It’s easy to imagine that a second civil war
in America might proceed like the first, two institutionalized factions wielding state militaries against each other along prescribed strategic fronts. Generals would choose a side, those with the most troops and firepower at their disposal would claim victory. The outcome, we imagine, would likely be a winner-take-all restructuring of the United States.
But that’s not really how wars are fought in the 21st century.
To neglect this distinction risks missing the signs of coordinated disruption and violence. If we keep thinking in terms of opposed armies, we’ll fail to develop effective strategies for recognizing and containing networked, hybrid asymmetrical warfare.
It is time to stop saying that just because it doesn’t affect you directly that it is not happening – it is happening, the media is playing into it, social media is playing into it – and just because it hasn’t been declared we can say that it isn’t happening here.
It is happening here.
The civil war we are in now can be identified as a patchwork of affiliated insurgency groups and their counterparts engaging in light skirmishes along the overlapping edges of their networks, mixed with occasional high-value terror attacks against soft and hard targets.
Nobody is asking you to join a side because it is self-composing and there is no official war to be called – the aftermath is identified by the writer of history, not the ones making history.
As in Charlottesville, Berkeley, Las Vegas, and Portland, the fronts are less territorial than ideological.
The reason this is apparent is because so many people ask me just whose side are you on? Sure, I can give them some ideological lie by saying lean to one side or the other but that is not how journalists are supposed to be.
Just as we risk missing the signs of networked violence, thinking in terms of a classic civil war can blind us to the many actors working to disrupt the U.S. from within and beyond our borders.
Behind the extremists are often additional layers of benefactors and provocateurs: oligarchs, plutocrats, transnational criminal networks, and foreign powers wielding them on both sides towards their strategic goals.
This is why we always hear that perhaps Russia may be provoking anger on the internet or that George Soros has funded protestors to disrupt a rally or even create violence.
With these characteristics in mind, we can envision what a modern U.S. civil war might look like. More sporadic and unexpected conflicts but with fewer deaths. Factions sprouting like mushrooms, taking different forms but coordinated across invisible networks. Waves of information warfare. Chaos and an accelerated bazaar of violence with a healthy immune response from the local and national authorities.
The goal of this civil war is not deaths, but the fragmentation of the Republic. The goal of the globalists is to whittle America down to manageable collectives.
This would easily harden the resolve of an increasingly authoritarian world government and would provide more reason to implement smart city infrastructure in order to maintain full spectrum control. |