Video Transcript
The Area Intelligence Handbook is a little bit difficult to describe. And the reason is, this is a pretty technical book. It's about a topic that most people don't think about. So it was written by a gentleman by the name of Mike Shelby, who was an intelligence NCO in the U.S. Army, and then later went on to work as a contractor. And intelligence-gathering work, building intelligence networks, doing an area study of a specific theater where either you live or you're going to be working. These are kind of foreign concepts for people who are not inside of that world. But this is a fantastic book to read about so that you can build some shelves in your brain as you consider different stuff. So it's basically three sections in this book. The first part is going to talk about area intelligence in general, figuring out your threat model, what it is that you're trying to accomplish, what some of the issues you're going to be.
So for example, here in Hickman County, just for example, we have various natural disasters. We have tornadoes and we have flooding. Then chapter two talks about the operational environment where you are. Since we're thinking about flooding, the physical terrain and the weather is a big deal, but also the human terrain, the critical infrastructure, the politics, the governance, stuff like that. So for example, an area study done before the big flood of 2010 would have revealed that one of our main electrical substations was in a spot that could very easily be completely underwater. But nobody realized that until it was already completely underwater.
So whether you're talking about natural disasters and the responses thereof, or unnatural disasters, civil unrest and the responses that you would have for those, these are really important topics to think through. And then the third part is about annexes, information annexes, contingency annexes, intelligence estimates. And you kind of have to read the book to figure out how all of these things might play out for you in your area with your resources to accomplish your mission. This is a really, I would say, military level book that is designed specifically for civilians and citizens to think through what it is that they're trying to accomplish in their specific areas and how to go about doing that. So that makes it a pretty unique thing. There aren't that many books like that in this space. We have some military books, field manuals, things like that, and then there's lots of stuff directly for civilians written about things in ways that we already understand. But this right here is kind of special. If you have specific questions about it, you can always talk to our customer service team, [email protected], and they'll be able to answer very complicated technical questions about physical terrain features, I'm sure.