Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, Force Assessment

“That way management can assess who’s valuable and who’s expendable.  It’s just business.” – American Beauty

There’s a new urban reality show where judges free inmates who like fishing, called “Off the Hook”.

5. Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
6. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
7. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
8. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
9. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
10. Open War.

Volume VIII, Issue 4

Most memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.  I have maintained the Clock O’Doom at 9., but given the lower numbers on the indexes and the lower number of violence and censorship events, will likely lower the level next month if violence stays low.  Beware: the number can climb quickly.

My advice remains.  Avoid crowds.  Get out of cities.  Now.  A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Chinese Assessment, Civil War 2.0  – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 920 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Chinese Assessment, Civil War 2.0 

This is a longer piece.  Obviously, I don’t have a friend in the PLA’s Institute of War Studies who sent this to me (THANK YOU SO MUCH CHANG!) but I do have a large number of readers from the People’s Republic of China, so here’s a shout out to you guys!

Part of being in the United States is that we’re invested in the outcome of a potential future Civil War in a big way.  The Chinese?  They’re interested.  So, I tried to come up with what a somewhat neutral third party would say about Civil War 2.0.  I do know this about militaries, they have plans for everything, so I know that China has a document based on a future American Civil War, so I thought, Wilder, what if you wrote one from China’s perspective?  Here’s my attempt.  It’s dry.  Only one joke.

People’s Liberation Army
Institute of War Studies
For:  General Staff/Theater Strategic Research Cell
INTERNAL DRAFT – NOT FOR RELEASE

Subject:  Possible forms of large-scale internal armed conflict in the United States; relative combat potential; implications for our strategy
Character:  Contingency estimate and outcome review.  This is not a strategic directive.
Constraints:  No actual names of U.S. persons.  No executable strike list against the U.S. homeland.

1. Mission and Purpose of the Estimate

This estimate reviews four questions:

1. If the United States enters a large internal conflict between an inland nationalist, armed civil-society coalition and an urban–institutional–transnational coalition, what is the balance of war potential?
2. On what time scale could the conflict unfold, and how cities and logistics could fail?
3. How would outside states recognize, hedge, or feed both sides?
4. What window and what risk does this create for our main strategic direction: Taiwan, the Western Pacific, energy and grain routes, and dollar clearing?

An American internal war is not two field armies advancing on a front, instead it is the splitting of a state machine.  From our viewpoint, the decisive prizes are fragments of nuclear command authority, which government foreign nations will still treat as a government that can sign contracts and that can keep ports and bulk food moving.  A rapid national reunification by either coalition is usually worse for us than a long dual-authority stalemate that cripples external power projection.

2. Situation and planning assumptions

Assumption A.  The trigger is domestic:  a disputed transfer of power, a federal–state armed standoff, a nationwide attempt to confiscate arms or starve ammunition supply that states refuse, or a systematic civil-liberties crackdown that produces organized nullification.

Assumption B.  The active-duty force does not split cleanly along electoral maps.  State National Guard, some reserve components, veterans, and local law enforcement will show regional tilt.

Assumption C.  In the opening period, intercity trucking and regional electric service are interrupted for days and possibly weeks.  This follows from just-in-time urban design and capitalist logistics.  It does not require a precision sabotage campaign to create failure.

Assumption D.  We do not seek American territory. The task is window management, risk hedging, and competitive shaping.

The United States has on the order of 340 million people. Partisan identification is close. Cities hold population and a majority of output. The interior holds land, calories, and most onshore hydrocarbons. That is the base conflict map.

3. Identification of the Two Coalitions

Label	Center of Gravity	Geographic Weight
Red Force, the state-rights /traditional Americans	Rural and small-town population, a majority of veterans by affiliation, higher personal firearms density, many state executives and county law officers in the interior	Heartland, Plains, Mountain West, much of the South and Appalachia, growing Sun Belt interiors
Blue Force, urban/ institutional/ globalist	Dense metros, universities, much of media, ports, hospitals, finance, a large share of the federal civilian apparatus	Coastal and Great Lakes cores, a few deep-blue states, the diplomatic and dollar-clearing nodes

 

4. Relative Combat Potential

4.1 Numbers

Blue Force has the larger share of people and of high-value economic output in compact space. Red Force has the larger share of land and of counties that produce food and fuel.  Raw headcount favors Blue. Staying power on territory favors Red.

4.2 Age and Manpower Quality

Younger urban cohorts lean toward Blue, especially young women. Older cohorts and a large share of military-age males with weapons experience lean toward Red. Red Force’s core is older. Blue Force’s demographic is younger and has no experience with hardship, especially in field conditions.

