Violence, implied or explicit, determines how scarce resources are distributed. It also governs people’s behavior to a fairly large degree, and mostly in unseen ways.
The law is an example of implied violence. Do something bad, and something bad will happen to you. The more bad things you do, the worse the consequences will be, scaling all the way up to physical harm or death. This discourages certain forms of behavior up until people don’t take the implied threat seriously anymore - i.e. folks in the Bay Area can get away with mob looting stores en masse since their fear of reprisal is low.
The United States, like all empires before it, has grown to be exceptionally adept at violence. In doing so it has been able to directly or indirectly influence the diplomatic, military, and economic behavior of billions of people for decades now. This has worked for so long because the US’s implied threat of violence was seen as highly credible. It still is. Sort of.
The issue is that the specific variant of violence that the US is really good at may be rapidly declining in relevance. With our massive fleet of ships, aircraft, and 4 million employees between Active Duty and Reserve/National Guard, our defense-industrial base is well stocked to win wars that look like WWII.
The problem is that there are no wars that look like WWII anymore, and may never be again. And most of our issues around violence really feel like they are happening here at home rather than somewhere far away.
In fact, if (or when) we have a WWIII on our hands, it won’t look like WWII. It will look something like the world does right now, but there will just be more of it, and it will be less geographically constrained. More disinformation, more non-attributable proxy warfare, more cyber attacks (as I write this, there is a nation wide AT&T service outage and no one seems to know why. Suspicious!)
So we need to adapt our toolset to meet today’s demands, not yesterdays.
In lieu of this imperative, I’m keeping an eye on the rise of domestic paramilitary groups. These groups have pretty distinct recruiting advantages over DoD outfits. One of which is that they typically have specific and personalized ideological substance to offer to their recruits.
Given the DoD missed its recruiting target by 41,000 people in 2023, I imagine the disparity between recruiting power in these outfits vs the DoD will only increase, and we’ll see more of these groups pop up, and they’ll do so under a broader range of ideological banners. Some of these groups will run lucrative businesses by offering protection to local communities in lieu of ineffectual law enforcement. And thus protection rackets are born.
Additionally, recruits can gobble up whichever ideological offering they desire while still enjoying the comfort of their day job. They can play action hero without signing their life away to a government they trust less and less with each passing day. They can also perhaps still be obese, mentally ill, or addicted to drugs, and still be granted admittance - these are some of the pesky no-no’s that are fueling the DoD’s recruiting crisis now.
So at scale, this starts to evolve into something historically quite familiar: a version of gangster-feudalism, where legitimacy increases with each new territory gained.
Feudalism can be broadly defined as a system for structuring society around relationships derived from the holding of land, known as a fiefdom or fief, in exchange for service or labour, and importantly for our purposes, protection. This includes physical protection as well as the protection of certain core values - whether religious, political, or secular.
If ran well, protection based businesses are incredibly lucrative. In fact, they are one of the principle justifications for governments to collect taxes from its citizens, and taxes are the most lucrative business model of all time.
It isn’t outrageous to imagine an instance where the Proud Boys, Antifa, Boogaloo, or the Oath Keepers suddenly become heavily armed and start duking it out with each other for territory and control. They’d be motivated to do so because territory and control would equate to wealth and resources (by way of protection fee’s), and thus further proliferation of their values and power. This is what most groups of this sort strive to do eventually.
It matters a lot which groups we let run the show, because in addition to paying them, they also get to write the rules about how we live and behave. And some of them have shitty rules. Check out some of the training footage from the Awaken Church in San Diego to get a glimpse of what the American equivalent of the Taliban might look like.
It seems like the more failed overseas escapades an empire has, the more susceptible to something like the above it becomes. It’s like if you are a parent who is away 11 months out of the year, and then come home to find all your kids are addicted to drugs and into gang activity. Should you be that surprised?
The good news is that some of these groups will be professional, apolitical, and effective, and comparatively benevolent. I’d argue we have a sort of moral imperative to find out exactly who those groups consist of, what they stand for, what they do, and how we form them up.
This is essentially at the core of my own business, and if you are a veteran or first responder, or just interested in this topic, let me know how you think this should play out.
More to follow.
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