A Second US Civil War?

[A modified version of this article has been published on Foreign Policy.]

Following an earlier 2017 survey, Foreign Policy has opened another poll to assess the likelihood of a second US Civil War. However, framing it as a second civil war embeds numerous assumptions about warfare on US soil that are based more on history than the current reality of how power acts in the world. The distinction is critical to effectively counter the emergence of networked violence in America.

With this framing we imagine a second civil war might proceed like the first: two institutionalized factions wielding state militaries against each other along prescribed strategic fronts. The split might fall between the coasts and the heartland. 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 with some persecution of the losers.

The shape of future homeland conflicts will be asymmetrical, distributed, and heterogeneous.

But that’s not really how wars are fought in the 21st century. Indeed, much of the last century was about deconstructing the habits of large-scale, state-driven conventional warfare. As a recourse to violence, warfare now proceeds from ideologically and economically marginalized communities whose suffering and impotence are wielded by cunning leaders. These become guerrillas, rebel factions, proxies, and insurgencies. Sometimes they look more like tribal conflicts composed along racial, religious, familial or economic lines, often on top of resource crises that push violence to become a necessary solution. But they are rarely simple two-sided conflicts.

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 warfare.

For the United States, the shape of future homeland conflicts will be asymmetrical, distributed, and heterogeneous, not a North vs. South duet. Like so much of our lives, conflict and power are being re-shaped along network topologies. As networks distribute power to the edges, this in turn shifts warfighting further away from a handful of monolithic forces and towards a diverse web of small actors.

Conflict and power are being re-shaped along network topologies.

A second US civil war would likely self-compose with numerous dynamic factions organized using digital tools around ideological and affinity networks. Such groups are much smaller than conventional militaries and where they lack in firepower, they make up for with transgression.

Guerrillas are always outgunned by the state so they compensate by fighting outside the rules of engagement (“never confront your enemy on the battlefield”). Terrorism, therefore, is often a tool of the weak and the desperate. It inflicts maximal damage with minimal resources.

Any cell can browse the literature, claim allegiance in some far-flung burb, and start whipping up violence against their targets.

Coordinated violence in the US may be an increasing likelihood but it probably won’t be pursued by states. It would likely be a patchwork of loosely-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. As in Charlottesville and Berkeley, the fronts are less territorial than ideological.

Behind the extremists are often additional layers of benefactors and provocateurs: oligarchs, plutocrats, transnational criminal networks, and foreign powers wielding extremists on both sides towards their strategic goals. Hence, the increasing regularity of cyber and information warfare originating from Macedonian server farms, reclusive billionaires, and adversarial governments.

In this scenario, borders and jurisdictions fall with the rules of engagement. The network is stateless. Like ISIS and Al Qaeda, any cell can browse the literature, claim allegiance in some far-flung burb, and start whipping up violence against their targets. Antifa and the Alt-Right are a hodge-podge of varying affinities loosely-coupled under their respective brand names. These are not top-down hierarchies. They’re agile and shapeless with the capacity to grow quickly then disappear.

“One simply cannot explain the speed and scale at which the Islamic State formed without that network effect,” writes Emile Simpson in another Foreign Policy article trying to augur the tremors of a new world war.

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.

Such scenarios are extremely difficult to predict.

Syria is instructive. Their civil war isn’t a war between two sides but, rather, a patch-work of insurgencies loosely coupled around similar goals, sometimes aligned and sometimes at odds, fighting against the deteriorating state, oppositional factions, foreign warfighters, soldiers of fortune, and radicalizing civilians, each wielded by religious leaders, agents, media and foreign powers.

This better approximates what a US civil war might look like. More sporadic and unexpected conflicts but with fewer deaths. Chaos and an accelerated bazaar of violence with a healthy immune response from the local and national authorities. The outcome (and probable goal) would likely be a fragmentation of the republic into smaller, more manageable alliances, though it may just as easily harden an increasingly authoritarian federal government.

For now, America is held in line by a strong rule of law and a good-enough economy.

To counter this emerging threat in America it’s critical to establish more formal practices for identifying and tracking domestic extremism — with an honest recognition that young, white males on both ends of the political spectrum are the most likely to commit violence. Likewise, we must formalize robust network analysis to map and track these distributed groups across their digital territories and to identify their backers, funders, and agitators. Finally, there needs to be a very serious conversation about how to regulate Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter as platforms for influence, instigation, propaganda, and recruiting.

For now, America is held in line by a strong rule of law and a good-enough economy that most people still have something to lose by choosing violence. But as our leaders continue to deconstruct these critical stabilizing systems (rule of law and economic opportunity), the norms degrade and the space for transgression becomes bigger. To FP’s poll, my gut says the likelihood of a second US civil war as defined here is between 20 and 40% but trending upward significantly.