4.3 Means

The largest force asymmetry is distributed firearms and veteran skill on the Red side.  This is counterbalanced by the institutional, financial, medical, and information infrastructure on the Blue side.

Personal gun ownership is on the order of twice as common in the general voter on the Red side as in the Blue aligned voters.  A key factor is the he national stock of firearms is measured in the hundreds of millions.  However, active-duty United States military services remain the only formation that can move at continental scale with aviation, logistics, and nuclear custody.  Their loyalty is the war’s hinge but it is not sure that they will follow either coalition.

4.4 Cohesion

Red Force coheres around land, faith networks, veterans’ organizations, and distrust of coastal institutions.  It fractures around personalities and between libertarian, populist, and traditional-conservative currents.

Blue Force coheres through bureaucracies, universities, city governments, and remaining national media.  It fractures among socialists, corporate liberals, and identity factions the moment scarcity arrives.

4.5 Command

No single chain exists at the start.

• Governors command Guard forces until a federalization fight is won or lost.
• Active-duty officers swear to a constitution, not a faction.
• Blue Force has more practice running large organizations and talking to foreign ministries.
• Red Force has more small-unit and land skill and more of the interior’s elected law officers.

Expected command picture:  federated, messy, multiple “capitals,” local strongmen.

4.6 Public Order

Urbanization predicts recorded violent crime better than party label. Dense Blue cores will face faster public-order failure when lights and food stop.  Rural Red areas will face their own disorder:  freelancers, score-settling, and local bosses.  Neither coalition is “the professional army” and neither is “the mob.” Both will generate both, though Red coordination structures are likely more resilient to the certain outages of power and information and less prone to the civil violence commonly seen among blacks.

5. Environment: terrain, logistics, systems

5.1 Terrain

Continental distances, the Rockies, the Appalachians, the Mississippi system, deserts, and northern winter all punish long supply lines.  The countryside is hard to occupy.  The city is impossible to live in without electricity and trucks.

5.2 Food and fuel

California leads agricultural production on a per dollar basis, but most food (grain, oilseeds, cattle, hogs) is produced in the Midwest and in the Plains.  Metros run on continuous inbound trucks.  Retail inventories of food in large cities are measured in days.  Western and southwestern cities are more exposed to food-supply shock than Midwestern and northeastern cities.

Onshore oil and gas are concentrated in Texas, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Wyoming, and similar interior producers.  Coastal Blue states are large consumers and are generally net energy importers.

5.3 Power

The bulk power system consists of three grids Eastern, Western, ERCOT.  Texas is nearly an electrical island.  Peak imports into California have already been source of unreliably during long durations of elevated temperatures.  Urban counties show higher outage burden than rural counties in recent published studies.  When bulk power fails, water pumps, sewage, hospitals, elevators, and card payments fail behind it.

5.4 Chokepoints of national significance

Interstate junctions, rail hubs, river locks, pipelines, a small number of container ports, and a small number of food-distribution counties. Blue Force lives at the receiving end of these systems. Red Force lives nearer many of the producing nodes.

6. Urban System Under Multi-Day to Multi-Week Loss of Power and Food Shipments

Planning assumption: inbound freight and bulk power are unreliable for days and possibly weeks. This is enough to break modern metros.

“Collapse” means loss of municipal control and mass uninhabitability.

“Hold” means some authority, a port or river, nearby production, or milder climate keeps a fraction of the population in place.

6.1 Blue-aligned cores most likely to collapse first

• Desert metros (Las Vegas type; Phoenix type).  No local water or calories at metro scale.
• Hyper-dense coastal islands (New York type).  Four to five days of point-of-sale food in official city studies; extensive use of bridges and tunnels; and apartments that need electricity for water.
• Inner Bay Area type.  Peninsula geography, little staple production, dependence on Central Valley corridors and imported peak power.
• Los Angeles basin type.  Conditionally fragile.  Nearby valleys can feed it only if corridors and pumps still work.  Population scale and imported water make simultaneous failure catastrophic.
• South Florida strip type.  Peninsula, heat, storms, imported food.
• Boston or New England type.  Winter energy tightness and thin local staples.
• Federal district core.  Political value high, local calories near zero. Survival depends on neighboring state authorities.
• Hawaii. On the order of nine-tenths of food imported. Sealift and air cargo stop, stores empty in days.

