Training & Course Catalog
Before we teach you what to do, we need you to understand why. The threat is real, confirmed, and pre-positioned. The journey starts with seeing the world as it is — then making yourself ready — then extending that readiness outward to everyone who depends on you.
Step 1 — Observe: The World Is Changing
The United States is at war. Four adversary nations — China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea — are cooperating against American infrastructure in ways never seen before. Chinese cyber operators have been inside your electric utility’s control systems for five years. Iranian proxy forces are pre-positioned inside the United States. A single encrypted activation signal was intercepted on March 9, 2026. The FBI, CISA, and NSA have confirmed all of this — in public testimony, under oath.
Separately, the sun poses its own threat. A severe geomagnetic storm — a Carrington-class event — has a 10–12% probability per decade of destroying the large power transformers that take 18 months to replace. One missed Earth by a week in 2012. It is not a question of if. It is a question of when.
Your community’s emergency plan assumes help arrives in 72 hours. In a Black Sky Event, there are no unaffected regions to send help from. What happens on Day 4?
This is not theory. This is the documented, sourced, confirmed threat environment as of 2026.
Step 2 — Orient: This Is Personal
CyberAv3ngers — an Iranian military hacking group — compromised American water treatment systems using default passwords. Not New York City. Small municipal systems serving communities like yours. Volt Typhoon embedded itself in utilities serving towns that will never have the cybersecurity budget to detect a nation-state implant. The 2013 Metcalf sniper attack destroyed 17 transformers with rifle fire — it was never solved. Most substations are protected by chain-link fencing.
Now make it personal. You are at work. The power goes out. Your phone dies in four hours. You cannot reach your family. GPS does not work. Traffic signals are dark. Gas stations cannot pump fuel. You are 30 miles from home. Can you get there?
You arrive home. The water pressure is dropping. The refrigerator is warming. The pharmacy is closed. Your child’s medication has a three-day supply. The grocery store shelves are emptying. No one is coming to help — because every community around you is in the same condition. Can your household survive 30 days?
If you cannot answer those questions, you are not ready. And if you are not ready, you cannot lead anyone else to readiness. That is why the fundamentals come first.
Step 3 — Decide: The Choice
You have two options. You can close this page and hope it does not happen. Or you can start — today, for free — with the one action that changes everything: making yourself ready.
FIR’s training begins where every credible readiness program begins — with you. Not your city council. Not your utility. You. The individual. Because a city manager who cannot survive three days without power has no credibility directing a 30-day BSE readiness program. A utility executive who has never packed a Get Home Bag does not understand what cascading infrastructure failure means.
The decision to begin costs nothing. BSE 099 is free. Eight hours. Online. At the end, you will have built a Get Home Bag with your own hands, planned your route home on paper, and confronted the reality of your household’s readiness. The moment you carry that bag to your car, the abstraction becomes physical. You carry the weight of the problem. That is the inflection point.
Step 4 — Act: The Training Journey
Training builds outward from you in concentric rings. Each ring requires mastery of the one inside it. The progression is non-negotiable — it mirrors both military training doctrine and the FIR Reference Architecture itself.
Ring 1 — You: “Can You Get Home?”
BSE 099: Why This Matters — FIR Orientation
Free. 8 hours. Online. The universal prerequisite for all FIR training. Four blocks: infrastructure vulnerability (the cascade from hour 1 through day 30), the four-party ecosystem threat, personal readiness fundamentals, and the historical precedent proving these solutions have worked for a thousand years — from Constantinople to Fort Boonesborough.
Deliverables: Get Home Bag (physical, photographed), Paper Route Map, PACE Communications Plan
Cost: Free
BSE 101: Individual Readiness
10 hours | Online | Prerequisite: BSE 099
Deepens the Get Home Bag into a tested survival capability. Tiered readiness: 24-hour survival kit → 48-hour Get Home Bag → 5+ day Expedition Bag. Movement reality — 3 to 10 miles per day on foot, severe blisters expected, plan for no GPS and no police. Water filtration: biological vs. chemical contamination. Caloric requirements: 4,000 cal/day active movement, 6,000 in harsh winter. Route planning on paper maps. Introduction to open-source intelligence — where to find the data that makes this urgent.
