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> I'd imagine that creative engineers who can ensure clean water supply and working electricity (or other smaller services) would be more valuable

In the World War Z novel, there's a section where the head of rebuilding in the US is speaking and talking about the new power structure in post-Z society as they look to rebuild.

He talks about how it's the blue collar workers: carpenters, farmers, plumbers, electricians, and their skillset that end up becoming the new key individuals in society because of their ability to build up from a collapse. It's not just hoarding guns and ammo. Those can be dealt with and they are dealt with by the military. Even a smaller military still has enough resources to take care of the local militias (preppers with guns and food).

But if you REALLY want to survive and thrive post collapse, it'll take practical skills to re-build.

Read Lucifer's Hammer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer%27s_Hammer]

How your creative engineers manage to engineer if they're starving or at the mercy of gangs? Only if they're well fed and protected in a strong community can they thrive and help back.

See my Genghis Khan example downthread.

The first warlord to protect the nerds and solidify logistics will build the strongest army.

Sparta never became a world power. Raw brute force alone does nothing. The first move of the Great Khan was to capture bureaucrats from China to organize his army.

That's what separated the Spartans from the Great Khan, and that will be the same issue if society ever degenerates to that state again.

You're thinking macro, I'm thinking micro. I don't care of the grand scheme of things like standing armies etc, I care to have the means to live or survive long enough to anything survivable (so not planet destroying asteroid or full scale atomic war, but local disruptions, civil war etc)

Guns and non perishable food aren't enough and they're not a warranty either, but they're a good start and better than nothing.

> I don't think that massing a collection of guns and canned goods is necessarily the best way to survive after societal collapse. > Instead, it will be the people who manage to build new societies from the rubble. I'd imagine that creative engineers who can ensure clean water supply and working electricity (or other smaller services) would be more valuable

The guns are the foundation for all the other things.

Guns aren't even the foundation to warfare. Food is, as is the efficient movement of food, allocation of food.

If society collapses, the most powerful fighters will be the dude who remembers how to raise donkeys and horses, so that food can move around and organize an army.

There's a reason why Genghis Khan first attacked China of all places. The great Khan needed to recruit bureaucrats to organize the logistics of his army.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yel%C3%BC_Chucai

It doesn't take very long to realize that standing armies themselves require a society with laws, rules, logistics, organization. Pretty much every ancient warlord understood this.

A good army / war requires a good society: food, education, laws. If you can't provide that, then you can't march an army for more than a couple dozen miles.

There's a good series of blog posts about this. [1] In particular I took away the idea that a bigger army needed more wagons (and donkeys, horses, cooks etc) and was NOT necessarily always more effective. There is a natural limit to the size of an army based on the logistical capabilities of the time. This is one of the reasons why modern warfare gets really large scale and awful. Lots of good details about foraging. Having played a lot of D&D over the years I always tended to ignore the logistics beyond bringing a 10 foot pole and a 50 foot rope into the dungeon.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-...