Illustration by Matt Rota for Foreign Policy
The U.S. empire’s hubris, its fundamental opposition towards rectifying the evils it’s built upon, will be its final undoing. This year, around the anniversary of the January 6th storming of the Capitol, Foreign Policy’s Stephen Marche concluded that “The U.S. military isn’t ready for civil war.” Quoting professor of military history at Ohio State University Peter Mansoor, Marche assessed that for the U.S. armed forces to triumph over the anti-colonial domestic insurgency which sociologists have begun predicting, the injustices which are producing this risk of civil war will themselves need to be addressed:
For Mansoor, a successful counterinsurgency is next to—but not quite—impossible, a vital distinction. For one thing, insurgencies fail when they are unpopular with the local population, as in the case of the Shining Path in Peru or Che Guevara in Bolivia. “The most important thing is to get the politics right, and if you get the politics right, you’re going to be able to win a counterinsurgency,” Mansoor said while acknowledging that “the reason these insurgencies occur in the first place is because of politics.” The role of the military, in Mansoor’s view, is to clamp down on violence so that political progress can be made. “If you have so much violence going on, the politics is frozen,” he said. That need for stability to promote dialogue was the assumption behind the 2007 surge in Iraq. And there, an expanded counterinsurgency strategy did make politics possible. It’s just that the parties found themselves exactly where they started before the violence. The solution to the next U.S. civil war would be the solution to the crises America already faces.
That crucial requirement for the state to prevent a successful overthrow by the rebel groups which will emerge in the coming decades, where the conditions driving the revolt get changed, will not be met. This is because U.S. imperialism will never do the right thing, it will only do the profitable thing.
The crises America already faces, & why the state won’t address them
There are innumerable crises in this country. But according to sociologist Temitope Oriola, the crisis that will set off a civil war is our increasingly inhumane police and carceral state. The militarization of police, which continues to accelerate, is subjecting colonized peoples to an ever worse version of the police violence that they’ve always been targeted by. Consistent with the prospect Foreign Policy describes of the U.S. military being unable to build legitimacy at home due to the masses seeing it as an occupier, this amounts to a military occupation of impoverished black communities.
Just because this is called the “United States,” and the armed forces here are supposedly exercising jurisdiction over the territories they have a “right” to in international law, doesn’t change the material nature of what they do. That nature is aggressive, obtuse, and anti-democratic. And I talk about police as if they’re military forces because with the decline of the U.S. empire, and the subsequent explosion of military aid to police amid an expanding global militaristic reaction, law enforcement here has quite visibly become an occupying army. As if it wasn’t that way from the start, given that all U.S. institutions only exist due to the theft of indigenous land. The occupation is just becoming more noticeable.
This reality of increasing provocations from the police state exacerbating the tenseness of our racial climate is multiplied by the impacts of mass incarceration. Those locked up are just one part of the population in this country that’s living under the thumb of our bloated and tyrannical penal system. Around two-thirds of them are on probation or parole, making for over 4 million overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately nonwhite people who are subject to the employment obstacles, surveillance, and voter disenfranchisement which come with being classified as a lawbreaker in the United States.
In the DPRK, those convicted of crimes can live their lives out of prison without any further punishments or discrimination. For this and other reasons, the DPRK is an immovable object on the international stage that will continue to build socialism despite Washington’s inhumane economic warfare against it. Its people won’t rise up, because even though they’re largely deprived, their government consistently shows itself to be on their side, and their problems are therefore clearly the fault of the sanctions. In the core of imperialism, the government can’t gain this kind of perceived credibility, because it consistently acts against the interests of the masses. No amount of propaganda to scapegoat Washington’s rival superpowers can negate this gargantuan trust deficit that keeps growing within its borders. Settler-colonialism has made the colonized masses hate our government from the beginning, and neoliberalism has turned increasing portions of the white masses towards this sentiment of hating the system.
According to Oriola, it’s those millions of persecuted parolees and probation victims who will form the nucleus for the anti-colonial revolt that’s to gain prominence in the coming decades. And the deteriorating living standards of the broader masses will provide the initial rebels with enough public support for the rebellion. Writes Oriola:
Some of these men may gradually be reaching the point where they believe they have nothing to lose. Some will join for revenge, others for the thrill of it and many for the dignity of the people they feel have been trampled on for too long. Although 93 per cent of protest against police brutality is peaceful and involves no major harm to people and property, there is no guarantee that future protests about new police killings will remain peaceful. The legitimacy of grievances of Black Americans among their fellow citizens is also an important variable. Their grievances appear to have found strong resonance and increasing sympathy within the broader population. Many Latino, Native American and white people see the injustices against Black people and are appalled. Black Lives Matter protests are now major multicultural events, particularly among young adults.
