Green Beret Bushcrafting Guide: The Eight Pillars of Survival in Any Situation

Become an expert at finding food, water, shelter, security, establishing communication, maintaining your health, navigating, and making fire.

Many survival and emergency preparedness experts today use the pyramid approach to survival prioritization, putting food, water, shelter and security in the largest block at the base of the pyramid and then community, sustainability, and higher needs in smaller brackets at the top of the pyramid. Decorated combat veteran Brian Morris takes a different and linear approach to survival using an eight-pillar system, developed over decades of serving as a Green Beret in the US Army Special Forces.

The foundation for Morris’s methodology is KISS, which stands for keep it simple, stupid , an acronym widely used by the military to remind soldiers that the best solutions are often the simplest. In his eight-pillar system, it is up to the survivor to assess their situation and then choose the pillar that is needed most to survive the situation at hand. Much like a rifle pop-up target range where a shooter is expected to hit the closer (more dangerous) 50-meter target first before engaging the 300-meter target, the survivor needs to choose the pillar that is most urgent and necessary to save their life under the circumstances.