6.2  Blue-aligned cores that may hold

• Chicago type. The country’s central food and freight node beside Illinois–Iowa production.  Lake water still needs treatment and pumps. If farms still sell into the city, it lasts. If the farms withhold, it becomes New York.
• Twin Cities type. Grain and protein nearby; winter without gasoline is the killer.
• Sacramento type. Sits in the Valley rather than at the end of a long hose.
• Willamette/Portland type. Actual nearby mixed farming.
• San Diego type. Naval and port footprint; milder climate than desert metros; survival rises if naval authority keeps the harbor working and Los Angeles out.
• Philadelphia–Baltimore type. Mid-Atlantic farms and ports; less isolated than Manhattan, yet in the midst of collapse already.
• Great Lakes rust-belt cores. Poor social baseline, better food geography than the Southwest.
• Atlanta type and other blue city halls inside mixed or red states. Resilience is political: the surrounding state may provision the tax base or quarantine the enclave.
• Front Range type. Some nearby production; long truck bridge; water is the weakness.

None of these are self-sufficient if the regional truck and grid system is actually down. A collapsed city is not automatically captured by Red Force, it may simply cease to be a city.

7. Victory Objectives

Neither coalition can cheaply occupy the other’s core terrain.

A Red Force win looks like: enough territory and calories to deny Blue a working national government; surviving state machines; a settlement, partition, or “restored constitution” that Red Force recognizes.  Occupying hostile coastal megacities would consume Red Force.

A Blue Force win looks like: retention of federal forms, the dollar, ports, and foreign recognition; isolation of interior resistance.  Occupying the interior against a dispersed armed population would consume Blue Force.

Most likely military-political outcome: multiple authorities, a humanitarian disaster, a poorer and less sovereign United States.

8. External Actors

Outside countries will not “join a side” as in a treaty war.  They will protect their interests and choose to deal with the winner that best serves their national interests.

8.1 China’s Preferred Outcome

A United States that can no longer concentrate power in the Western Pacific, while still buying our goods and servicing dollar assets until a substitute currency system is in place.

• A fast Red Faction victory is dangerous if the survivor is coherent, energy-rich, hostile over Taiwan and technology, and still willing to use export controls and naval power.  It is less dangerous if that survivor withdraws from Asia.
• A fast Blue Faction victory is dangerous if it restores a working Pentagon, alliances, and export-control regimes and insists on maintaining its cultural hegemony.
• A long stalemate is the best of the bad outcomes:  while markets seize, naval fleets argue over which orders are legitimate.  During this period, Taiwan is isolated and external military force projection become impossible for the United States.

Therefore, the rational course for China is dual-track:  public language of stability and non-interference.  But we will fund either side with covert information, finance, and selected commodities to prevent a short decisive win.  We engage in recognition of whoever holds the UN seat, but will continue to provide enough life support to the other fragment to keep the split active.  We buy soy, pork, and energy from the interior and sell finished goods into coastal metros.

A famine that kills our suppliers and a coastal crash that kills our consumers are both to be avoided.  The best condition would be a managed paralysis.

8.2  Goals of Countries Hostile to the United States

Russia/Iran/Best Korea:  Aligned with China in wanting a weaker United States, and longer term Russia has designs on Alaska.

8.3 Neighbors of the United States

Mexico will prefer a Blue Force victory due to a need for an outlet for their excess population and as a source of funding.

Canada is more tightly bound to the United States since they are wired into the electrical grid, and export automobiles, grain and energy.  A non-functional United States is an existential Canadian problem, though a potential Chinese foothold on the continent.

8.4 U.S. allies

Pacific:  Japan, ROK, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand

They ask one question:  is there still a navy and a nuclear deterrent that will appear in the Pacific?  They will follow continuing command authority.  Their only win is for Red Force to win decisively and keep the fleet intact.  A Blue Force that holds ports but loses interior fuel and manpower looks will provide no support.  They have little ability to influence the events of a civil war in the United States.

European Union and the United Kingdom.

There is a cultural affinity with Blue Force.  They are in terror of Red Force abandoning NATO; and feel equal terror of a collapsed America.  They have little ability to influence the events of a civil war in the United States.

9. Wild Cards
   Urban gangs and border cartels.
   Winter, hurricanes, western fire and drought.
   Nuclear and strategic-asset custody.
   Dollar collapse.
   A disease event on top of disorder.
10. Implications for Our Strategy

10.1 The window

A United States arguing over which fragment owns the Pacific fleet is a United States that cannot run a two-theater war.  That is the operational meaning of this contingency for the first island chain.  As cracks open, we should have plans in place to take advantage of the advantage this will give us.

