In favor of the squad-sized survival group, or even smaller.

In the American Partisan article titled "Some Principles for Group Recruiting", Kit Perez mentions that "A group with 3 guys in it is not going to have the same issues as a group of 7. If you’re above 7 (or, depending on your function and goals, 10 at the absolute max), you have too many people."

Her reasons in that particular article are based mostly on recruiting difficulties and openings for infiltration of your group. The larger groups are much easier for what we in the intelligence community referred to as "ADVINT", or adversarial intelligence, to infiltrate.

Her statement on group size got me thinking about another major factor that puts me firmly in the same mindset when it comes to group size, that is that the ideal group size is between three and ten gunslingers. Here is the "major factor": With those three to ten gunslingers, come their families.

Let me tell you about my own loosely affiliated group. I say "loosely affiliated" because we haven't yet hammered out the details of how our group would operate, but I'll use it as an example of how this can become a big logistical burden.

Let's say you've got me, my dad and two brothers in-law. So that's four shooters with appropriate rifles, pistols, shooting capabilities, diverse experiences that give me a pretty nice little fireteam for a small AO in whatever environment we are working in. When the manure contacts the rotational air mover, I suspect that my rural location with acreage will be our rally point, for the sake of this article. So the call will go out using our primary, secondary or emergency commo channels, and everyone will drop in to our little HQ to get ready to fight off the Russians or Cubans, or whoever is playing the villain in our movie. But that's not going to be the whole group. I've got my wife and children, of course. My dad obviously has my mom with him. My two brothers in-law would be bringing their wives of course, my sisters. They would all need to bring their children.

Then my wife has her parents, and there is no way I can deny my wife's parents a safe haven, nor can I deny her siblings. That's out of the question. One of my brothers in-law has another kid that I wouldn't think of ever turning away. My grandparents are elderly and sick and live in the next town over. Do I tell them that they're on their own at 80+ years old? My in-law has a parent who lives alone too. Are they the odd one out? I could lose one of my gunslingers (who is a former corpsman) if I decide that this person is just out of luck.

These are the kinds of decisions that will have to be made in these situations, and you're going to have to make potentially dozens and dozens of these difficult decisions if you've got an entire platoon of 30 gunslingers in your group.

The example above is loosely based on reality, and could have me trying to manage upwards of 30 people at our location, with some elderly, some infants, some toddlers and some sick. All of those people require food, water, shelter, sanitation, etc., and you've got to keep them in a cooperative mood. This is assuming that our group has to maintain at a single location. Being able to continue maintaining safely in multiple locations makes managing a group easier in some ways and harder in others, but once you are forced to activate your group, these people still have to be taken into full account wherever they are. That group has swelled to over 30 people for just a four-man fireteam...

I understand that there are going to be a lot of people who will say "you're just going to have to make the hard decisions and turn people away...", and I do hear you, and you're correct. But we will all have a short list of people who we will never turn away, and when you're putting a group together and you've decided that a particular person is too much of an asset not to have with you, you will have to take on their short list of essential people as well, or they will not join your group.

This was a mental exercise on my part to try to get you thinking of a survival group differently. Many of us once thought about this concept and imagined our group of rifle carriers meeting together to hash out tactics and training exercises and barbecues, and the group we imagined was neatly split into three or four squads of eight or ten people, all forming a nice tight platoon of 30-40 dudes with uniforms and ranks and matching kit. It's time to consider that a better option for a lot of people is going to look a lot more like a scout team of three or four guys, or a squad of eight or ten split into twin fireteams. From this soldier's perspective, that may be the most practical size logistically, and also for the previously mentioned counter-infiltration purposes.