The United States has been politically stable for about 160 years, and that stretch has convinced a lot of people the stability is permanent — that whatever the country is arguing about, it will keep arguing about it the normal way forever. History doesn’t support that confidence. Societies move through cycles, and stability is a phase of the cycle, not the end of it.
The useful thing about internal conflict is that it isn’t sudden. A civil war or revolution is the end of a long process, and the process has observable stages. If you can read the stages, you can tell the difference between a country that’s merely loud and a country that’s actually coming apart — and you can place yourself on that map instead of guessing.
The three legs every government stands on
Start with what holds a government up, because everything after this is about knocking those legs out. Every government rests on three:
- Legitimacy — the recognized right to rule.
- Authority — the ability to enforce laws.
- Capacity — the ability to carry out the state’s duties.
Think of it as a three-legged stool. Remove any one leg and the government stops functioning; remove all three and it ceases to exist. And there’s a house-of-cards effect: once one leg is gone, the other two are far easier to knock out. Every strategy in this article — the slow kind and the fast kind — is aimed at those three legs.
A society sits somewhere on one line
At any given moment, a society’s condition falls somewhere on a single continuum with three named states:
Peaceful Cooperation is what most people picture when they think “normal.” Issues get debated civilly. Competing sides compromise for mutual benefit. People stay friendly across differing beliefs, and they do business with one another without a second thought.
Low-Intensity Conflict is the enormous middle — everything between cooperation and open war. It begins the moment the “social compact” breaks: a fault line forms, and two groups decide their differences are irreconcilable. Think of it as the beginning of a societal divorce.
Civil War / Revolution is the far end. Open conflict, terrorist activity and other violence is the norm.
The whole point is that a society doesn’t teleport from the first state to the third. It slides down the middle one, usually for years, throwing off warning signs the entire way.
The early warning isn’t violence — it’s the end of cooperation
Here’s the part people miss. The first symptoms of a society sliding toward conflict isn’t gunfire. They’re the quiet collapse of ordinary cooperation.
The fault lines can form around race or ethnicity, social or economic class, religion, political affiliation, or raw ideology. Once one opens, society sorts itself into camps around it — and the tell-tale signs show up long before anyone is hurt:
- Issues stop being debated and descend straight into name-calling.
- People won’t compromise with the other side, even when compromise is best for everyone.
- People stop associating with the other camp.
- People stop doing business with companies seen as aligned with the other camp.
A society doesn’t announce its descent with a gunshot. It announces it when neighbors stop debating, stop compromising, and stop doing business across the line.
That last one is the quietest and the most telling, because it’s economic — it means the split has moved out of politics and into daily life. The divide can still heal at this stage if the original grievance is resolved. Far more often it widens, and a familiar set of accelerants widens it: media bias, deaths, government policy, demographic shifts, election results, and tribalism.
When it turns kinetic
Somewhere in the middle stage, the conflict stops being rhetorical and people start dying. It takes recognizable forms — domestic terrorism, guerrilla warfare, violent social movements, assassinations, and both popular and “color” revolutions (more on those below).
From there the mechanism is escalation. Each camp vilifies the other; each round of back-and-forth pushes the vilification further, until each side no longer sees the other as fully human. Once a population reaches that point, civil war becomes close to inevitable, because each side now regards the other as an existential threat that has to be eliminated “for the greater good.”
You don’t always have to wait for that final stage, though. A single flashpoint can trigger full-blown war before complete vilification sets in. Lexington and Concord did it for the Revolution; Fort Sumter did it for the Civil War. In both cases a deep schism already existed, but the vilification wasn’t complete — and one event tipped the whole thing into war anyway.
What actually counts as a civil war
“Civil war” gets thrown around loosely, so it’s worth being precise. Drawing on Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1816–1980 by Melvin Small and Joel David Singer, an internal conflict has to clear four bars to qualify (my paraphrase):
- The government is a party. It’s directly involved, or directly backing one side. Two factions fighting without the government as a combatant or heavy backer doesn’t count.
- The military is deployed beyond a police action. Regular troops are actually in combat with another party inside the country.
- Both sides sustain effective conflict. A one-sided genocide doesn’t qualify; a small guerrilla insurgency may or may not, depending on scale and frequency.
- A minimum threshold of combat deaths is crossed. The exact number varies by nation, but practically it means enough deaths that the wider population feels it.
This matters for planning because it keeps you honest. Riots, even sustained ones, aren’t a civil war. The bar is high — which is part of why the fast path around it was invented.
The fast version: color revolution
Traditional regime change is slow. Political reform takes decades; an insurgency or civil war averages around ten years. A color revolution is engineered to do the same job in weeks to a few months, with as little open bloodshed as possible — and it does it by attacking all three pillars at once, using a plan that’s fully drawn up before the first move.
The playbook hits each leg deliberately:
- Legitimacy — convince people the leaders weren’t legitimately elected and therefore don’t have to be obeyed.
- Authority — convince people the government is immoral or its leaders “evil,” so its laws or edicts can be ignored.
- Capacity — choke off the money, people, and resources the state runs on: block ports and railways, withhold taxes, or trigger an economic crisis.
