RESOURCES
Field references for small-team operators.
Craft, doctrine, and the thinking behind Arcline — written by people who have run the plans.
Articles
Why Every Claim Should Trace to a Source
Provenance is a working discipline, not a software feature. Why every claim in a protective intelligence product should trace back to something checkable.
What ATAK Doesn't Do
ATAK is the standard for shared situational awareness, and that is a different job from planning. Where the map ends and the planning work begins.
Working with Local Drivers and Fixers
A local driver knows the ground you are about to work on. How to brief, question, rate, corroborate, and vet the best source available on a short trip.
The Geofence Fallacy: Location Filters Aren't Mission Filters
A radius drawn on a map is not a relevance filter. Why geofence alerting fails moving teams in both directions, and how to run circle-based tools well.
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
Auditing a Principal's Digital Exposure
A defensive OSINT method for protective teams: research your own principal the way a hostile planner would, then reduce what that research returns.
The After-Action Review for Protective Details
The after-action review is the cheapest capability improvement a small protective detail has. How to run one in fifteen minutes and make the findings stick.
Named Areas of Interest: Where to Point Attention
A named area of interest is a place you watch because what happens there changes a decision. How small protective teams define, cap, and assign them.
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.