Ring 2 — Your Household: “Can Your Family Survive 30 Days?”
BSE 102: Household Readiness
10 hours | Online | Prerequisite: BSE 101
You made it home. Now what? Water storage and purification. Food storage, rotation, and caloric planning. Medical supply management and prescription contingency. Sanitation without municipal water. Family communications plan. Home security assessment. Complete the FIR Family Checklist and produce a 90-day household improvement plan with specific actions, purchases, costs, and skills to learn.
Ring 3 — Your Community Organization: “Can You Coordinate and Sustain?”
This is where FIR diverges from every other preparedness program. FEMA teaches you to shelter in place for 72 hours. FIR teaches your community organization — church, civic group, neighborhood association — to function as a consolidation point for months. The solutions are not new. They are a thousand years old.
BSE 103: Community Readiness & Coordination
12 hours | Online | Prerequisite: BSE 102
Your household is ready. Now look outward. Who in your community organization — church, civic group, neighborhood association, volunteer fire company — has skills your community needs? Who is the nurse, the ham radio operator, the farmer, the mechanic, the veteran? This course teaches shared readiness at the community level: skills inventory and registry, coordinated communications planning, mutual aid agreements between neighboring organizations, shared supply awareness, and the identification of facilities that could serve as community gathering points in an emergency. No one household can survive alone for months. But a network of prepared households — coordinated, communicating, and aware of each other’s capabilities — is resilient in ways that no individual can be.
BSE 104: Food Systems & Agricultural Resilience
10 hours | Online | Prerequisite: BSE 102
Three-leg food assessment: grocery supply chain, local agriculture within 30 miles, and aquatic protein. The Resilient Agrihood Doctrine for new development. Contingent procurement contracts. Community production planning. Seed preservation. Medicinal plant production — garlic as the most important BSE medicinal crop. The transition from procurement dependency to indigenous production.
Ring 4 — Your Organization: “Can Your Entity Sustain Operations?”
With individual, household, and community foundations in place, training advances to organizational resilience. This tier introduces the full FIR assessment methodology, the Diamond Blue scoring framework, and the source discipline that makes everything else sustainable.
BSE 100: Source Discipline & Methodology
12 hours | Online | Prerequisite: BSE 099
The core competency. FIR trains practitioners to independently find, evaluate, and synthesize open-source intelligence — not to memorize FIR’s conclusions. The Source Hierarchy from primary documents to government press releases. The Transformation Architecture: a seven-step delivery sequence that connects every module in the curriculum. Administrations change. Media narratives shift. Source discipline endures.
BSE 107: The Four-Party Ecosystem
8 hours | Online | Prerequisite: BSE 100
The full threat picture. China as strategic architect. Russia as capability multiplier. Iran as kinetic arm. North Korea as financial plumber. Proxy forces inside the United States. The combined-arms attack doctrine. Volt Typhoon, CyberAv3ngers, Sandworm, Famous Chollima. Deniability architecture. Why the ecosystem survives even when individual nodes are degraded.
BSE 109: Three-Vector Assessment Methodology
16 hours | Online + Practicum | Prerequisites: BSE 100, 101, 102
FIR assesses each entity across three independent resilience vectors — Cyber, Physical, and EMP/GMD — each with its own maturity level from Bronze through Diamond Blue. A single days-of-supply modifier represents the entity’s physical stockpile — water, food, fuel, medical — which sustains the community regardless of which vector caused the outage.
