The worse the social inequality from our collapse gets, the more class tensions will be inflamed. And the more we'll see uprisings like this last year's Black Lives Matter protests, which emerged right after a sudden plunge into economic depression and for this reason turned into likely the largest protest movement in the country's history. As the years go on, this scenario where the spontaneous mobilization of the people gets maximized is going to be repeated, no doubt resulting in future revolts even bigger than the ones we've seen so far. These revolts will go along with the growth of revolutionary socialist organizations, which will be able to find ever more sympathizers as the evils of the capitalist state keep coming to a head.
The state wants to keep it so that these revolts can be contained by simply sending in the National Guard, militarized police, and unlabeled federal agents. The state's worst fear is that the revolutionary socialists will make enough inroads among the masses to gain the support for a proletarian revolution. For now, the ruling class is content to try to pre-emptively stop this revolution, putting forth propaganda to confuse the masses and alienate them from Marxist theory; the CIA's current campaign to flood the media with fabricated claims of socialist China committing a "genocide" against the Uyghurs is one part of this informational aspect of the class war.
But when the risk of a successful revolution gets substantial enough, the U.S. is going to bring its warfare tactics from abroad into our neighborhoods. A 2016 Pentagon training video anticipates that as unemployment, climatic disasters, and destitution proliferate throughout these next few decades, the military is going to have to invade some of the world's largest cities--including ones like New York and Los Angeles--to retain Washington's control over the increasingly unstable territories. The video observes that megacities in particular "are the future breeding grounds, incubators, and launching pads for adversaries and hybrid threats." It concluded that due to the U.S. military's lack of strategic knowledge about how to operate within megacities (I'm unsure if the military has gained better knowledge in this areas since 2016), their only options will be to either abandon these cities to the rebels, or "drain the swamp of non-combatants" so that U.S. Special Operations Forces can engage the insurgents without killing vast amounts of U.S. civilians.
This intent is reflected in a 2016 U.S. Army War College report, which explains that the military will need to try its best to clear non-combatants out of impoverished neighborhoods and "bulldoze the slums" so that these hypothetical near-future domestic rebels can be engaged without constraint. Given that Philadelphia police bombed an entire city block in 1985 to snuff out a black liberation group, an action that decidedly wasn't made with civilian lives in mind, it's doubtful the military will truly carry out domestic combat with this kind of surgical constraint. Much more likely, civilians will be deliberately targeted by the military to try to terrorize the population into not backing the rebel forces. As the Pentagon video warns, even 1% of the population supporting Washington's adversaries in a large city will represent tens of thousands of people, people whom the government can only treat as enemy combatants.
For a while now, there's already been precedent for the U.S. ruling class carrying out this kind of haphazard violence against the underclass during climatic catastrophes. As the Marxist site MR Online has written:
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the city's wealthiest residents evacuated well in advance and hired a private army of security guards from companies such as Blackwater to protect their homes and possessions from the mass of poor, mainly Black residents who were left behind. Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill went to the city in the aftermath of the hurricane and witnessed first-hand the highly militarised and racialised nature of the response. One security contractor, hired by a local businessman, told Scahill his team had been fired on by "Black gangbangers", in response to which the contractors "unleashed a barrage of bullets in the general direction of the alleged shooters " 'After that, all I heard was moaning and screaming, and the shooting stopped. That was it. Enough said.'
We can expect these kinds of incidents to get more common. We can also expect the carpet bombings, drone strikes, and careless troop killings of civilians that Washington carries out in its global wars to be brought home, along with other genocidal warfare tactics like blockades of food, water, and medical equipment. These tactics, in addition to the explicitly planned neighborhood-bulldozing and forced urban evacuations, are going to further multiply the country's domestic migrant crises. Large parts of the country will become like Libya, Syria, Yemen, and the other places U.S. imperialism has destabilized.
No one can say what year Washington will begin to import the more extreme tactics, or in which locality the war will start. But the Pentagon video and the War College report respectively describe these urban conflicts as "unavoidable" and "inescapable." And a 2019 Pentagon report, which doesn't describe these planned class-warfare tactics but does outline how the National Security State aims to militarize American society, provides a good sense of what the conditions immediately preceding the war's start will look like.
This report gives us a sense of the time frame in which the country will likely go from being increasingly dysfunctional to largely being a war zone, because it considers the potential for a collapse of the U.S. power grid within "the next 20 years." If this is the number that the military intelligentsia have honed in on while speculating about when a larger social breakdown will happen, and therefore when such domestic military interventions will be carried out, we can at least say that the military's anticipated war will fairly likely happen before 2040.
Regardless of the exact date for when this threshold into Syria-level instability gets passed, it's likely that what will directly precede it is a massive provocation from the state. One that sways much of the populace in an already deteriorating area towards turning against the government. This inciting atrocity could be another police murder of an unarmed black man, or another city block bombing, or a massacre of protesters. Whatever it is, its likelihood will be expanded by the intensive role that the military plans to establish within everyday American life. As the Pentagon report says, when large swaths of the U.S. lose electricity or otherwise get plunged into instability, "The US Army will be called upon to assist in much the same way it was called upon in other disasters. Detailed coordination with local, state and federal agencies in the most high-risk regions will hasten response time and minimize risk to mission."
The report expects these ever-growing demands for domestic military intervention because as it says, "Most of the critical infrastructures identified by the Department of Homeland Security are not built to withstand these altered conditions." It explains that "The power grid that serves the United States is aging and continues to operate without a coordinated and significant infrastructure investment. Vulnerabilities exist to electricity-generating power plants, electric transmission infrastructure and distribution system components." Consequently, the "increased energy requirements" from a changing climate will overstretch "an already fragile system."
As the report observes, such power-grid failures will go along with numerous disease outbreaks, ones that scientists have since predicted will be even more deadly than Covid-19. Imagine a pandemic worse than the one we've been experiencing, but with likely most of the country also undergoing these consequences of a national power-grid collapse that the report lists:
Loss of perishable foods and medications
Loss of water and wastewater distribution systems
Loss of heating/air conditioning and electrical lighting systems
Loss of computer, telephone, and communications systems (including airline flights, satellite networks and GPS services)
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