How comfortable and possible the long term is often predicated upon the ability to survive the short-term well enough to make it through to the long-term. Some supplies that make the first 3 days to week safer and easier while you build shelter and set-up long-term camp are not hard to carry and make it quite a bit easier to get a long term scenario started. A full bottle of iodine tabs easily fits in a pant's or jacket pocket without much difficulty and could keep you in water for a week. I have 10 iodine tabs in my PSK and that is 5 liters or about 3 days of drinking water. If I don't have to worry about the sanitation of my water source for the first 3 days I will be living in a much better shelter for the long term because I was spending the first three days building it rather than worrying about boiling my water. The short term consumables are just that. I carry them mostly in the hopes that there will be a reasonable chance of short term rescue. That doesn't mean that I would be unprepared to stay long term, just that I could spend the first few days focused on setting up infrastructure to make the long-term shorter or easier by either focusing on setting up camp or by focusing or signalling rescue. In either case the short-term consumables are intended to make it possible to survive without being consumed by the day-to-day of the effort right off the bat. The other trinkets (wire-saw, ziplock baggies, zip-ties, cordage, p-38, Xacto blades, etc) will be with me through the duration of the extended scenario if I treat them right. They all serve a valid purpose and cannot easily be replaced in the field without great expenditure of effort and time that could be spent on other things such as watching the sky for a plane to signal or for an elk to wander by to be speared with my Xacto tipped spear.