David Betz: Civil War Comes to the West, Part II: Strategic Realities

That civil war is looming in the West is a logical conclusion of standard, well-understood precepts of social science. The likely fracture of multicultural societies along lines of identity is an obvious hypothesis. The configuration of demographic geography, and the factional polarisation that is its political consequence, is a measurable fact. The precariousness of contemporary urbanity is a thing which geographers have worried over for at least a half century.[xvi] In short, the situation which I have described above is unpleasant, but it is not controversial as far as our grasp of current reality and theoretical understanding of how societies function is concerned.

Image credit: by Sineakee, Belfast Riots 2011, original source , via Wikimedia Commons CC-by-2.0.

David Betz is Professor of War in the Modern World in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He has wide interests in strategic and military affairs but has written extensively on insurgency and counterinsurgency, information warfare, and strategic communications. His most recent book is The Guarded Age: Fortifications in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2024).

This is the second of two articles on the dawning of an uncomfortable new strategic reality for the West, which is that the primary threat to its security and well-being today is not external but internal—specifically, civil war.[i] In the first essay, I explained the reasons that this situation has arisen: a combination of culturally fractured societies, economic stagnation, elite overreach and a collapse of public confidence in the ability of normal politics to solve problems, and ultimately the realisation by anti-status quo groups of plausible strategies of attack based on systems disruption of vulnerable critical infrastructure. In this article I expound on the likely shape that civil war will take and the strategies that might be employed to minimise and mitigate the damage that will entail.

At the time of writing the countries that are most likely to experience the outbreak of violent civil conflict first are Britain and France—both of which have already experienced what may be described as precursor or exemplary incidents of the kind discussed further below. The conditions are similar, however, throughout Western Europe as well as, for slightly different reasons, the United States;[ii] moreover, it must be assumed that if civil war breaks out in one place it is likely to spread elsewhere.[iii]

In the previous article in this journal, I explained how the conditions which scholars consider to be indicative of incipient civil war are present widely in Western states. According to the best guess of the extant literature, in a country where the conditions are present the chances of actual civil war occurring is four per cent per year.[iv] With this as an assumption, we may conclude that the chances of it occurring are 18.5 per cent over five years.

Let us assume, based on the existence of recent statements to that effect by credible national political or academic figures, that there are at least ten countries in Europe that face the prospect of violent civil conflict. In Appendix 1, I provide fifteen such examples—readers may dispense with whichever five of those they deem less credible. The chances then of it occurring in any one of these countries over five years is 87 per cent (or 95 per cent if you include all 15 of the sample).

A further reasonable assumption is that if it occurs in one place it has the potential to spread elsewhere. If we say, arbitrarily but plausibly, that the chances of spreading are half and half, then we may conclude that the chances of it occurring in one of ten Western states and then spreading to all others is about 60 per cent (or 72 per cent with all fifteen of the sample included) over five years.

A reasonable person might argue with the assessment of all or some of these factors and calculations. Perhaps things are only half as bad as I argue, might the risk therefore be just two per cent per year? On the other hand, perhaps I have been rather conservative? As I have argued previously the perception of ‘downgrading’ of a former majority which is one of the most powerful causes of civil war, is the main issue in all of the cases at hand.[v] Objectively, one must conclude that there is ample cause for concern about a worryingly large possibility of a form of war occurring in the West, to which it has not thought itself vulnerable for a long time.

This brings me to the matter of to whom this article is addressed. The first intended audience is statesmen, a constituency which I hope will get the message that the danger is ‘clear and present’, to use the jargon. The second is the general public, to whom I wish to say ‘No, you are not taking crazy pills’, the feeling you have had that something like this is going seriously wrong is right.

Finally and most specifically I hope to address military commanders at all levels, but particularly those with the greatest authority. You have spent a quarter of a century now thinking about insurgency and counterinsurgency. You know exactly what is in store for a fractured society under economic stress in which political legitimacy has been lost because your own doctrine spells it out.[vi] Everything that the general staffs and ministries of defence are now doing is secondary to the primary danger.

There is good precedent for what I am suggesting be done. In February 1989 Boris Gromov was the most highly regarded general in the Soviet Army, an obvious candidate to be chief of the general staff, and in time to be minister of defence. Instead, he resigned from the Army to join the Interior Ministry as commander of internal troops—a policeman, in effect. A perplexed journalist begged him to explain why he did it. The answer was that he feared civil war.[vii]

Soviet society was configured in a way that drove it towards internal conflict, he believed. Gromov’s duty, therefore, as he understood it, was to reorient his mindset to meet the main danger. The situation faced by soldiers and statesmen in the West today is fundamentally similar. It is as imminent for them now as it was for General Gromov on the eve of the implosion of the USSR.

