RESOURCES
Field references for small-team operators.
Craft, doctrine, and the thinking behind Arcline — written by people who have run the plans.
Articles
What Mission-Scoped Collection Means
Mission-scoped collection defined: intelligence collection bounded by a mission's geometry, timeframe, and decisions — and how to run it manually.
Protective Intelligence for Teams Without an Analyst
How a small protective detail runs the protective intelligence function without a dedicated analyst — four jobs, distributed across the team you have.
OTR Movements: Planning for the Unplannable
How protection teams prepare for off-the-record movements — pattern files, area studies, standing SOPs, and the hasty advance from the passenger seat.
The Trauma-Center Problem
Most advance plans list the nearest hospital, not the nearest facility that can treat a critical injury. How to build a medical annex that closes that gap.
Drones and the Advance: What a Protection Team Can Legally Do
The SAFER SKIES Act redrew who can counter drones. What a protective team can legally detect, what stays off-limits, and how to plan the air layer.
Site Survey vs Advance Survey: What Each Covers and When You Need Both
A site survey documents a single location. An advance survey builds the plan around a principal's movement. What each covers, and when you need both.
The SAFER SKIES Act, Explained: Who Can Counter Drones Now
What the SAFER SKIES Act and the July 2026 counter-UAS rule change for civilians, private security, event security, police, and the military.
How Arcline's Collection Layer Works
Open-source feeds, scoped to a mission and traced to source. A look at how Arcline's live collection layer turns public data into findings an operator can act on.
Route Surveys That Hold Up
A route survey that only lives in the driver's head isn't a survey. One way to build routes that survive handoff, schedule slips, and a bad day.
The Attention Problem at the Edge
Sensors, feeds, and compute keep getting cheaper at the tactical edge. Attention doesn't. The scarce resource in small-team operations has changed.
The Collection Gap
Planning ends. The environment doesn't. How to keep watching the ground between the day the plan is locked and the day it runs — with or without software.
What Is a Security Advance?
A security advance is the preparatory work done before a principal arrives at a location. What it covers, what it decides, and how good teams approach it.
Why We Built Arcline
High-end planning tools serve large organizations. Small teams get spreadsheets and browser tabs. We built Arcline because we were those small teams.
Guides
BLE Trackers and the Protective Detail
How Bluetooth trackers actually work, how to sweep a vehicle for one, and where they fit as a tool on a protective detail without being oversold.
Surveillance Detection for Small Teams
How small protective teams run surveillance detection without a dedicated cell: TEDD in plain language, correlation over single sightings, and what to do.
IPB for Protective Intelligence: A Military Framework That Translates
Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield, translated for protective work: four steps that show a small team where its intelligence picture has holes.
The Pre-Travel Intel Brief: A Working Method
A repeatable pre-travel intelligence brief template for small teams: six sections, one page, sourced claims, and a cadence that survives real timelines.
Choke Point Analysis: Finding Where a Route Can Fail
How to find and analyze choke points on a route — bridges, ramps, tunnels, garages — before the advance, and what to do with each one you find.
Wargaming Your Plan: Red-Teaming Your Own Plan
A practical method for red-teaming a protective advance: assign a red cell, walk the timeline action by action, and find the plan's failure points first.
The Hasty Advance: Order of Precedence When There's No Time
How to run a hasty advance in executive protection: the order of precedence, what never gets cut, and a phone-based method for 60–90 minutes.
What GDELT Is — and Isn't — Good For
What GDELT does well, where it fails, and how protective-intel teams should actually use the free global news index — a practitioner's teardown.
How to Rate an Intelligence Source
A practical way to rate sources on reliability and information on credibility — the analyst's discipline, made usable by teams that don't have an analyst.
Monitoring a Region Before You Travel
One practical way to build situational awareness of a region before an operation — with free, referenceable sources and a worked example. Adapt it to your team.
OSINT Sources for Protective Work
Open sources worth a protective team's time — with an honest read on what each is good for, from a team that runs them. Your mileage will vary; adapt to your ground.
Search Strings for the Advance
Search operators, applied to protective advance work. Copy-paste strings for venue, route, and exposure research — and the tradecraft to use them well.