Gator FERPS SUMIT Program - GFTACSOP 1 & 2

Gator Family Emergency Response Planning & Survival Tactical Standard Operating Procedures

Jun 01, 2025

This video conducts an overview of the survival handbooks Gator Family Emergency Response Planning & Survival Tactical Standard Operating Procedures

Summary Overview of Basic Survival Concepts: You cannot master everything, but you must develop your jack-of-all-trades capabilities and develop the iGators of your SGU and the immediate group around you (SGU) to build their ability to react and survive. You will find yourself being the navigator, emergency planner and director, doctor, nurse, psychologist, and cheerleader:

• Self-Aid: Possess and maintain the basic minimum KSA’s to administer first-aid and proactive preventive health and medicine.

• Preventive Health, Medicine & Safety: The need for preventive medicine and safety cannot be overemphasized. Again, prevention starts with a proactive health and fitness strategy to maintain life-long fitness.

• Psychological Health: An important need for a survivor is emotional stability and a positive, optimistic attitude.

• Personal Protection: The human body is comparatively fragile. Without protection, the effects of environmental conditions (climate, terrain, and life forms) and of induced conditions (radiological, biological, and chemical agents) may be fatal.

• Survival Equipment: Designed to aid survivors throughout their situation, it must be cared for to maintain effectiveness.

• Shelter: The survivor's requirement for adequate shelter is based on the need to avoid specific environmental extremes.

• Self-Defense: Like self-reliance development in proactive (preventive health and medicine) and reactive (proficiency in life-saving first-aid), you must be able to avoid attacks and, if necessary, defend yourself.

Practical Benefits of Self-Defense Training:

• Contribute to individual and Small Group Unit (SGU) strength, flexibility, balance, and cardiorespiratory fitness.

• Build courage, confidence, self-discipline, and teamwork within your SGU.

• Maximize basic knowledge and apply the basics of the following concepts: Mental calm, situational awareness, flexibility, dominant body positioning, distance, physical balance, and leverage. See the Self-Defense (Section IV,c – pg. GFWB2 - 235) for more detailed information on basic self-defense principles and hand-to-hand combat tactics.

• Fire & Heat: Serves many survivor needs. It purifies water, cooks, and preserves food, is used to signal, and provides a source of heat to warm the body and dry clothing.

• Sustenance: You need water, nutrition, and energy sources to maintain normal body functions and to provide strength, energy, and endurance.

• Water: The survivor must be constantly aware of the body's continuing need for water. Check out the program. You'll go through tons of exercises (SwampEx such as Residential Water Readiness, SwampEx F - Individual Water Assessments, for important consolidated Life-Saving Water guidance.

• Food: During the first phases of a survival situation, the need for food will not be a priority, but the importance of nutrition and energy will become key as the duration of a survival event extends.

• Resources & Equipment: At the beginning of a survival scenario, the resources and equipment you have are the sum-total assets that will help your survival.

• Frontier Flash-Back Kit: During extreme long-term catastrophic Bug-Out situations, you need a kit with tools to fashion natural homemade items as your modern man-made items break, wear out, or are lost or stolen. This kit should contain those tools needed to enable the functions of cutting, binding, shaping, sewing, leather tooling, wood shaping, drilling, etc:

• How much room do you have?

• Are you with a team to distribute group mission or purpose-based equipment?

• Is your equipment capabilities based on your need?

We cannot hypothesize every probable action-resultant cause-effect need, but that is why knowing H2T will be so important such as:

• Decisions to drop the solar panel and pick-up the hearty true bushcraft gear such as a shovel, axe, foldable bow saw, auger drill, saw, and other frontier-type items.

• Developing a list of items needed again based on the NBCA to fill functional frontiersman categories – dig, chop, cut, saw, trim, poke, hold, drill, file, sharpen, widdle, seem/sew, smooth, and scrape. And these tools need to be durable to last as there will be no store to reorder.

• Eventually, you may have to rely on skills to make tools out of wood, bone, and if somewhat “industrially capable,” develop the old-fashioned blacksmith capabilities and sourcing of materials needed.