U.S. imperialism is cultivating the circumstances for its own ultimate demise, driving its own people to a desperation that can only lead to revolution. The reason I believe the abolition of the United States to be feasible, despite indigenous people being a small minority, is that the United States simply doesn’t have the capacity to function as an entity which most can tie their own interests to. The last half-century’s rise in inequality, due to accelerate unprecedentedly during the coming decades of climatic catastrophe, is reorienting the interests of the majority towards those of the very most oppressed peoples—whether they’re the impoverished First Nations indigenous peoples or the victims of the penal system. Solidarity behind the cause of returning full jurisdiction to the First Nations, and towards building socialism on a post-colonial continent, absolutely can be created under these conditions.
We know this because U.S. imperialism won’t enact the internal reforms which would take away the social backing for such a revolution. It won’t because it can’t, because it’s too overcome by its own deficiencies to invest resources in its own people. Faced with the unraveling of U.S. hegemony and the decline of profits, its only plan is to continue driving the masses into destitution through austerity, and to keep building up the national security state. We can tell this from looking at the ways U.S. military officials talk about the crises the country is facing—and their opinions are so decisive because the U.S. is an imperialist oligarchy that’s effectively run by the military-industrial complex.
Their consensus on how to respond to our society’s collapse can be summarized as one of taking the orthodox military mentality towards defeating an enemy, and applying this mentality to the country’s own people. It’s an approach that’s single-mindedly fixated on subduing some nebulous foe, and that’s not willing to question the conditions behind the potential for unrest. We can see this in the 2019 Pentagon report which is best known for considering that the U.S. military could collapse within 20 years due to climatic disasters, but that should also be noted for the alarmingly myopic attitude it reveals military elites have towards our crises. Nafeez Ahmed, who wrote the Vice article with the title famously describing the “collapse within 20 years” prediction about the military, summarized how much of a hands-on approach the military aims to take on global warming and other destabilizing events:
Their report not only describes the need for massive permanent military infrastructure on US soil to stave off climate collapse, but portends new foreign interventions due to climate change. The authors argue that the Syrian civil war could be a taste of future international conflicts triggered by climate-induced unrest. There is “no question that the conflict erupted coincident with a major drought in the region which forced rural people into Syrian cities as large numbers of Iraqi refugees arrived,” they say. The resulting conflict “reignited civil war in Iraq,” and heightened military tensions between the US and Russia. “The Syrian population has declined by about 10 percent since the start of the war, with millions of refugees fleeing the nation, increasing instability in Europe, and stoking violent extremism,” the report concludes.
The U.S. empire’s attitude towards the crises it’s created is not pragmatism, but reaction. Its strategists are paranoid towards the U.S. population, drawing both implicit and explicit plans for occupying U.S. cities to preempt an internal revolt. This fear of insurrection will turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the empire loses the loyalty of its people due to its own propensity towards using mindless violence as a “solution” to problems. The step following the breakdown of national unity, where much of the public turns against the state out of practical necessity, will be a breakdown of unity among the military’s own ranks.
U.S. imperialism cultivates abysmal military morale. Revolutionary guerrilla armies cultivate great morale.
To see what a military with good morale looks like, study a revolutionary guerrilla army. By necessity, they properly balance severe discipline of rule-breakers with a dynamic of warmth and companionship. As Che Guevara describes in Guerrilla Warfare, this can correspond with successful efforts to reduce the morale of the enemy’s military: “It is possible to paralyze entire armies, to suspend the industrial life of a zone, leaving the inhabitants of a city without factories, without light, without water, without communications of any kind, without being able to risk travel by highway except at certain hours. If all this is achieved, the morale of the enemy falls, the morale of his combatant units weakens, and the fruit ripens for plucking at a precise moment.”
But the morale of the rebels can’t depend on such victories. It has to come from within, not from events outside of it. Which is what the Viet Minh’s fighters showed how to do. The Viet Minh achieved superior morale to the U.S. military, and consequently won the war, through:
-Organizing into three-person cells. A minimal number for a guerrilla band that’s coincidentally now more practical than ever, due to how advancements in military surveillance technologies have necessitated smaller, more easily concealable groups of insurgents. But all on its own, this approach serves as a way to maintain unity. A member of these cells said “The purpose is . . . to give constant assistance to each other. . . . It usually unites three best friends.”