The question: If civil war in the West is potentially as imminent, what ought commanders be preparing to do now? The answer is that a drastic reorientation of mindset on the part of the Western defence establishment is required. Generals should be formulating strategies to respond to the reality of civil conflict now. At the very least, should they fear for their careers lest they begin to plan for the outbreak of civil war without a civilian political directive, they ought to seek such a directive.

The essay which follows is intended as a guide to some of the things they might seek permission to consider.

In his book Military Strategy, John Stone reminds readers of the most important Clausewitzian aphorism, that the most crucial step in any ends-means calculation is the selection of the objective, which in turn must be based upon a realistic apprehension of the character of the war that one faces.[viii] I shall argue that the strategic objective in the coming civil war is the maximum limitation of the damage it will entail.

All civil wars are sui generis but we can surmise some general qualities that they tend to possess, which serve well to structure the following rumination on how to navigate the coming turmoil. These are as follows:

Civil wars inflict serious depredation through iconoclastic vandalism or theft of societal cultural infrastructure—i.e., art and other historic objects and architecture. They destroy a country’s human capital through the strategic displacement of the civilian population on a mass scale. They increase societal vulnerability to predatory foreign intervention.[ix] Civil wars are disproportionately long and bloody. A statistical study of civil wars from 1945 to1999 found that their median duration was six years and that total deaths in them came to 16.2 million—five times that of interstate conflicts in the same period.[x] It follows that shortening their duration is the most highly desirable strategy for damage limitation. The importance of the last point above is that foreign involvement in civil conflict seems to be the most important contributor to civil war duration.

As for casualties, if we take Britain as an example, with a population of 70 million and assume levels of violence only as bad as the worst year of the Northern Ireland conflict (1971 with 500 deaths in a population of 1.5 million) then 23,300 killed per year would be expected. If we take the Bosnian War of the 1990s, or the more recent Syrian War as indicators we might hazard a guess that between one and four per cent of the pre-war population will be killed, with many times more that amount displaced.

In light of the human cost of what might be called the best-case scenario, readers may, rightly, consider what follows a dismal strategy. It seeks as much as possible to negate/mitigate certain outcomes but does not assume that preventing them entirely is possible. Its logical parallel is the suite of civil defence measures once undertaken by many states in anticipation of mass aerial bombing of cities—which did occur—and nuclear war—which thankfully has not yet.

At this stage, it is useful to elucidate more specifically the shape of the civil wars that are going to occur in the West.

Feral Cities Western governments under increasing structural civilisational distress and having squandered their legitimacy are losing the ability to peacefully manage multicultural societies that are terminally fractured by ethnic identity politics. The initial result is an accelerating descent of multiple major cities into marginally ‘feral’ status as defined by Richard Norton in a 2003 essay in this way:

…a metropolis with a population of more than a million people in a state the government of which has lost the ability to maintain the rule of law within the city’s boundaries yet remains a functioning actor in the greater international system.[xi]

The concept as further explored by Norton and others is understood to encompass a range of contingencies of increasing ferality, usually explained with a simple green (non-feral), amber (marginally or partially feral), or red (actively or incipiently feral) typology. In 2003, the exemplary feral city according to Norton was Mogadishu, Somalia.

As of 2024, a list of global cities exhibiting some or all the characteristics of amber and red ferality, such as high levels of political corruption, negotiated areas of police control if not outright no-go zones, decaying industries, crumbling infrastructure, unsustainable debt, two-tier policing, and the burgeoning of private security, would include many in the West.[xii] The direction of the situation, moreover, is decisively towards greater ferality.

In short, things are manifestly worsening right now. They are, however, going to get very much worse—I would estimate over not more than five years. That is because of the combination of two other vital factors. The first is the urban versus rural dimension of the coming conflicts which, in turn, is a result of migrant settlement dynamics. Simply put, the major cities are radically more diverse and have a growing mutually hostile political relationship with the country in which they are embedded.

Source: map adapted by the author from an original published in Le Monde (16 June 2024).

This is most effectively shown graphically, as in the map above which shows in black the 457 French constituencies which voted in the first round of the 2024 European Parliament elections for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, as opposed to the 119 in white that voted for other parties. Similar maps using other proxies for measuring anti-status quo mood showing the same pattern of geographic distribution could be easily made for the United States, Great Britain, and other countries.

The second is the way in which modern critical infrastructure—gas, electricity, and transportation—is configured. Again, simply put, the life support systems of cities are all located in or pass through rural areas. This is easily illustrated below with a simplified map of Britain’s energy infrastructure. None of this infrastructure is well guarded, indeed most of it is effectively impossible to guard adequately.