• Without any transport (auto, train, plane, etc.) of the advanced industrial complex of today’s modern world, what you have may be what you have.

Time Condition (Duration): The duration of the survival episode has a major effect on survivor needs.

Socio-Political Condition: The people who a survivor contacts, their social customs, cultural heritage, and political attitudes affect the survivor's status.

Induced Conditions: Any form of covert or overt man-made or natural activity can result in circumstances promulgating the need for specific reactions and forms of protection.

Movement Techniques: The ability to walk or traverse existing terrain with the help of transport mechanisms (motorized or self-powered) to support load carrying. Gator Table (GT11.30) Individual Mobility Carriers (IMC’s) is a helpful guide to take care of your most important movement asset – your feet.

Load Configuration: The need to transport personal possessions (burden carrying).

Ability to Determine Present Position: Maps, compasses, star charts, Weems plotters, etc., permit accurate determination of position during extended travel. Yet, the knowledgeable, skillful, and alert survivor can do well without a full complement of these aids.

Restrictions or Limitations to Select & Maintain a Course of Travel: The tools used in determining position are the tools used to maintain a course of travel.

Travel on Water: Variable differing circumstances may require survivors to travel on water. Travel on seas, shipwrecking, and crash-landing in open seas are confronted with one type of situation. Survivors who find a river or stream which leads in a desirable direction are faced with a different situation. In each instance, however, a common element is to stay afloat.

Physical Conditioning: Individual physical condition is one of the major factors affecting survivability:

• People who maintain a high level of physical fitness are better prepared to face survival situations than those who do not.

• Good physical fitness will help the survivor to overcome such diverse hardships as temperature extremes, lack of rest, lack of food, and a shortage of water over an extended period of time.

• High levels of physical, mental, and spiritual fitness will enhance your ability to cope with such diverse variables as:

1. Temperature extremes.

2. Rest or lack of it.

3. Water availability.

4. Food availability.

5. Extended survival episodes.

A Really SAD Diet: Change your diet to eliminate processed foods and increase Fresh Fruits and Vegetables (FF&V) have helped to combat and help my body build its own healing mechanism:

• During prolonged survival scenarios, lack of physical fitness can lead to weakness and will increase the risk of nutritional deficiencies, disease, etc.

• These can lead to a negative cycle of degradation of your capabilities to survive.

• Learn the basics about water survival methods and some minimal foraging techniques to take advantage of edible plant life within your targeted area of survival.

Avoiding Illnesses: In a survival situation, the dangers of disease are multiplied. Applying the simple guidelines enables the survivor to safeguard their personal health and that of others.

Herbal Medicine: Our modern-day drugs, complex laboratories, and equipment have obscured old-time "country doctor” medicine using common sense and a few primitive treatments. In many areas of the world, however, people still depend on the local “medicine man” to cure their ailments. Many of the herbs (plants) and treatments they use are as effective as the most modern medications available. In fact, many modern medications come from refined herbs.

The Role Your Health & Fitness Status Makes in Survival: Be aware of your condition's role both before and during the survival episode. Also, target and build your fitness levels before conducting camping trips and rehearsal excursions.

See Section IV,a – pg. GFWB2 – 262) for more on Personal Competency (Mental, Physical & Spiritual Fitness).

Life-Saving Water

Water – Not Just for Survival Situations Anymore: Take positive, proactive steps to properly react to life-threatening severe weather, but you can only control weather and risk from hazards to a finite extent. Similarly, you can have little control over a water source and supply (i.e., in the desert), but you can control the readiness of your KSA’s, equipment, and resources. Determine what source your water comes from, how it is procured and distributed to your residence, and how your residence moves, stores, and eliminates water.

PLEASE CONSIDER DONTATION TO:

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“Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is” (1 Corinthians 3:13, KJV

“Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again” (John 4:13, KJV).

God loves you so much He sent His son. So don't do the drink. Thirst for the water at the well and He will soon explain us all (John 4:25).

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