-Holding the leaders of cadres responsible for indoctrinating their subordinates, and directing their actions. This responsibility also naturally entails punishing any actions which aren’t sanctioned by democratic centralism. Che says the base version of what these teachers need to impart on their pupils is “elementary notions about the history of the country, explained with a clear sense of the economic facts that motivate each of the historic acts; accounts of the national heroes and their manner of reacting when confronted with certain injustices; and afterwards an analysis of the national situation or of the situation in the zone.”
-An effort to make sure that the party's organizational model and ideology define the army at every level. There was no room for ideological factionalism, any more than there was room for actions which weren’t done with the approval that democratic centralism provides. Everyone shared the same goals, and the teachers made sure there was no confusion about what those goals were.
-Giving anyone of any rank the right to criticize battle plans. This is the “democratic” in democratic centralism; you can’t do what the cadre doesn’t collectively agree you should do, but you can try to persuade the cadre to your opinion if you think their approach is wrong. This way, where arguments must pass a test of popular approval before getting converted to actions, bad ideas have less chance of being put into practice.
-A series of shared philosophical principles that give everyone determination. In Vietnam, a major part of this was nationalism. But a U.S. insurgency that attempts to replicate this aspect of their philosophy would take on the baggage of the colonial contradiction, and therefore come into conflict with the colonized nations. How an insurgency here would avoid this pitfall is by treating these nations as the vanguard of the broader effort to liberate the proletariat. And to incorporate the universally applicable aspects of the Viet Minh’s warfare philosophy. Such as a desire to maintain dignity in the face of extreme challenges, and a fatalistic attitude that detaches one from worry upon taking on a challenge.
Contrast this with the morale of the U.S. military. From Vietnam onwards, Washington has been increasingly unsuccessful in its insurgency efforts, and with the rise of multipolarity, this has come to apply to its proxy wars. Despite assertions that Ukraine is winning, Russia has secured the entire Russian-Ukrainian border, destroyed Ukraine’s air force and navy, and is slowly dismantling the rest of its military. Should Ukraine’s fascist regime be subdued, it will compound the crisis U.S. hegemony has been in since last year’s collapse of the Afghanistan neo-colonial regime. The reasons why the U.S. military would encounter a crisis of unity during a domestic revolt reflects why Washington is struggling in these areas abroad: everywhere, imperialism is divorced from the masses, and subject to the contradictions that come with existing purely to advance capital.
These issues are apparent within the U.S. military itself, which I recently gained special insight into when a military member offered to describe some details about the abusive and ill-equipped environment that the imperialists have cultivated for their cannon fodder. This person revealed a dynamic rife with maddening contradictions, where superiors obsessively bully people for trivial imperfections yet the most egregious problems imaginable are permitted:
Waking up soldiers at 0500 to have their sergeant or other high rank people basically nitpick their living space, write them up for infractions as minor as having a recently used tissue in the trash can or not wiping the sink after brushing teeth. This is in a conventional unit, not training. Sexual assaults galore. Sexual assault causes more military suicides and psychological damage than combat does. It particularly affects women, though men are in no way immune. The sexual assault rate for males in the army is much higher than the civilian population, because it’s tied to hazing rituals. Diagnoses of alcoholism, substance abuse, and other 'coping mechanisms' are on the rise. When you factor in room inspections and physical training, the average work day of a junior enlisted on a line unit is something like 14-18 hours/day, sometimes as much as 7 days a week. As a supervisor, I get written up if my subordinate gets a DUI. that involves me usually coming in at like 4 in the morning on a Saturday to stand in front of the sergeant major getting yelled at for something I didn’t even do.
Barracks commonly have faulty plumbing with undrinkable, exotically colored water. I’ve seen black mold. I’ve seen the Department of Public Works refuse to turn on air conditioners when it's ilke 90 degrees indoors on the 3rd floor of a barracks room. Work orders to repair these things go unfulfilled for months, and even then, the only reason they get attention is because the soldier happens to find one of maybe two senior leaders in an organization of 3,000+ who gives enough of a shit to fix it. Did i mention sexual assault? Soldiers rape soldiers. There were more people who died at the Fort Irwin National Training Center than there were deaths in combat. Soldiers will oftentimes be forced to drive incredibly dangerous training missions with broken and/or faulty equipment, such as driving around steep cliffs at night with no headlights and busted night vision goggles, all while they're running on maybe 2 hours of sleep the past 36 hours. One egregious incident I vividly recall was at fort hood, where the NCO in charge of the installation sexual assault prevention program ended up using his position of authority to manipulate vulnerable women into becoming prostitutes and pimping them out to senior leaders on post.
