Civil War II

• Introduction 6
• The Next Tipping Point 12
• Is Democracy Permanent? 15
• American Radicalization 37
• An American Spring? 42
• Intelligence failures 44
• QAnon Uncovered 53
• Putin’s Victory 77
• Calls for Insurrection 78
• Patriots and Enemies 82
• What did the Patriots Achieve? 87
• 1/6 What Nearly Happened - I 92
• What is Likely to Happen Next? 97
• The Political Program 99
• The Paramilitary Program 114
• Coup What Nearly Happened - II 119
• Poli-tainment and the Future of US Stability 122
• Can America be Saved from Insurgency? 131
• Conclusion 135
• About the Author 139
• Further Reading 139
• ANNEX A The Radicalization of Guy Reffitt 141
• ANNEX B Among the Insurrectionists 143
• ANNEX C Lone Wolves 147
• ANNEX D The Laws related to Riots, Insurrection, Treason and Coup d’état 149
• ANNEX E Speculative Intelligence 155
• ANNEX F Comparison of BLM v Patriot violence 159
• ANNEX G Issues in Policing 165

Introduction

Overwhelming evidence has emerged that the President of the United States attempted a coup in 2020. Political, legal, propaganda and paramilitary operations were mounted to overturn the election. The coup only narrowly failed because it was haphazardly organized after Nov 3, 2020. Learning from past mistakes, the coup plotters have refined their programs. They will use propaganda and legal mechanisms to attack the next two elections. First by tending the garden of ‘stolen election’ narratives - past and future. Second, by delivering new draconian voting restriction laws. Third, by pushing out long-standing local election officials and replacing them with apparatchiks loyal to the coup. Finally, by passing laws that will allow states to change electors and override the vote of the people. These polices will work. They are already neatly falling into place essentially unchallenged. Their very existence will also undermine confidence in election integrity further destabilizing the system. The apparatus of government will be handed to the coup plotters who will ruthlessly and violently crack down on any dissent. Where a nuclear armed America goes from there is anyone’s guess. The coup is a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States of America and global stability.

Was the election stolen? Or was it free and fair? Your opinion on this vital question does not matter at all. It is completely irrelevant. The only thing that matters is a "third of Americans, including 70 percent of Republicans, and 47 percent of independents have been convinced it was stolen. The only thing that matters more than that, is a third of all Americans and 56% of Republicans agree violence is justified to right the wrong they believe happened. That is the crux of the rapidly unspooling instability in the United States. 

None of these indicators occurred naturally in the population. They were manufactured. Influence over an operationally relevant portion of the population has been achieved by advanced psychological operations techniques mediated through new commercial psychometric micro-targeted / mass-effect marketing algorithms as applied through social media. The effectiveness of these programs is enhanced by the vulnerabilities created by multiple stressors American society has endured since 9/11. Social divisions have been dramatically deepened by carefully tailored messages applied to both sides of every divide to maximize antagonism between left and right. The core messaging of this system is that democracy is corrupt and no long works, that the other side of any debate is evil and out to destroy society, that the time for discussion has come to an end and all that remains is violence as the only way to ‘preserve a way of life’. Left unchecked, the net effect is an insecurity spiral that will result in civil war. 

Because the reality is so unthinkable, many see the Jan 6, 2021 attack on Congress as a culminating point. It is looking increasingly like a tipping point. Politics is giving way to violence in word and deed. America has long left the shores of politics as a place to resolve differences through the dialectic of debate, mutual concessions and joint resolution (hypothesis, antithesis, synthesis). 

As a former strategic analyst for US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), long serving US War College Professor, and strategic analyst for an allied government (inter alia, writing strategic assessments of the US), it pains me to assess that the United States is showing signs of potential for greater political instability than it has already suffered. If this were happening in another country monitored by the Intelligence Community (IC), bulletins would be published with regularity, monitoring the descent into instability and warning US policymakers about the future of the country of concern. In 2021, the country of highest strategic concern to American stability is the United States. 

The system is blinking red.

The United States is approaching a tipping point where full faith and allegiance to the constitution, to fellow citizens, to ballots, to democracy; will transfer to party, to tribe, to bullets, to autocracy. Consequently, the United States is at risk of a serious escalation of violence that could be lasting if not effectively contained. However, containment efforts may well simply add fuel to the fire as they will be painted as fulfilling prophecies of the aggression of the ‘corrupt other’. 

The new civil war will take the form of all modern wars; namely, an insurgency. It will consist of two components, political and paramilitary operations. Both of these operations are already well underway. The political program has been running for half a decade or more and set the conditions for the emergence of violence following the Nov 2020 election. The insurrection was not the only example of post election violence. A major campaign has been initiated to threaten and intimidate anyone who opposes the forces behind the insurrection, from local election officials all the way up to moderate members of congress who might otherwise speak against the coming crisis. 

