When you are in a survival situation, when your life is on the line, you simply cannot have the vital gear you need to survive breaking.
The lesson that Spice and I had drilled into our heads over and over during our technical dive training… look for, and eliminate, as many failure points as possible.
Technical diving means to dive in situations where you cannot (for whatever reason) just ascend to the surface if you have a problem. Technical dive training is, literally, the study of how to survive when the SHTF and any mistake may kill you.
That makes the lessons we have learned quite applicable to the world above land… and although the phrase I’am about to use will make many divers cringe (it’s a “diving” thing far beyond the scope of this article), it explains what I am talking about simply and quickly.
Doing It Right (or DIR)
DIR diving was developed as failure-point elimination technique so that people can come back alive from otherwise deadly situations.
What does it emphasize?
- The Buddy System: team members work and train together
- Experience: develop experiences through action, learning from mistakes made and improving skills. (It’s best if you get the experience in lower-risk situations… practicing where a mistake won’t kill you, for example.)
- Learning: Learn good technique to do the skills required to survive and thrive
- Equipment: Equipment should be rock solid, streamlined, exactly sufficient to meet all challenges, tough, dependable, with as few failure points as possible and reliable.
- Standardization: This is very important, Spice and I are a team so we have standardized our equipment (such as defensive firearms being the same brand and caliber so that we can use the same magazines and ammunition, for example).
- Preparation: Everything should be checked and maintained
- Fitness: Team members need to be fit enough to do what is needed.
There’s more that doesn’t translate as well, but the concept of keeping it simple, streamlined and eliminating failure points sure does.
When Spice and I consider our preps, we use the DIR approach.
What are things that preppers can do to DIR?
- Purchase only quality gear, and for critical items buy multiples. Redundancy of important gear is critical. It doesn’t need all the bells and whistles, but it’s got to be reliable.
- Standardize, standardize, standardize. Everything from the magazines that go in your firearms down to the size of your canning lids can be standardized. As a bonus, this one saves a lot of space in your preps.
- Eliminate failure points. In prepping, these include electronics, poorly made items, anything that uses consumables that may be hard to get (generators need gas, for example) and have alternatives to switch to should any failure point item you decide to keep fail.
Many of these principles apply to plans as well as to equipment. For example, you don’t want a plan for ‘where we meet up if we can’t get home’ that requires routes with likely failure points such as bridges or road sections likely to have troublesome traffic with no good alternate routes. You also want your plans to be fairly robust in their timing, such as “We will wait for one another at this place for six hours after the event, and if we don’t make contact by then we will both move on and meet at Option B.”
Think about it, what failure points do you have in your situation? Are you on the same page with the others that will be in your survival group? If not, can you work to standardize?
There’s more than one way to DIR, but there are countless ways to do it wrong. We need to make sure we know which path we are on.
My four-word definition of DIR? Simple. Reliable. Redundant. Sufficient.
