Planning Series · PLN-03

Community SITREP

Ten people, ten fragments of information. None of them the whole picture — until now.

Course Overview, One Page

A single printable page covering what PLN-03 teaches, the five lessons, what you need before starting, and the doctrinal sources behind the method. Useful for deciding whether the course is for you, or for handing to somebody in your group who is weighing it up.

Download the One-Pager (PDF)

Why This Course

After a disaster, information is incomplete, unstructured, and scattered across everyone who saw one piece of it. Whose power is out, which roads are blocked, who’s hurt — every household knows one true, narrow slice, and without a shared structure none of it adds up to a picture anyone can act on.

The failure isn’t a lack of information. It’s the absence of a format that takes what neighbors, radio traffic, and outage maps already know and fuses it into one status a decision-maker can actually use. A Community SITREP is that format — and getting it wrong usually means confusing a pre-incident guess for a post-incident fact, or letting an official map overrule someone who was just standing on the ground.

By the end of this course, you’ll be able to:

Tell a Threat/Hazard Assessment from a Community SITREP on sight, and know which one a piece of information actually belongs in.
Sort a report into HUMINT, SIGINT/COMINT, TECHINT, or OSINT, and know which one wins when two of them disagree.
Fill in a complete Community SITREP, header to footer, with the seven Community Lifelines in the correct order.
Trace how your household’s FEP, PPA, Next of Kin, and Household Recovery Workbooks feed into and out of a SITREP.
Fuse a real, fragmented, partially conflicting set of field reports into one usable status — not just recall the lesson text.

Lessons 01–05

Lesson 01
Why Post-Disaster Information Fails
The core problem, and the line between a Threat/Hazard Assessment and a Community SITREP — the most confusable pair of concepts in the course.

Lesson 02
The Intelligence Fusion Model
Four input streams — HUMINT, SIGINT/COMINT, TECHINT, OSINT — and the rule that keeps fusion honest when sources conflict.

Lesson 03
Building the SITREP: Structure and Mechanics
Every field, the seven Community Lifelines in the correct order, and a fully worked example. The chapter you’ll come back to most.

Lesson 04
Reassessment Loop: Feeding Household Data Upward
How the Family Emergency Plan, Personal Preparedness Assessment, Next of Kin, and Household Recovery Workbooks connect to the fusion process.

Lesson 05
Capstone: Fusing a SITREP from Fragmented Inputs
A novel, partially conflicting scenario. Judgment practice using everything from Lessons 1–4 — not new content.

How This Course Works

Item	Detail
Prerequisites	PLN-01 (Community Situational Awareness — Community Lifelines), required. This course uses the seven Lifelines exactly as PLN-01 defines them and never re-teaches them. INT-03 (SALUTE & SPOT Report Training) is recommended, not required.
Equipment	A Field Report Card (product C4-PLN03, color or black & white) is useful for Lesson 3’s hands-on exercise, but not required to start.
Structure	Five lessons, each with knowledge checks worked into the reading. You unlock the next lesson by answering all of a lesson’s checks correctly.
Practical work	Lesson 3 produces a completed household SITREP. Lesson 5 is a capstone scenario fusing fragmented, conflicting field reports into one report.
Scope	Household and neighborhood-level reporting throughout. The course teaches fusion and reporting, not collection — individual observation is INT-03’s subject, not this one’s.
Access	Patreon subscription required. Lessons are read online; a companion guide with reference tables and blank worksheets is available inside the course.