Putting these factors together allows one to outline the trajectory of the coming civil wars. First, the major cities become ungovernable, i.e., feral, exhausting the ability of the police even with military assistance to maintain civil order, while the broader perception of systemic political legitimacy plummets beyond recovery. The economy is crippled by metastasising intercommunal violence and consequent internal displacement. Second, these feral cities come to be seen by many of those indigenes of the titular nationality now living outside them as effectively having been lost to foreign occupation. They then directly attack the exposed city support systems with a view to causing their collapse through systemic failure.

Source: map adapted by the author using data from ‘Open Infrastructure’, https://openinframap.org/#2.03/26/12.2

In a limited but exemplary form, infrastructural attacks such as I have described have already occurred. In Paris, in July of 2024, a major sabotage attack on the long-distance fiber-optic cable network followed a series of coordinated arson attacks on the rail network. Both attacks were supposed to have been timed to coincide with the Olympic Games that were being hosted by the city.[xiii] In London, vigilantes known as ‘Blade Runners’ have damaged or destroyed somewhere between 1000-1200 surveillance cameras intended to enforce the city’s ultra-low-emission-zone scheme.[xiv] At the time of writing, counterterrorism police are investigating why the primary electrical transformer for Heathrow Airport is burning, causing 1300 flights to be delayed or cancelled with consequent severe economic damage.[xv]

Searching for a definition of ‘city’ which would satisfy all the many variants of such a thing that have existed in human history, Arnold Toynbee supposed that it was, simply, ‘a human settlement whose inhabitants cannot produce, within the city limits, all of the food that they need for keeping them alive.’[xvii] It is a definition which is currently highly apposite. The fact of the matter is that numerous major Western cities are perceived increasingly as alien to and parasitic of the nations in which they are embedded.

The viability of such places has always been contingent; their apparent stability is, in fact, an astonishing balancing act requiring constant and competent maintenance. On current trajectory, that balancing act is going to fail....SNIP

This is what’s been going on for over a decade. We err in believing the collapse of our culture is US centric. It is the entire civilized world that is collapsing all around us.

The surface reason - we embraced multiculturalism and tried to be “nice”. More deeply, our handlers knew this is what it would lead to.

Eventually it will become so bad that the people will cry out for “drastic” solutions, just as the people of Germany did in the 1930’s.

Trump and others like him are trying to stop this slide to insanity before we reach the point of no return, but I am concerned we have already reached that point. The fallout from the current (and coming) riots in US cities will clear it up, I think. We must stay the course and USE OUR LAWS TO STOP LAWLESSNESS.

Holy cow. I just read the article. I could have written that (though not as well). It gets to why I moved from seattle to rural Kentucky 14 years ago. And it changed my life in many, MANY positive ways. None negative.

The level of peace and self sufficiency out here is simply a thing to behold.

But is it truly civil war when the ones fighting the citizens are muslims and illegals?

In Europe it would be a civil war. The government treats the immigrants as first class citizens and the native population as second class citizens. It would be the natural citizens fighting the immigrants (replacement citizens) and the government.

Eventually it will become so bad that the people will cry out for “drastic” solutions, just as the people of Germany did in the 1930’s.

If we are lucky, we will end up with a Milei or a Pinochet. If we are doomed, we will end up with a Stalin or a Mao. What we are unklikely to end up with is, to coin a phrase, a free republic.

I will probably not be here when it happens, but my children definitely will, and in spite of my parenting they are presently unable to effectively respond to it.

From the article:

"As I have argued previously the perception of ‘downgrading’ of a former majority which is one of the most powerful causes of civil war"

Such as illegal immigrants being arrested and immediately released for violent crimes, especially if the crime is committed against a white person.

Yeah. But a few things: Although history repeats itself, it never does so identically. That “gun under every blade of grass” quote actually impacts how “they” will try to take over the US. It will almost certainly be VERY bloody - if they try it here.

But Europe, as always, is quite vulnerable, and GULLIBLE.

I’m 71 and won’t be around all that much longer, probably. But my kids and grandkids will have to deal with it. However, two things: First, every generation has their own particular cross to bear. And second, several of my kids would support it (strong leftists). So, it’s on them.

I see life as a sort of “boot camp”, anyway, What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, and even if one is killed, they have lived the life God gave them to the best of their ability and will take past the grave the things they learned, in life, AND in death.

Right now, Los Angeles is showing signs of being a “feral city.” The city’s mayor, and the state governor seem to want to continue playing the internationalist game that got them to this point.

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