The role of militia and security following the end of the rule of law, a few thoughts.

Mao Tse-Tung, the infamous Chinese Communist leader and guerrilla warfare master advocate said "The population is to the guerrilla as the water is to the fish." The success and the survival of a guerrilla force relies and depends on the continuous physical, moral, material popular support of the civilian population.... In a survival situation this becomes both more necessary as well as much more difficult to achieve. The guerrilla is acting in a environment where the main enemy is a force seeking to control the population and act as the formal government. This type of enemy will attempt to terrorize and dominate and exploit the civilian population for its own ends but will not seek to destroy a civilian population. The defenders of a survivalist community are working in a much more hostile environment where many if not most of the enemies are brigands and marauding bands who will merely exploit and wipe out the civilian population and then move on to find other victims. This is a more ancient and I feel a much more difficult problem for the commander of the survivalist defense forces. How do you defend the civilian populace and its means of survival and recovery from a enemy who will not hesitate to kill everyone in the community to get at what amounts to the communities loot. First Americans and many other peoples dealt with such enemies in the past. Because there is no negotiation possible with a enemy who only wishes to kill and loot or enslave (maybe) the only answer has always been to dig in and fight to the bitter end. Everyone in a community must be trained and organized into the defense plan, even if only to carry water to the combatants or to give warning. Next as soon as possible you will need to set up some kind of final protective position that will stop a more numerous and violently inclined enemy from physically getting in among your probably less numerous, less fit, older defenders. This is why most old frontier communities had walls. (go back to the defenses the farmers of Jericho built 9000 years ago, walls, ditches and towers, to keep a raiding attacker away from the defenders) . Update these defenses to allow for the use of firearms and barriers to keep a attacker away in clear prepared fire swept kill zones and you can make a simple farming community a much harder nut to crack, even if only defended by a home guard of farmer/artisan militia. In order to keep the raider/brigand marauder types from getting close to your civil populace you will need to organize a force like the frontier "minutemen" ready to spring to arms immediately and back them up with something like the "rangers that Americans organized to deal with similar French, Indian and Mexican marauders in the past. The "ranger" would then take the fight to the enemy and when a enemy force was to big, alert the home guard and the minuteman type field forces to make ready to protect their community. The entire focus of post collapse security will be the protection of the means of survival and recovery and that means the civilian populace of productive farmers and artisans. Guerrilla warfare type forces are not enough, you will need to revert to the older American frontier model if you wish your community to survive.