Unlike natural disasters, which can happen without warning, a civil war won’t occur without advance notice.
If you know the signs to watch out for, you can observe a build-up of tensions and hostilities before SHTF in your neighborhood. Be observant so you have enough time to get your preps and emergency plans in order. (h/t to AskAPrepper.com)
But even the most experienced prepper who is vigilant can still be taken by surprise once a civil war starts. To help you prepare for a civil war, here are some tips to follow:
Make sure your family is safe
When chaos starts and bullets start flying, your priority will be your security and safety. Once you are safe, you can then make sure that your family is safe and secure.
Before SHTF, finalize a contingency plan so that when disaster strikes, your family knows what to do even if everyone is separated and you have no way to communicate with each other.
Run drills and make sure all family members know what to do and where to go. Your plan will be foolproof if everyone follows it and no one deviates from it unless absolutely necessary.
For your plan to work, you should get constant updates on the whereabouts of each family member. While you don’t have to monitor them 24/7, you should at least inform each other about your whereabouts every hour or so.
To avoid disturbing each other with constant calls, set up a family group chat where you can let everyone know where you are. When SHTF, you can quickly check your messages to confirm the whereabouts of your family members.
Once you confirm their locations, you can easily estimate how long it will take them to get home based on the situation in your area.
Once your family is safe together, start securing other aspects of your situation, like your survival supplies, comms plan and bug-out or evacuation plan. (Related: Prepping tips: Scavenging in the city when SHTF.)
Secure and hide your food supply
When civil war breaks out, all factions fighting against each other will need more food, water, medical supplies and ammo. If they find out you are a prepper, they might target your home to steal your supplies.
Before things go south, plan ahead and secure food, water and other essential supplies. Keep them well hidden but still accessible. Don’t tell anyone about your stockpile or armed groups will want to take them for their cause.
Keep your preps a secret by building or preparing a hidden room to bury caches. If this isn’t possible, hide your supplies somewhere else, like your basement or a spare room at home.
Another option is to leave a decoy cache that is easy to find so anyone who decides to steal your stockpiles will have something to take. Hopefully, this should be enough and they don’t look elsewhere.
At the start of a civil war, many items will be restricted or banned by governments or factions that have seized control over your area. Some examples are:
- Alcohol
- Fuel
- Radios and other communications gear
- Tactical gear
- Various items used as ingredients for explosive or incendiary devices
- Weapons and ammunition
Once you notice signs of impending chaos and civil war, conceal these items if you have them in your stockpile. Should you encounter soldiers going door to door, having these items in your possession could result in you being jailed, having your possessions taken or being executed on the spot.
Protect yourself by getting rid of these items or hiding them well to avoid any danger.
Comms security
During a civil war or armed conflict, radio communications, including amateur radio, are one of the first things that will become illegal.
In some cases, even possessing a shortwave receiver could be illegal. However, effective communication will be essential during a civil war so you need to learn how to use an amateur radio covertly.
Do your research and learn how to set up and use covert antennas. You also need to have a plan for how you will communicate with family and other prepping groups during the conflict.
Ask experienced preppers for tips on how to deal with direction-finding and jamming equipment. When SHTF, it won’t take much for others to triangulate your position and find your location. Make sure your comms plan allows you to stay updated on the changing situation as civil war intensifies.
Your comms plan should also allow you to maintain effective two-way communication with other preppers. If the front lines of battle start moving too close, you can monitor your comms and bug out before the chaos reaches your location.
Listen to shortwave radio broadcasts to get a good overall picture of where the fighting is. Good comms will also help you find out where the safe zones are and monitor news from outside the country.
Fortify your home
When SHTF, you must be able to protect your family and property from those who wish to do you harm. This means getting firearms, learning how to use them and securing your property to keep out trespassers.
While setting up a seven-foot wall fence around your property may seem like a good idea, this can make your home a target for potential looters. Having a giant fence makes it harder for someone to trespass on your property, but it is also one of the most obvious signs that you have things worth stealing.
If you want to build a fence to protect your home and property, try to make it look as innocent as possible. Settle for a sturdy chain link or a tall wooden fence.
When SHTF, you can add barbed wire or spikes on the top to prevent trespassers from scaling the fence.
Alternatively, you can use your lawn to your advantage by landscaping defensively. This means planting shrubs and trees strategically to provide shade and give you more privacy.
Take note that people might use your plants to conceal themselves so you need to be smart with your landscaping. When planting hedges and trees, make sure they won’t block your view of potential intruders.
Choose defensive plants with a lot of protective thorns and prickles. These can help deal damage to anyone attempting to break into your home.
Here are some of the best defensive plants to grow around your property:
- Bougainvillea
- Century plant
- Firethorn
- Spanish bayonet
- Tomato porcupine
Don’t forget to improve your door security by installing sturdy deadbolt locks and using longer set screws for door hinges and strike plates. If possible, install door jammers so you can buy more time in case of an attempted break-in.
As for windows, you can secure them with security film. Plant cacti or thorny bushes beneath first-floor windows to keep out trespassers.
Finalize your bug-out plan
If it’s too dangerous to stay at home, you may have no choice but to bug out during a civil war.
This may be your last resort if your home is located in the middle of two warring factions that show no sign of giving up their attacks.
Bugging out after a natural disaster is difficult, but during a war, it will be more complex. Before things go south, you may need several unique and independent routes and methods to escape the conflict as you bug out.
When drafting your plan, consider that you will probably not be able to use your preferred mode of transportation. This means if you plan to drive out of the danger zone, you should also have a plan B to get to your bug-out location.
The chances of civil war are exceptionally low and they don’t happen suddenly. This means you will have plenty of time to get your preps and plans ready before you find yourself in the middle of a warzone.
Before SHTF, take immediate action to increase your chance of surviving conflict. Watch this video for tips on how to prep your survival backpack.
This video is from the Cahlen channel on Brighteon.com.
More related stories:
- Will there be a 2nd civil war in America? Growing calls for ‘civil war’ after FBI search.
- Are we looking at another civil war?
- Deep state plan revealed: Frame a civil war to justify UN troops to OCCUPY and DISARM America.
Sources include:
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.