10.2 Risks to us

• Financial contagion that destroys our reserve portfolio and export demand.
• Loss of U.S. soy, pork, and energy shipments if interior authorities stop exporting or if ports freeze.
• A surviving American fragment that is poorer, angrier, less legally constrained, and considering expansion.
• Allied emergency coordination that freezes the map against us (United States bases stay manned by European allies).  This is unlikely.

10.3 Recommended posture for study

1. Treat prolonged dual authority as the outcome to shape toward.
2. Prepare recognition and trade channels for more than one U.S. fragment (ports, grain houses, energy terminals) without early exclusive commitment unless that commitment comes with extraordinary opportunity.
3. Insulation of our own grain, energy, and payment exposure to a dollar seizure or a Gulf–Pacific simultaneous crisis.  Continue to build stockpiles of critical minerals and commodities.

11. Estimate in One Paragraph

Red Force is stronger in distributed arms, veterans, land, food, and hydrocarbons.

Blue Force is stronger in people, money, ports, formal institutions, and the existing alliance-and-dollar network.

Neither can cheaply occupy the other’s core.  Desert and hyper-dense coastal Blue metros fail first when power and trucks stop.  Blue Midwest lake-and-rail metros fail later.

Outside powers will not crown a winner if they are thinking clearly.  Our interest is a United States that cannot concentrate, not a United States that has been replaced by a single hostile survivor.

Violence and Censorship:

War was declared on Spain, yet they’re not fighting back:

Ireland . . . excellent!

England, however, hates itself and is censoring it’s national symbol:

Never forget, the GloboLeftElite hates you.

Misery Index

The new Trump administration is shown in red.  Results continue to be much better than Biden’s misery.

But all those data center jobs?

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real time.  They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings.  As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that combine to become the index.  On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Violence indicators are way down.  Too hot for all that?

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it went down again this month to a near-record low.

Economic:

The economy ticked up slightly last month but I’m concerned.

Illegal Aliens:

Still the near lowest level since the Weather Report started, but remember who they are.

LINKS

The links are again done by Ricky this month.  Thanks, Ricky!

BAD GUYS

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/inflection-point-arrives-dsas-unofficial-america-hating-communist-mascot
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/the-dsa-is-using-coffee-with-comrades-and-socialist-softball-to-convert-the-curious-ffcbcc65
https://nypost.com/2026/08/15/us-news/socialist-ny-lawmaker-emily-gallagher-says-shoplifters-have-a-biological-need-to-steal/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/democratic-socialists-openly-call-erasure-constitutional-government
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/inflection-point-arrives-dsas-unofficial-america-hating-communist-mascot
https://twitter.com/i/status/2042031825887936702
https://modernity.news/2026/09/05/copycat-clancy-horror/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2026/08/09/mexican-influencers-murdered-live-streams/

GOOD GUYS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYSaeU5qC70
https://x.com/FoxNews/status/2096564604646068341

ONE GUY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpWxamM96bg&t=31s
https://cowboystatedaily.com/2026/08/26/trans-protestor-has-self-defense-hearing-over-drawing-gun-in-laramie-street/

BODY COUNT

https://www.dailymail.com/health/article-16044311/massachusetts-governor-maura-healey-abortion-law.html
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-how-the-american-population-map-will-shift-by-2050/
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2026-08-12_09-25-50.png?itok=Ogu-3AuJ
https://archive.ph/LaP2e

VOTE COUNT

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XgSnP_KD_CU
https://www.michigannewssource.com/2026/08/michigan-sheriff-receives-whistleblower-allegation-state-software-automatically-registering-noncitizens-to-vote/
https://www.themidwesterner.news/2026/08/citizen-only-voting-initiative-faces-monday-canvassers-vote-after-staff-recommends-rejecting-petition/
https://ballotpedia.org/When_states_can_begin_processing_and_counting_absentee/mail-in_ballots,_2022

CIVIL WAR

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1984801376
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/a-second-civil-war-and-the-country-fractured-in-two-thats-the-imagined-future-in-author-kurt-andersens-new-novel-xexbrf/
https://www.axios.com/2026/08/30/socialists-fight-aoc-2028
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/gop-plot-to-sabotage-jd-vance-2028-prospects
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/10/style/america-is-atomizing.html?unlocked_article_code=1.4VA.1iQ7.eLCo7EZHLM8d&smid=url-share
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/socialist-leader-says-quiet-part-out-loud-affordability-pitch-masks-guerrilla-class-war
https://modernity.news/2026/08/09/uk-intelligence-warns-of-civil-war-plot-against-migrants-convenient-demonisation/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/magazine/national-blackout-power-electricity-outage.html?unlocked_article_code=1.6VA.oPoZ.in0JSEQwfHWI&smid=url-share