Tactical Espionage Dollar-Store Hobo

The Anarchonomicon Kit List

Hark how the trumpet
Thither doth call us,
Where either pleasure
Or death may befall us.
Hail to the tumult !
Life’s in the field !
Damsel and fortress
To us must yield.
Bold is the venture.
Costly the pay !
Gayly the soldier
Marches away.

-Soldier’s Song
from Faust, Goethe

Screw James Bond!

A truly Legendary series

I have now seen 5+ different spy films, In which a CIA or MI6 spy has to breach a chainlink fence. An ordinary chainlink fence.

The Most Common Obstacle in the world.

There’s barb or razor wire up top that prevents our hero from just climbing it…So he or she has to breach it. And on FIVE SEPARATE OCCASIONS…I have seen the goofiest inventions in the world come out. $10,000 super-spy wrist watches with hidden lasers in them, super-secret hairpins with scissors in them made of magic cutting alloys, aerosol sprays that instantly oxidize and rust out a massive section of solid steel fencing (don’t breathe that spray) allowing the spy to just push out a Wile E. Coyote style hole of fencing…

Completely over-designed over-specific insanity that’d cost thousands of dollars, and would basically instantly betray the CIA or MI6 was behind the breach…

Of course no sane human being would ever use those techniques even if they existed. The one semi-plausible breech I’ve seen is in Fight Club Ed Norton and Brad Pitt toss a rug over the razor wire surrounding a medical facility so they can climb the fence… but even this strikes me as profoundly unideal… Would you really want to PLAN on risking nasty lacerations climbing OVER razor wire? That seems more like a desperate break-out trick. Not a Break-in trick.

Of course this is all insane because BREACHING A FENCE is maybe the most SOLVED problem out there, 80% of people reading this already have the tools to do it.

You just use wirecutters or a multitool. Ideally creating a single vertical slit so you can crawl through without the breach being visible unless you look very closely. (be sure to fold the slit back as you crawl so you don’t cut yourself on the jagged edges.

Often the crappiest $15 Chinese Multi-tool is up for the task (although test it out on a random fence on a walk before you gamble on it).

(Note that a “Leatherman” is just a good make of multitool, and outperforms even larger wire-cutters… Your cheepo crappy surplus multi-tool will take more elbow grease (if it works, test it))

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Almost everything on the pop-culture side of the tactical world is like this… There’s an obsession with ultra-expensive James Bond scifi inventions that double as a luxury brand to match your tuxedo… When in reality the cheapest rusty junk from your granddad’s tool shed probably gives you vastly more capability.

And even In the world of prepping, tacticool influences, camping, modern combat, and all matters “survival”, “guerilla”, and “outdoors adventure” there’s an intense focus on expensive kit.

All your favorite influencer are sponsored by various product sellers, and half the reason people watch them is for the vicarious or personal thrill of collecting expensive Gucci kit and showing off their rare or designer rifles and Military Artifacts.

Most will assemble load-outs, rigs, and rifles, far less as a preparation for disaster or war, or an exercise in capability expansion, and more as an artistic expression, fashion statement, or historical exercise… Whether they will admit it or not most of the people who buy Yugoslavian combat webbing, or archaic experimental 80s rifles meant for an upcoming war in the scifi future of 2005 have more in common with historical reenactors than they might care to admit… They just chose wars that didn’t happen towards the end of the cold war, instead of The American Revolution, 1812, or the Civil War.

It’s astrology for boys!

As such one could be forgiven for believing that the great wars of the 21st century to come, and the Urban Battlefield that much of the world is quickly becoming, is a “pay to win” combat-zone. And that unless one has close to 100,000 dollars for body Armour, thermal vision, night vision, precision optics, gucci rifles, and all manner of overpriced gadgets and gizmos that they are simply screwed in any 21st century conflict.

This is not the case. Indeed in some cases it is almost the opposite: given how mass surveillance defines the modern battlefield, there’s a lot of kit I wouldn’t want to use just for risk of dropping it and the Glowies tracking down the only 10-20 people who’ve ordered Czechoslovakian Mag-Pouches via NSA copies of online transaction records, or by just calling the 3 sellers who ever had them.