A score of “Cyber Silver | Physical Gold | EMP/GMD Bronze | 30-Day Supply” tells leadership exactly where they stand: strong physical hardening, moderate cyber posture, early-stage EMP/GMD protection, and one month of endurance across all three. Each vector has its own champion, its own funding stream, and its own improvement roadmap. The stockpile supports all three. FIR encourages communities to build stockpile depth early — even at Bronze — because endurance changes the outcome of every scenario.
Diamond Blue on any vector requires the full post-BSE sustainment plan: community consolidation contingency, local economic continuity, organized labor and governance, and demonstrated capability through exercise. The four-artifact assessment methodology, eight scoring categories, six-domain compliance framework, and Balanced Readiness Rule are all taught in this course.
BSE 110: Grant Strategy & Funding
8 hours | Online | Prerequisite: BSE 109
Each vector maps to different federal funding streams. CISA programs fund cyber hardening. FEMA BRIC funds physical resilience. DOE Grid Resilience funds energy and EMP/GMD protection. USDA Community Facilities funds water and food infrastructure. OLDCC funds base-adjacent community integration. The three-vector model means three parallel grant strategies — each with its own application, its own program-native language, and its own scoring criteria. Disadvantaged communities qualify for 90% federal / 10% local cost share. The difference between a funded roadmap and a wish list is knowing which program funds which vector.
Ring 5 — Your Municipality: “Can Your City Reach Diamond Blue?”
The apex of FIR training. Only practitioners who have mastered Rings 1–4 can lead a municipal assessment. A municipal assessor who has never packed a Get Home Bag cannot credibly assess a city of 73,000. Ring 5 courses are restricted to CIRP-track and CBRA-track candidates.
BSE 201: CI Reference Architecture
16 hours | Online + Practicum | CIRP Track
The complete FIR Reference Architecture: 16 CI sectors in six dependency tiers, six self-sustaining core domains, 155+ Diamond Blue target items. Three-vector assessment applied at municipal scale — scoring the city’s cyber, physical, and EMP/GMD posture independently with stockpile modifiers for each. Food System Assessment methodology. Hardened Facility Framework. Military mutual aid (8-domain model). OLDCC integration for base-adjacent communities. Refugee management and correctional facility contingency.
BSE 203: Roadmap Development
12 hours | Online + Practicum | Prerequisite: BSE 201
Transformation Architecture Steps 4–6. Translating three-vector gap analysis into phased actions with costs — each vector gets its own roadmap, its own budget, its own timeline. The Affordability Decision: where leadership decides what to fund on each vector and what to accept as unmitigated risk. The Diamond Blue target is never negotiated down — it remains the documented destination. The pace of getting there is determined by affordability, and that is a leadership decision the practitioner facilitates, not makes.
BSE 204: Exercise Design
12 hours | Practicum | Prerequisite: BSE 203
Capability validation — you have not achieved a maturity level until you have exercised it. Per-vector exercise design: cyber incident response tabletop, physical security breach scenario, EMP/GMD grid-down simulation. Combined multi-vector exercises for advanced communities. The exercise proves the score is real — not a checklist on paper.
BSE 205: Legal Framework
8 hours | Online | Prerequisite: BSE 201
Legal readiness is scored infrastructure. Certification Engagement Agreement, NDA, PCII protections, COG ordinance, emergency operational authority, safe harbor provisions. Why legal readiness must be established before any assessment generates findings that could create liability. Legal protections reviewed by FIR counsel for accuracy before course delivery.
BSE 207: Advanced Threat Assessment
12 hours | Online + Practicum | Prerequisites: BSE 107, 109
Pre-BSE intelligence extraction from FBI, JTTF, DEA, and state fusion centers. Community-level threat posture across all three domestic threat categories: cartel presence, Islamist radical infrastructure, and domestic extremist groups. This course teaches practitioners to ask the questions law enforcement will answer if asked correctly — and to document the answers in a format that drives the three-vector assessment.