Officially these movements are nonviolent, but violence — specifically the threat of it — is a standard tool. Organizers have learned that actually committing violence tends to backfire, while the threat achieves the same pressure and lets them keep the moral high ground. A common lever is to take some distinct group in the population — immigrants are a frequent example — and either vilify or glorify them in whatever way damages the government’s legitimacy or authority.
The goal is always a tipping point: the moment resistance hits critical mass and popular adoption takes over. In Why Civil Resistance Works (Chenoweth & Stephan), the authors argue — from a study of over 300 violent and nonviolent campaigns — that no regime has survived a resistance movement that reached sustained, active participation of just 3.5% of the population. In the U.S. today that’s just under 12 million people. For scale, the largest 2025 national protest days reportedly drew on the order of 3 million — a quarter of the way to that number, which is closer than anyone should be comfortable with.
Where the U.S. sits right now
Applying the framework to the present is where it stops being abstract — and where you should read the following as assessment, not prophecy.
By this model, the U.S. has been in Low-Intensity Conflict for several years, and it appears to be in the early part of the kinetic sub-stage — politically and ideologically motivated mass-violence events occurring with rising frequency. I view Charlie Kirk’s assassination (Sept 10, 2025) is an example of this escalation. The forecast is that this stage continues well into the 2030s and most likely worsens before it improves.
The period around the 2028 election looks like the delicate window. Here I’m relaying a specific third-party assessment rather than my own: the intelligence group Forward Observer has described an opposition strategy moving through Protest → Resistance → Revolution, roughly — symbolic protests now to gauge and build support; “selective resistance” aimed at provoking government overreaction that feeds the narrative; “mass resistance” (strikes, boycotts, coordinated pressure on all three pillars) once support crosses ~15%; and a contested or failed election used as the fulcrum for a final push.
This is being countered by “gerrymandering” efforts in multiple “red” states like Texas and Missouri with the goal of the Republicans maintaining control of the U.S. House of Representatives. These back-and-forth efforts paint a clear picture of the two sides and their goals.
The honest summary: the early and middle warning signs are present. That’s not a prediction of war. It’s a reason to know which stage you’re in and to watch the specific events that could accelerate it.
The trigger events worth watching for
A slow slide can be shortcut by a single event. These are many potential accelerants to consider — they are useful precisely because each is something you can watch for:
- A high-level assassination — a president, a candidate, or the face of a movement. The attempt on Donald Trump (July 13, 2024) or death of Charlie Kirk (Sept 10, 2025) could have been a spark, but were thankfully not.
- A failed presidential election — two candidates both claiming victory amid fraud allegations, some states refusing to certify, and the decision kicked to the House. It can produce the genuinely destabilizing outcome of two people simultaneously claiming to be president. We came closer to this happening in the 2020 presidential election than many realize. This election was the third time in history that both a representative and Senator successfully forced formal debate and vote to challenge a state’s Electoral College certification (1969 and 2005 were the others). Note: This law was changed in 2022 to now require 20% of both houses to object instead of only one of each.
- A “feds out” movement — states moving to expel federal law enforcement or assets, the federal government responding with force to “pacify” the region, and it escalating from there. (The 2014 Bundy standoff and the 2020 CHOP/CHAZ zone are the smaller-scale versions. The 2021 Missouri Second Amendment Preservation Act was a state-level example of this.)
- A secession or breakaway movement — states attempting to leave, federal occupation in response, and direct state-versus-federal conflict. Worth watching given the growing secession sentiment in several states.
- A “dirty” civil war — one party holding power long enough to turn tyrannical and run a violent campaign against dissenters: state-sponsored terror. The historical references are 1930s Germany and Argentina from 1976 to 1983.
- A failure of government capacity — an economic collapse, EMP, nuclear strike, or other massive blow to infrastructure that leaves the state unable to function, opening space for another group to rise in its place. This is where several other threats on this site feed directly into this one.
That last point is the one to internalize: civil conflict isn’t an isolated threat. It’s the thing that a grid-down event, an economic collapse, or an EMP can cause — which is another reason the general-preparedness work you’re already doing is the right hedge.
Bottom Line
- It’s a process, not an event. A society moves from Peaceful Cooperation through Low-Intensity Conflict to Civil War over years, shedding warning signs the whole way. You can locate yourself on that line instead of being surprised.
- The first symptom is the end of cooperation, not the start of violence — debate turning to name-calling, refusal to compromise, and people declining to associate or do business across the divide. Watch for the economic version; it means the split has left politics and entered daily life.
- Know the real definitions. A true civil war clears four hard bars (government as a party, military beyond a police action, sustained two-sided conflict, a death threshold). A color revolution skips them by attacking legitimacy, authority, and capacity at once — and needs only about 3.5% sustained participation to succeed.
- Watch the accelerants, and note the overlap with other threats. Assassinations, contested elections, secession pushes, and — most of all — any event that guts government capacity can shortcut the timeline. Prep for the big infrastructure threats and you’re already prepping for this one.
Internal conflict is the threat that rides in on the others. Rate it honestly against your own location and situation with the Threat Report tool, and don’t build a plan around it alone — build the broad resilience that covers it and everything that can trigger it.