This is a military that’s literally decaying, that’s fundamentally unable to overcome its internal dysfunctionality despite the endless excesses of funds that the government throws at it. A guerrilla force, at least one that follows the parameters laid down by Che, doesn’t have any of these defects. Its very nature as a tight-knit camping setup makes sexual assaults behind closed doors impossible, its members deal with issues like heat through stoicism without having to rely on air conditioning within the claustrophobia of being indoors in hot weather, and it’s designed to manage sleep efficiently rather than haphazardly coercing people into working while severely sleep-deprived. In guerrilla warfare, even the discipline improves morale when done right, as opposed to serving no other purpose than petty torment.
Che describes how imposing punishments like ten-day deprivation of the opportunity to study or work, enforcing a severe boredom, ultimately lifts morale when applied in response to serious offenses: “This was the grade of revolutionary morale that our troop achieved through the continual exercise of armed struggle. It is not possible to achieve it at the outset, when there are still many who are frightened, and subjective currents serve to put a brake on the influence of the Revolution; but finally it is reached through work and through the force of continual example.” This grade being one where everyone in the unit is motivated to follow their duties, and to correct their failures to follow their duties should they receive punishment. Because what’s immeasurably worse than bruised egos for cocky individuals is a dynamic where not everyone is operating according to protocol.
Advantages like this could draw many U.S. soldiers to defect to the rebels, and could therefore gain the rebels territory. This is made more likely by that reality about how U.S. military strategists view the country’s internal population not as victims of a capitalist humanitarian crisis who must be rescued, but as a threat to be subdued.
Treating the U.S. population like an enemy will make the U.S. population respond in kind
These strategists imagine a scenario where the military defeats the rebels by carrying out surgical operations, designed not to impact any non-combatants. They talk about evacuating the affected areas so that they can engage the rebels in “high-intensity combat” with special ops, so as to avoid alienating the population. But this is pure fantasy in a scenario where the rebels have gathered enough military strength to pose real potential for taking entire urban centers. When the moment of confrontation comes, the military will have to resort to the same kinds of measures it applies to insurgents abroad.
Which will incentivize the population, as well as the many military personnel who come from the working class, to help the rebels. Che observed about his Cuban experience that “There are, of course, individual cases of military men who break with the past and enter into the new organization with a spirit of complete cooperation. These persons are doubly useful, because they unite with their love of the people's cause the knowledge necessary for carrying forward the creation of the new popular army.”
We see potential for this in countries that are further along the path towards capitalist collapse than the U.S., like India. A major reason why India’s military remains unable to totally subdue the Naxalite guerrillas is because the country’s military strategists know that if they start effectively waging war against India’s own people, sacrificing civilian lives to go after the guerrillas, the population will turn against the government. Which would lead not just to greater numbers for the insurgents, but to factionalism within the ranks of the military itself. Soldiers, especially ones who come from lower class backgrounds as is largely the case for the ones within the United States, become uneasy when they’re ordered to start killing massive amounts of their fellow community members. And history has shown this kind of crisis of conscience to be especially prevalent among military personnel, at least relative to the police; in innumerable examples of revolutions, it’s been the military members who’ve turned against the threatened regime, with the police remaining obstinate.
For this mass switching of allegiances among both civilians and military personnel to occur, there will need to be a widespread distribution of information about the war crimes the state will inevitably start committing against its own people. The military strategists are aware of this, with their plans including the shutdown of internet and cell phone access within the zones the military will occupy—as well as the direct suppression of online journalists who have potential to expose sensitive information.
The state is conscious that should it lose control over the flow of information during the moment of revolutionary confrontation, the revolution could win. That the masses, seeing evidence of the state’s brutality, will be turned in sufficient numbers towards participating in the tipping point that analysts like Monsoor and Oriola believe to be possible within U.S. borders. The tipping point where the cadres which are prepared to serve the desire of the masses—that being the kind of “social reform” which Che described within a revolutionary context. And where the many U.S. military members with potential to defect can observe a viable alternative to their dysfunctional and abusive imperialist military structure. The state is not an invincible monolith, it’s an institution made of people. And the way people act can rapidly shift from the norm under the kinds of extreme circumstances which our conditions are taking us towards.
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