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SPARTAN9 | Newsletter 7/2020

Dear <<First Name>>

My name is Grant Rayner, and I'm the founder of Spartan9. We provide consulting and training services designed to enable you and your organisation to operate safely, securely, and successfully in complex and higher-risk environments.

This is our monthly newsletter for July, which we use to keep our clients, partners, and friends updated on what we're up to. If this isn't your thing and you'd like to unsubscribe, you can click on the link at the bottom of the email.

PROJECT UPDATES

What we've been doing, where we've been travelling to, and what's next.


We’ve just launched two new books:

1. The Guide to Travelling in Higher-Risk Environments

2. The Field Guide to Deployment Planning

The Guide to Travelling in Higher-Risk Environments is designed to get you to higher-risk locations and home again safely. It’s written for backpackers, business people and everyone in between. This book dives deeply into risk and personal security. I've also dedicated a chapter to information security, which is becoming more of a risk for travellers.

The Field Guide to Deployment Planning is the first in a series of Field Guides that are focused on different aspects of operating successfully in higher-risk environments. The style of the Field Guides is crisp and focused on actionable advice.
 

Backstory and context

Writing a book is a humbling experience. Smashing out a first draft is relatively easy. From that first draft, there’s a downward spiral of editing and second guessing that can become life-consuming. Will it ever be good enough to publish? In the end you can only hope it is.

What makes writing a book on travel security hard is the differing needs of the travelling audience. Backpackers have different travel profiles to corporate travellers, who have different profiles to NGOs operating in developing countries. There’s an urge to create a compendium that covers every use case and eventuality, when in fact what people probably need most is just a 'top 10 things to avoid' list. In The Guide to Travelling in Higher-Risk Environments, I haven't covered everything but I believe I've covered the most important things, which I hope makes the book not only readable but useful.

When you’re deeply immersed in a domain it's easy to lose objectivity. It’s hard to know what aspects of domain knowledge and experience will be of interest or use to others, if any. This results in some tension between what’s left in and what’s left out. That’s why I started working on the Field Guides in parallel to The Guide to Travelling in Higher-Risk Environments. I wanted to make sure there would be space for everything, eventually.
 

Acknowledgments

A sincere thank you to those of you who read early drafts of the The Guide to Travelling in Higher-Risk Environments. The final book is quite different from those early drafts, but was shaped by your perspectives and guidance early on in the process. Thanks to Sam for your frequent reviews (sorry!), Jan from Studio D for guidance on the title and for the opportunity with OCE, Patrick and Chris from No Media for copy and line editing, and Crystal for proofreading and correcting my woeful grammar. And, of course, thanks to the many mentors I've had over the years both in the military and in the commercial world.
 

How to buy

Both books are currently available on the Apple Bookstore (which unfortunately isn’t available everywhere - only 51 countries right now). I’ll be exploring options to publish on Amazon and through other distribution channels later in the year.

If you do happen to purchase and read either of these books, thank you. I hope you find them useful.

The good thing about ebooks is that it’s easy to make changes and issue new versions. If any of you read the books and find any errors or inconsistencies, please let me know and I’ll add it to a backlog for the next review and release.
 

Please help to spread the word

If you feel so inclined, I’d appreciate you helping to get the word out to people you know that travel and might benefit from reading these books.
 

More to come

The pandemic isn’t quite over, and neither is my writing binge.

I have several more Field Guides in the works, with the intent to get these published in the next month or so.

I’m also in the late stages of a book on designing and delivering crisis simulation exercises, and another on evacuation planning. These books have been in the works from some years, and are considerably more involved than the Field Guides; however, I’m hoping to get at least one out before life returns to normal.

TRAINING UPDATES

Training workshops, retreats, and customised training solutions.

I've been continuing to run tailored client training during the period, but I've stopped running open training sessions for the time being. I'm tinkering with video training, which has been interesting, but for now I'm focused more on typing than talking.

If you have specific training needs, please get in touch.

GEAR AND TECH

Useful gear and technology for operating in challenging work from home environments.

My research for the Field Guides has resulted in me surfacing all kinds of interesting kit. Depending what you get up to in your spare time, here's a few items that may be useful for you:

MIRA Safety CM-6M Tactical Gas Mask. This mask will protect you from riot control agents protests as well as chlorine gas attacks and other threats. Pair with NBC-77 SOF filters (these filters have a 20-year shelf life). Details here.

Angel Armor Ally One backpack armour. This thin and lightweight sheet of armour fits into your backpack or bag and exceeds NIJ Level IIIA standards for multi-round handgun protection. Comes in varying sizes. Details here.

Team Wendy Exfil SAR Tactical helmet. A purpose-built Search and Rescue helmet that provides tactical accessory mounting capabilities, including a standard NVG shroud. The helmet meets key industrial and mountaineering performance standards. Good option as a bump helmet. Details here.

USEFUL LINKS

Links to topical and useful information.


We need to talk about ventilation. Zeynep Tufekci, writing for The Atlantic, highlights the importance of good ventilation to reduce the indoor spread of SARS-CoV-2. Read here.

Hong Kong's new security law explained. In this video on the BBC, China Correspondent Stephen McDonell explains what the law means, and what people there think. Watch here.

The Resistance Manual. Some interesting reading for anyone interested in UW or GW. Published by the United States Army Special Operations Command, and part of the Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies (ARIS) project. Read here.

 

That's it for this month folks. Stay safe out there.

 

Grant Rayner
Spartan9

 

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