Christopher Brown
Remember the classic Twilight Zone episode The Monsters are Due on Maple Street? You know, the segment where aliens come to earth and systematically start turning off the lights. This quickly escalates to neighbor turning on neighbor in bloody mayhem blaming each other for these inexplicable, disquieting technological mysteries. Now pause for a moment and imagine any modern street in America. Jamaica Avenue in Queens, New York or East Houston Street in San Antonio, Texas. Each street contains Americans, blue and white collar. Independent, Republican, and Democrat. Americans’ paranoid of one another, each espousing their own ideologies with the vast majority unable to coalesce around topical, pragmatic conversation. Americans armed to the teeth with 400+ million firearms.[i] Every day we hear it in passing. Strangers remarking about a coming civil war, celebrities acting out in extreme defiance over their own political opinions, pundits propagating misinformation over the airwaves, Americans on the brink of sheer hysteria over the latest viral moment on social media. All these things are brewing a divisive stew of suspicion, fear, hate, and angst.
The Looming Large-Scale Combat Operation
In the Pentagon I have no doubt top people right now are focusing on contingency operations for responding to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. I am of the outside opinion. That is, I believe the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will launch a full-scale invasion of Taiwan prior to January 1st, 2025, with a minimum of 1+ million troops, air, land, and sea. I will not delve into my reasons, backed up only by open-source information available to the public. And no one is perfect in their assessments. But I was correct in predicting a major Russian invasion of Ukraine, four months before it occurred. Experts such as Peter Zeihan, predicted it as far back as 2014.[ii] Has the Pentagon considered that an attack on an island nearly 7,600 miles away from the U.S. mainland is likely to be preceded by or complimented by a much larger strike with never seen, non-kinetic, weapons of mass destruction here on American soil? I am highly doubtful.
An Electronically Addicted, Uninterested, Untested Youth
Enter the military recruiting crisis.[iii] Recently, the Department of Defense released polling and survey data indicating potential military recruits were passing on service for key reasons including fears of safety.[iv] Imagine for a moment a present-day, large-scale war involving American forces. There will be casualties. Safety is by no means guaranteed. In fact, visceral, painful, images of life altering casualties are to be expected. Remember the scene in Saving Private Ryan during the D-day invasion? The American soldier lying on the ground, innards out, while screaming for his mother? This horrific moment is sure to be repeated in future wars. The difference this time, is the ability to beam sickening snapshots like this back to American recruits – already hesitant to serve, in real time.
Weaponizing the Algorithm
On Capitol Hill, officials are lambasting TikTok, deriding its ability to freely access 150+ million users’ information, which is no doubt being culled by the government in Beijing.[v] They are completely missing the point. Social media is a waiting, weapon of mass destruction. You read that right. The PLA will weaponize scenes like the one in Saving Private Ryan in a future conflict over Taiwan. They will project that back to the American youth with lighting precision.
Discarding the Digital Draft Card
The PLA will follow the teachings of Sun Tzu. To defeat the United States Military without fighting is the entire point. Why wage a bloody war of attrition when you can merely sap the will to fight of an entire enemy recruiting age population before ever setting foot on the battlefield? Better yet why not turn them on each other and make their home the real battlefield? Once U.S. forces are committed to Taiwan, scenes of death and destruction will start showing up in social media feeds. If you think recruiting is bad now, it will come to a full stop. Selective service will be initiated. This time though, no Vietnam-era scenes of draft cards on fire in black and white imagery will be strewn across the tv screen. Instead, the U.S. government will have no choice but to lock down online bank accounts of all members who opt not to show with a message to report to their local draft station. How will they respond? By posting videos of themselves on social media, crying that they cannot pay their rent or grocery bill. Mass rioting will ensue in every major city. The PLA will weaponize the algorithm with a divisive narrative of an American population who wants nothing to do with what they claim is an unjust war and a corrupt government forcing them to fight it.
A Very Limited Window of Time to Act
There is an answer to saving America. It is called avoiding war through National Will and achieving true deterrence. For many GWOT veterans, this meant coalescing around the idea of defending the homeland following the tragic day of September 11th, 2001. This time it will need to involve the American public writ large, not just 1% made up entirely of volunteers.[vi] So, what is the catalyst? It is an unpopular one, and one we must initiate ourselves. Congress should initiate a mandatory, one-year service obligation for the entire recruiting age population of 18–24-year-olds. You heard me right. American youth need to understand what it means to serve. If we do not go through these pains as a country now. And I mean now. We are in serious trouble.
The Call for a New Prince
If a contemporary draft is not instated prior to outbreak of war over Taiwan, the solution will be an unsuccessful attempt by the private sector to backfill the military. We will see a reemergence of companies like Blackwater, on a large scale, made up of GWOT veterans at 500k a contract to form line infantry. I do not believe we will resort to convicts like Wagner Group,[vii] but you get the picture. This will be supplemented by Gen X and to a lesser extent Boomers trained and led by these GWOT veterans. Essentially, selective service will extend all the way to 60-year-olds and maybe beyond. This is not dissimilar to World War I veterans who were brought back to lead World War II recruits. It is not ideal and will not work for reasons too numerous to list here.
The PLAs Nuclear Option
If the United States manages to reassume National Will, but deterrence fails, we will respond militarily. There is no doubt China will resort to forms of economic warfare. If the CCP must bear the brunt of extreme financial consequences, then I believe they will begin taking drastic measures. The PLA will employ unconventional military techniques right here in the United States through our porous border. This will take the shape of either undocumented foreign agents from malign nation states or proxy forces such as Central American cartels paid off by the CCP, who will sabotage our power grid with relative ease, striking any number of the roughly 55,000 substations across the United States.[viii] This will likely bring the grid down like a game of Jenga, thrusting the United States back into the late 1800s. Remember The Monsters are Due on Maple Street? This time the monsters will be on every street in America armed with pistols and AR-15s.
If the Grid Goes Down
My prediction? 9 out of 10 Americans will die within one year. That civil war? It will take a backseat to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Once the raw, graphic scenes of innate violence stems and some semblance of society is reestablished, those extreme ideologies will emerge in armed groups and form whatever subsections of American society remain – most likely from the fringe right and left. This is assuming that our true adversaries do not launch a mainland invasion concurrent to this which may, ironically, bring America back together again.
The Crossroads
We are at a fork in the path and a decision must be made soon. We must harden our critical infrastructure and train a mass force of special, covert protection specialists to always keep it under watchful eye. We must give Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) the tools they need to succeed. We are on the brink of catastrophe and America is asleep at the wheel, still left with a nasty hangover from the Afghanistan debacle. National Will and a hardened, defended power grid are the only things standing in the way of Rome burning again should nuclear mutually assured destruction hold. The balloon is already up, so what is our next move?
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