Insurgencies are complicated because insurgents, counterinsurgents and the general population live side by side. To the lay person, insurgencies lack all the usual signs of warfare. There are no front lines, no uniforms, no massed armies fighting pitched tank battles and seizing territory. In Iraq and Afghanistan, it was American forces that wore the uniforms. In the coming American civil war, there will be no liberating force coming to the aid of one side or the other. America will be free to tear itself apart. In theory, NATO could trigger Article V to intervene in the US to conduct stability operations. However, this will be unlikely for many reasons. Even at peak strength and efficiency, all of NATO combined could not hold the state of Virginia, let alone all the hot spots that will emerge. The contagion of radical political violence to NATO member states is also currently underway as witnessed by anti vaccine movements and related conspiracy theories. Thus by the time things boil over in America, it can be anticipated that there will be copy-cat instability in many other traditionally stable states. 

What will an American insurgency look like? There are countless ways it could unfold but three plausible scenarios come to mind - soft insurgency, crack down and hard insurgency. A soft insurgency will be a gradual escalation of the current patterns of violence that already include wide spread threats against officials, home invasions, cyber attacks, mass shootings, lone wolf attacks, vehicular attacks, and protests turned violent riots. A major event, like the sentencing of a political leader or new elections portrayed as stolen, could trigger mass protests providing an excuse for a crack down. A shock to the system of this kind might be a sufficient corrective to the insecurity spiral, returning all parties to renewed dedication to the constitution and peaceful resolutions of disputes. Alternatively, things could go the other way. A hard insurgency could follow either of the two initial scenarios. A hard insurgency would include a range of possibilities including mass shootings, vehicular homicides, a politically targeted assassination campaign, and the use of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) delivered on foot or by vehicle, including drones.

Almost all of these events have already occurred in the US in recent years. Based on current evidence, they do no appear to be coordinated. It does not take much imagination to see how dangerous a well planned and coordinated insurgency could escalate away from current violence levels to have a major impact on daily life in the US. Equally, given how ponderously the justice system moves, it will be overwhelmed with even a moderate uptick in insurgency related cases. It is already straining to process 600 cases arising from the insurrection.

A complicating factor is the role of the federal government. The tactics noted above will most likely be adopted by both sides to the dispute, resulting in dual insurgencies attacking one another for control of the state. Under these circumstances, the societal divide would likely stretch into institutions of government. Legitimacy would be completely compromised. At that point the side that seizes control will use the tools of the federal government to crush all opposition. Law enforcement and the military may be hopelessly divided or may decide to back one side or the other. Under any of these options, the US will pass into territory uncharted since 1861. 

An American civil war even of low intensity and moderate scale will have extraordinary global repercussions. It can be expected that revisionist powers in the international system, hitherto checked by US power and policy, will be free to indulge their long held plans to upend the central balance of power. The Baltic’s and central Europe will be at the mercy of Putin. Taiwan and possibly even some of the states bordering the South China Sea will have their heads cracked against the great steel wall of China as Chairman Xi recently threatened. Indirectly, many more states in both theaters of operations and further afield will experience a degree of anarchy not thought possible since the 19th Century.

The two parties to the coming American civil war are ‘Patriots’ and ‘traitors’. These labels reflect which side has the rhetorical and messaging upper hand. This book uncovers how that has come about and discuss the impact of that state of affairs. Crucially, there is an asymmetry of passion between the two sides and it's not on the side of discourse, reason, or peaceful resolutions of disputes. Wild agitation is aided and abetted by the fact that the status quo community simply cannot imagine a real threat to the current order. Throughout history in periods of instability, those seeking to revise the system, to upend the status quo, will prevail if the majority remains silent. A small, highly agitated / motivated cadre of revisionists are ignored at great peril.

If the sacking of the seat of democracy was an insufficient shock to the system indicating something is seriously wrong, then the system is simply sleepwalking into a new civil war. If you think this is ludicrous, remember, it has happened here before. Nothing is immutable.

American extremists on right and left have been dreamed of starting a civil war since the last civil war. They never got anywhere because they were on the fringe of society. Yet somehow, the fringe has moved to the center. This book explains why and how this has happened.

The principal drivers of this change are primarily two fold. The way the world communicates has changed. What the world values in communication has also changed. Together these developments work organically to enhance the devolution of politics to ‘politics by other means’, the Clausewitzian definition of war. To this organic development must be added artificial efforts that have been created by various forces to take advantage of the changed political landscape. These will be examined in detail in this book.

