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by hef19898 1574 days ago
This focus on combat for survival thing is so American. In Civil War combatants are quickly trained by warlords, and quite expendable. No amout of training will allow a single person to survive alone. In case of warfare, there are armies.

For all other circumstances, combat skills are negligable. Repair, food "gathering" and medical skills are so much more important. Followed by organising people and stuff.

1 comments

"Combat skills" include medical skills, communications skills, planning, coordination, and effective teamwork skills. None of the training I've ever been involved with has been focused on turning a single person into Rambo, but more along the lines of turning 4 or 12 people into an effective team, able to accomplish specific tasks under decent amounts of stress.
These are also the skills you'd learn in e.g. a volunteer firefighting brigade or search and rescue team, you'd just be applying them to the task of putting out fires and finding lost tourists rather than killing a building full of people.
Honest question, did you receive this training in a military or disaster relieve organisation? If so, good!

You forgot one, very relevant, support skill (since we include a lot of enabling skills now it seems): logistics.

Yes, to both; the latter as the result of my experience with the former. But I would say that the vast majority of the training that I have received the most use out of was obtained outside of either, though often from trainers who are generally focused on servicing both of those fields, generally.

And yes, logistics skills are very important. I would say that most of my logistics knowledge comes from vocational exposure, and though I've looked for civilian logistics-type training (I'm old, I have a toddler, and I'm not going back into service at this point), I have not found much available. That may be a failure on my searching skills, though.

I have found a number of valuable references, written, over time, but that's not the same thing as experiential training, at least from the perspective of how I best consume information with an expectation to retain it.