Part of Phase 2: First Year
Phase 2 security assumes the Phase 0 basics — reading a real threat and watching for it — are already second nature, and spends its own six topics on staying unnoticed and buying time rather than on reacting to danger that has already arrived. A single candle is visible at night from 1.5 km and a campfire from 5 to 10 km, so concealment has to cover light, sound, and scent together; a layered perimeter and an early-warning system then exist to convert however much warning you get — thirty seconds is barely enough to grab a weapon, thirty minutes is enough to evacuate entirely — into an actual response instead of a surprise.
None of the six gates another on paper: all six list Phase 0’s threat assessment and situational awareness as prerequisites, hidden food caches needs only the former, and none names a sibling topic as a requirement. In practice they split into two jobs. Camouflage and Concealment, Perimeter Defense Design, and Early Warning Systems work together as layers around a location: concealment keeps a position from being found at all, a perimeter’s three concentric zones — the outer one alone starts 100-300 m out — slow down whoever finds it anyway, and early warning turns detection time into response time. Guard Dog Training supports that same layer: dogs have worked as an early-warning system for over 15,000 years, and training here is for mobile detection rather than attack, specifically to avoid the liability an attack-trained dog creates.
Hidden Food Caches and Escape Route Planning are the other half, and the article on caches links directly to the one on escape routes — a cache is explicitly built to support an evacuation route with resources already staged along it, not just to survive a raid on the main stores in place. Build the perimeter and concealment work first if the open question is whether you’ll be found; build the caches and the escape routes first if the open question is what happens once you are.
Staying Unnoticed and Buying Time
Concealment, a layered perimeter, early warning, and a dog trained to detect rather than attack — the four ways this section keeps trouble from reaching you, or buys time once it’s close.
Having Somewhere to Go
What happens once you’ve been found: supplies already staged along a route out, and the route itself, planned before anyone needs it.