Social media has completely changed how ideas are created, spread and accepted. Social media is not a neutral bulletin board where people are free to chose between competing ideas. Social media is controlled by computer programs (algorithms) that decide what is seen and not seen, based on constant testing and evaluation of the population in real time using sophisticated scientific techniques. Every click is collected and analyzed as it happens. The object of this feedback loop is to create new content that maximizes the amount of attention people pay to a channel. Attention directly corresponds to the degree of stimulation provided by the channel. Accordingly, algorithms are optimized to amplify and promote stimulation.

The stimulation system was designed for commercial purposes. That model only viewed people as consumers. It neglected the other facets of their lives. Applying the same system to politics has profound consequences. Stimulating a politically engaged (or susceptible) segment of a population is neither hard nor complex. The key is outrage. Consequently, in the political context, algorithms drive users towards ever more extreme political content to maintain or grow ‘engagement’ (the social media marketers definition of attention). 

The drive for the attention of consumers has long predated the internet and social media. New technologies have merely refined, accentuated and accelerated the substitution of style over substance in the scramble for attention and revenue. In the production of news for example, the quality of information or analysis has become secondary to the primary focus - entertainment. It used to be that quality news would attract high value consumers who would be exposed to entertaining advertisements. Today the roles are reversed. News has become the entertainment that stirs people up and keeps them waiting for the next outrage after the commercial break.

Not surprisingly, politicians have responded to these changes. Retail politics is no longer about passing laws and improving peoples lives. It is about spectacle. It’s about ‘owning’ the other side. What infotainment is to news, poli-tainment is to politics. This explains the huge success of politicians who endlessly criticize, stir trouble, and tear things down, compared to the work-a-day legislators who propose, negotiate and pass laws. Destruction trumps construction. Destruction is much easier to do and entertaining to watch, than the time and effort to build something. The old guard simply do not understand what is going on all around them. It would be entertaining to watch if it was not so tragic. Of course, it is entertaining to watch for the radicals, who have mastered the new rules of the game.

The vanguard of any revolution is always a small, agitated and highly active group that shake a system up through sheer force of will. This is what is happening in contemporary American partisan politics and it dovetails perfectly with algorithms designed to highlight outrage through narrow information channels that bar the door against alternative viewpoints. You couldn't create a more destabilizing system of actors, interests, and means of achieving radical outcomes if you tried.

The idea of watching a difference of opinion among reasonable people that can be negotiated through discussion and compromise over weeks or months, is not a very entertaining prospect. Broadcasting a video that depicts the murder of a political rival in the form of a ‘cartoon’ is about as attention getting as things get. At least, short of the real thing. This is how fringe views have come to dominate political discourse. In fact, in the United States, there is no discourse left. There is no exchange of ideas between groups seeking an amicable resolution of disputes. Politics has become the signaling of threats. It is only a matter of time for the inevitable transition from threats to actions. Politics by other means.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Powerful domestic and international monied interests have learned how to use the attention-industrial-complex to manufacture potent forms of outrage for distraction, profit and political gain. The channels through which these efforts are propagated are many and varied. Most of these actors have arrived independently of one another, but a degree of coordination among a few can not be ruled out.

This book puts all of these developments in context and presents a strategic assessment that contends that the window of opportunity for peaceful resolutions of disputes is almost closed. In other words, American democracy has a limited shelf life best measured in months. The data shows that the United States is on a pathway to a major domestic crisis that will have lasting global consequences. The book details the political and paramilitary operations that will likely trigger civil war, why it is a likely outcome, and what can be done to prevent it from happening.

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Adam C PhD (Cantab) served as a Principal Strategist for USSOCOM where he was involved in designing clandestine war plans for special mission units. He is now Director General of Contexr, a national security upstart start-up based in Washington DC. Dr C has lived, studied and worked all over the world including as a Special Director of Strategic Programs for an allied DoD in the Indo-Pacific. Adam earned a PhD under Sir Harry Hinsley (wartime codebreaker and official historian of British Intelligence in WWII) at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he researched the rise of non-state actors as challengers to the power of the state. Over the course of more than a decade he served with distinction as a professor of strategy at the United States Air War College, the United States Marine Corps Command and Staff College, and the United States Naval War College. At Newport, Dr Cobb was Director of the Mahan Advanced Research Project, a classified US Navy intel-planning-ops cell dedicated to assessing future enemy WMD concepts of operations and charged with devising innovative ways of deterring and defeating such threats. This organization was unique in the US Government in that it combined activities across the J2, J3, and J5, for US Strategic Command, US Special Operations Command and US Pacific Command (primarily), and worked closely with the IC and the NSC in assessing, developing and shaping America’s nuclear war plans. Contexr’s mission is helping US DOD (and related organizations) prepare for major great power conflict in Asia by providing much needed context to operational and strategic design. 

He can be reached at M@contexr.com.

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