot of work—perhaps harder to organize and write than the first volume was. I don’t know what the final hard copy price will be, until I get the complete work to the printer and get a quote from him. It SHOULD be less expensive than Volume One, despite the size differences, but don’t hold me to that.

So, what’s in the book so far?

Introduction: “I’m Rick Jam…..errr…Nostradamus, Bitch!”

• Where we are on the Scale O’ Doom

• How that affects Life and Preparedness

Chapter One: “Let’s Get DOWN!”

• What is the Underground, and how does it apply to Survival Preparedness?

• Cellular Network Construction. You’re already doing it, and you don’t even know it.

• Recruiting: Be selective now, and you’ll find more good people as you need them, I promise.

Chapter Two: “We don’t need no steenkin’ training!”

• Training and Education within the underground

• Core Cadre as a training and education force multiplier

• Direct-Action Training Considerations

• Finance and Procurement Training Considerations

• Propaganda/PSYOP/MISO Training Considerations

• Intelligence and CI Training Considerations

Chapter Three: “All ‘Bout the Benjamins”

• Historical trends in funding the underground

• Your Storage Preps are NOT a revenue source.

• “Barter goods,” as you know them are bullshit.

• What the black market REALLY wants, and what you can get for it.

• Finance and exchange within and without the network.

Chapter Four: “Eat Their Brains!”

• The Importance of PSYOP/MISO

• The PSYOP Process

• It’s not about convincing each other.

• If you scare the sheep, you’ll have to chase them down to save them.

• Teddy was wrong. Sometimes you need to speak loudly and carry a big stick.

Chapter Five: “Teacher’s Pet”

• Intelligence and CI cells within the network

• Fundamentals of Military Intelligence

• Fundamentals of CI

• Intelligence Collection: IR/PIR/etc

• Intelligence Analysis Considerations and Methods

• Communications for Intel Distribution

Chapter Six: “Hey, Let’s Play Doctor!”

• Strengths of the Underground for Medical Care

• Medical Cells in the network.

• Medical and Nursing Considerations for the Underground

• An Ounce of Prevention is worth 50 pounds of Cure.

Chapter Seven: “I’m To Old For This Shit!”

• Passive Resistance Considerations

Chapter Eight: “Leroy Brown!”

• Cool-Guy Action Figure Direct-Action Cells

• Operations for Urban DA

• Combat operations in built-up areas for the DA Cell

• Vehicle-Mounted Urban patrolling operations for the DA Cell

Chapter Nine: “I’ve Got a Black Belt! (and a couple of brown ones, and even a really cool, metal spiked on that looks like a dog collar!)

• General Urban Self-Protection Issues for the Underground

• So, what is this “awareness” shit, anyway?

• Battlefield Recovery: Combat Rifle with stuff other than AR15/M4

• Clandestine Carry Pistol: The “Rifle” for the Non-Permissive Environment

• Unarmed Combatives: When even a pistol is more than you can get away with.

• Vehicle-Mounted Urban Survival: When you don’t have a DA cell that can ride around with you all fucking day.

Chapter Ten: “Ludwig, you can kiss my ass, I’m outta here!”

• Escape-and-Evasion cells and networks

• The Evasion Plan-of-Action for the Underground

Appendix One: “More Shit from the Schoolyard”

• Clandestine Carry Pistol POI

• Combat Rifle POI (for the AK, FAL, and M1A)

• Vehicle-Based Patrolling POI

• CQB/Room-Clearing, and fighting in built-up areas POI

Appendix Two: “The Big Bad Wolf ain’t getting nothing here!”

• Hardening and Defending Buildings and Neighborhoods

Recent issues with Volume One:

We’ve had a couple of relatively minor issues with Volume One, and of course, the big one that everyone has complained about. Let’s take a minute and look at some of them, and how I’ve fixed them for the future:

1) Tiny-ass font size: When I sent Volume One to the printer, it was a full-size PDF file, with 12-point text. Unfortunately, when they shrank it down to fit the pocket-size format, the text shrank accordingly. Is what it is…..

For Volume Two, we’re actually going to keep it as a full-size, 8.5×11, book. So, you’ll have nice, big, 12-point text to read easier.

2) Initially, when we started taking Internet orders through FO, Sam C. would forward me all the orders received once a week. I would package the orders, and ship them the following week, when I could get to the post office. This means, many orders were shipping a full two weeks after the order was placed.

We’ve fixed that, by having book orders forwarded, automatically, to my Inbox. This means, orders are going out within a couple days of being placed, not two weeks later.

3) In light of my very vocal, very loud, advocacy of “support local community businesses,” I decided to utilize a (relatively) local printer, instead of an anonymous, online print service like CreateSpace or Lulu. Obviously, either of those would have a) increased visibility to the buying market (I’m pretty sure the 1450+ subscribers to this blog are not ALL the people in the world who would find the information useful and interesting—besides, I KNOW I ain’t sold no 1450 copies…..), and b) made my life much easier by allowing the printer to handle all of the labor in getting the books out. Unfortunately, I am more interested in standing by my beliefs than I am in making a fortune as an author (otherwise, I’d be writing horror or romance novels, right?).

This has actually not been much of an issue (it just takes me a couple of hours a week to package and ship the books), until the last print run. The printer decided to change glues, didn’t like the result, and switched back without letting me know, so some orders got shipped a week later than typical even. I have discussed it with them and this has been fixed so it will be a non-issue in the future as well.

The only other option was ordering a supply to hold on hand. I don’t have room—or funds—to sit on a couple hundred copies of the book that might never get sold….