BSE 306: Full-Scale Exercise Leadership
16 hours | Practicum | Prerequisites: BSE 204, 207 + CIRP
CBRA capstone. Multi-vector, full-scale BSE exercise: simultaneous cyber incident, physical breach, and grid-down scenario. Post-exercise assessment report generation. This is the highest-stakes training FIR delivers — the practitioner who completes BSE 306 has designed and led a community through its worst day.
Diamond Blue Requirement: Post-BSE Contingency Planning
BSE 206: Post-BSE Course of Action — Community Consolidation Doctrine
16 hours | Online + Practicum | Prerequisites: BSE 201, 205, 207
This course addresses the scenario nobody wants to plan for — but that Diamond Blue communities must be ready to execute. The adversaries documented in BSE 107 and BSE 207 have successfully waged a combined-arms attack against the U.S. homeland. Nationwide infrastructure is destroyed or inoperable. Federal response is overwhelmed. Your community is consuming its stockpile and the grid is not coming back.
What does your community do on Day 61?
BSE 206 is the contingency planning course that separates Diamond Blue from every level below it. Drawing on a thousand years of proven precedent — European city-states that sustained themselves for years under siege, Swiss communes that governed autonomously for centuries, American frontier forts that survived months of isolation — this course teaches the organizational structures that sustained communities under conditions identical to a post-BSE environment.
Course of action planning includes: designation of hardened community gathering points with pre-positioned supplies, water, medical capability, and communications. Population management when displaced persons exceed carrying capacity. Organized labor frameworks ensuring every critical function has trained depth — not individual dependency. Security rotation as civic obligation sustained across the full community. Threat-triggered acceleration protocols executed when leading indicators suggest a BSE is imminent. Local economic continuity — how a community conducts exchange when electronic payment systems no longer exist. Counter-threat architecture — how a community protects its infrastructure, governance, and population against organized groups that will attempt to seize control in the post-BSE power vacuum.
Diamond Blue on any vector requires this course. A community cannot sustain itself indefinitely without the governance, labor, economic, and security architecture taught here. BSE 206 is restricted to CIRP-track and CBRA-track candidates who have completed the advanced threat assessment and legal framework — because the doctrine requires the full threat context and legal architecture to be applied correctly.
We hope no community ever needs to execute this plan. But the communities that have planned, resourced, and exercised it will respond with calm, organized action. The communities that have not will improvise — and most will fail.
Fundamentals Evidence — Required for ALL Certifications
Before sitting any FIR certification exam — CRC, CIRP, or CBRA — every candidate submits:
Get Home Bag load list with photographs and weight calculation. Personal PACE communications plan. Paper route map from workplace to home with alternates and hazard annotations. Completed household assessment using the FIR Family Checklist. 90-day household readiness improvement plan. Primary source library: 20+ Tier 1/2 sources relevant to your local critical infrastructure environment.
These are not academic exercises. They are evidence that the practitioner has internalized the fundamentals and can independently gather intelligence before being entrusted to assess others.
Organizational Training Packages
Municipal Readiness Package — $8,500
Foundation courses for 5 staff + CRC exam + tabletop exercise + assessment kickstart. Everything a municipality needs to launch Diamond Blue Transition.
Utility Compliance Package — $7,800
Foundation courses + BSE 109 for 3 compliance staff + gap assessment against six-domain standards. For utilities facing emerging BSE resilience requirements.
Delivery & Enrollment
All training delivered 100% remotely. No travel required. Live virtual sessions via Zoom/Teams with scenario exercises. Self-paced modules at learn.fir.foundation with 24/7 access. Online proctored exams. Digital badges through Credly with LinkedIn integration. Credentials verified through the public FIR Practitioner Registry at fir.foundation.
Cohorts launch quarterly — January, April, July, October. Self-paced modules available anytime. Exams on-demand once prerequisites are met.
The Journey Starts With You
BSE 099 is free. Eight hours. You will build a Get Home Bag, plan your route home on paper, and confront the question every FIR practitioner must answer honestly: can I survive 30 days? The answer changes everything that follows.
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