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Once the infrastructure is untended, due to urban riots plus deserting infrastructure workers, the food and fuel distribution machinery will stop entirely.

I think you are right on target with an unspecified network / communication disruption as the catalyst to a major upheaval. In my current adventure driving a truck for a large national carrier, I had the interesting opportunity to observe first-hand the impact of a network error on trucking - one of the largest truck stop chains suffered a "computer problem" that prevented them from processing payments for fuel (a chain-wide error, not just a localized one.) For drivers on national accounts, the staff would manually collect our payment information for later submission, since they expected the problem to be resolved quickly and had every expectation that they would be paid for the fuel. Everyone else seemed to be cash-only or out of luck. Lines at the fuel islands were long, and the lines at the register were even longer. A process that usually takes me less than fifteen minutes to complete went more than an hour that day, and I was still one of the lucky ones.

It is not hard at all to imagine how quickly our commercial transportation system would grind to a halt if that same scenario were expanded to the top three or four chains at the same time or, even worse, a specifically-targeted attack (denial-of-service or network hack) on a company like EFS, a major fuel-card payment company. No fuel - No trucks. As you mentioned in terms of just-in-time delivery, one small disruption in the system can domino into a major catastrophe. Much of what I deliver is not a consumer product at all, but is merely one small element needed to keep a plant running. However, if that delivery does not arrive in time, the entire production line is at risk of shutting down. Your story is an excellent reminder that "just-in-time" is remarkably similar to "hanging-by-a-thread", which seems to be an apt description of the thin veneer of civility that lightly covers American society.

Thanks for all of your work!