Put simply Skill, knowledge, resourcefulness, and a more than abundant paranoia are more overpowered than almost anytime since the neolithic period… Basic resourcefulness, daring, courage, B-Grade high-school shop-class craftiness, low level chemistry knowledge, basic boy-scout skills, physical fitness (tall order I know), and a nigh primitivist obsession with the pre-computer way of doing things… Is sufficient to achieve a shocking level of capability and inflict an extraordinary level of damage in any near-future conflict, tyrannical regime, or low intensity resistance.

The most important kit in any future conflict isn’t free. But it is near free.

Available at shockingly low prices from dollar-, convenience-, hardware-, surplus-, grocery-stores, and pawn shops… The necessary equipment and capabilities to fight a high impact Guerilla Campaign are available in almost any town of 20,000 almost anywhere in the western world.

Sadly in spite of being largely legal throughout most of the US and not a few odd other countries (assuming one navigates the proper tax stamps and legal statements) I will not be presenting a guide on how to manufacture black-powder, explosives, firearms, or more exotic weaponry… This is all largely trivially covered by Chemistry Youtube in a level of detail I could never hope to match and with a level of responsibility and maturity far beyond my juvenile imagination, and with a level of expertise and experience I cannot pretend to… Seriously! Chemistry/explosive Youtube is really cool, Some of this stuff is should be taught in schools, so historically relevant and useful is it.

If one Navigates to my Earlier “Warlord’s Reading List” you’ll find many listed works (not least published by the US, Canadian, British, and Swiss Governments) that give detailed guides to the manufacture of explosives, chemical weapons, rocket weapons, improvised firearms, homemade flamethrowers, etc… All from other publishers that I can gesture at without exposing me to legal risk and most of them largely available online in PDF form, or from Amazon, and sometimes from the governments themselves.

(though do check legalities of the works in your area before you store PDFs on your hard-drive, and get 10 years in prison in the UK or elsewhere… Just because the work was originally published by the government, doesn’t mean that same government won’t now arrest you for having it):

Those works will do a much better job than I can, and quite frankly you should not be following the Manufacturing instructions or legal advice of internet CatGirls anyway😽. (The 1960s Department of the Army however…)

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However for writers, preppers, wargamers, worldbuilders, future guerillas, etc. do note that Blackpowder, explosives, homemade firearms (primitive and rather complex), and WW1 grade chemical weapons, are all readily manufactured at extremely low price-points from ingredients widely available in an common grocery stores and hardware stores. Indeed many people every year die accidentally creating mustard gas, TAPT, nitroglycerin, and other chemical weapons and high sensitivity explosives during overzealous cleaning jobs, so trivial is it create.

All of them would rightly belong on this list (both in terms of usefulness, and cheapness of ingredients), if at the start I was not choosing to forgo the technical, legal, and moral questions involved in their inclusion.

Instead this list is going to focus on the mostly legal (not legal advice) and straightforward kit that would give a wide range of capability, offensive and defensive… whilst keeping it largely multi-use and low cost.

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You too can be a Tactical Espionage Dollar-Store Hobo for less than $1000… And I’m going to tell you over the next 116 pages (its that Long, I checked) in exquisite detail how to use all that kit in an tactical espionage environment.

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So pass Some of the savings along to me! Atleast use the free trial subscription!

Unlike your favorite influencers Dollar-Tree and your local Goodwill are not giving me kickbacks. If you think I’m adding value, you’ve got to support it yourself:

Let me teach you the ways of the broke-ass hoodlum

The Dao of the Tactical Espionage Hobo

Across every society in history, there exist poor unfortunate souls. People who fall through the cracks, people forgotten by their government, their families, their communities, their Gods, people who could, and often do, just disappear.

You can slip into those cracks as well… You can stalk, crawl, and slither along those ditches just as invisibly.

you too can disappear.

If only you’re willing to give up the comforts of middle-class life and become a truly ridiculous sperg.

PART 1: Planning Like a Hobo