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In the forgotten corners of America’s martial landscape, among cracked concrete where weeds claw their way through asphalt & where puddles of oil gather like stagnant pools of blood…
Sit the relics of a once mighty, world-class army that once called itself decisive:
Humvees without wheels, Bradleys stripped for parts, & Abrams reduced to monuments of rust, each One immobile not because of enemy fire but because the flow of bolts, bearings, glass panels, & fuel pumps has ceased.
To call this a metaphor would be wrong; for it isn’t a metaphor but a mirror, since in that stillness lies the truth about the republic itself:
A nation that cannot get its machines moving has already forfeited sovereignty, no matter how loud its demagogues yell or how many flags they wave.
This is where fatalism begins & Qadr/Destiny ruthlessly asserts itself over men:
Namely, in the recognition that politics without logistics is theatre performed on a stage that has already collapsed.
The Government Accountability Office, in prose drained of emotion, admits that none of the Army’s eleven ground vehicle fleets reached their readiness goals in 2024…
That depot once numbered in the thousands but has shrunk to barely a dozen, such that foreign militaries are sometimes serviced while American machines gather dust.1
Read carefully & you hear what the auditors won’t say aloud:
The arsenal of democracy is a museum, & its museum pieces don’t fight.
What follows is annihilation not on the battlefield but in the motor pool:
The Caesarists who imagine Trump restored as some iron-handed imperator, the constitutionalists who dream of a republic purified of corruption, & even the technocrats who fantasize about algorithmic salvation...
All of them are irrelevant once the engines seize & industry stutters:
You cannot deport millions if the buses don’t run;
You cannot project order abroad if the supply ships lie idle at port;
& You cannot restore constitutional virtue if the transmission that drives the Humvee will never be manufactured again…
A broken part doesn’t obey rhetoric, a turbine doesn’t care for patriotism, & a bolt missing from inventory cannot be conjured by oratory.
& so the Humvee on cinder blocks isn’t just a machine in need of repair but a gravestone for every political fantasy:
Here lies Caesar, unborn;
Here lies the republic, unrecoverable;
Here lies the new feudalism, without tools;
& Here lies every left-wing & right-wing hopium & copium, all equally stranded.
The vehicle won’t move, & neither will the state that owns it.
Decline isn’t the thunderclap of foreign invasion;
It’s the Silence of engines that will never turn over again… a Motorpool Morgue.
Yet, there is a deep craving in a collapsing empire to imagine that decline can be reversed by mere strength of spirit, that some reserve of grit or patriotism remains untapped, & that if only the right man rises & shouts loudly enough…
History herself will magically obey his nonsensical commands.
The Right imagines the ascension of a Caesar in a red hat;
The Left imagines a renewal of solidarity & democratic virtue;
The weary middle imagines managerial adults in the room…
But the Humvees are still deadlined, the Bradleys are still stripped for parts, & the Abrams are still rusting in Silence.
Willpower doesn’t build gearboxes, grit doesn’t forge aluminum, & leadership & heightened charisma don’t deliver a single missing bolt.
The speeches may roar… Yet, the engines won’t respond.
Look closely at the ranks themselves & you see the futility of the dream:
The US Army cannot fill its own quotas;
Recruitment collapses year after year;
Obesity & drug use disqualify entire cohorts;
& mental illness & suicide hollow out what remains.
At Fort Bragg (the supposed heart of America’s special-operations complex), the record isn’t One of strength but of overdose, homicide, & despair.
Delta Force operators smuggle cocaine, the Green Berets moonlight for cartels, & paratroopers kill themselves in barracks rooms haunted by fentanyl fumes.2
A culture that cannot even keep its soldiers alive in peacetime has no “willpower surplus” to call upon in crisis. It’s as simple as that.
Thus, it’s here that the hollowness of political theatre reveals itself most cruelly:
Trump can parade tanks down Constitution Avenue & shout about greatness, his enemies can gather in protests to denounce fascism, the centrist commentariat can plead for moderation from ‘both sides!’...
& none of it matters to the pilot whose training hours have been cut in half, to the mechanic waiting months for a Replacement part, or even to the sergeant major watching half his recruits fail basic fitness.
A turbine doesn’t stir at the sound of applause, & a fuel tank doesn’t materialize because the commander-in-chief tweets angrily in Capital letters…
Since willpower cannot close a supply chain that has already collapsed.
& so the myth of Caesar falls apart not only in the depot but in the body itself:
The soldiers are unfit, the officers are corrupt, & the units are dissolved by despair.
This is neither betrayal, nor cowardice… but entropy:
Entropy of the body, the depot, & even the state.
Willpower isn’t a wrench, & when the actual, physical wrench itself is gone…
Speeches, protests, & parades are no more than theatre before the grave.
This is because every empire is built not on parchment or rhetoric, but on energy, & when the energy falters, sovereignty likewise shatters.
The republic can pass laws & the Caesarists can fervently chant in stadiums all they wish to, but without the flows of fuel, electricity, & heat that keep factories humming & depots lit, none of it matters in the grand scheme of things:
A grid blackout is more final than any coup, & a port without diesel is more decisive than any revolution or rebellion.
Energy isn’t a backdrop to politics;
It is politics-proper, written in voltage & pressure, invisible until it fails, & once it does, the illusion of control dissolves in seconds for ideologues of all stripes.
The numbers tell the story more clearly than any unhinged, nonsensical partisan rant:
America’s grid is held together by transmission lines older than the parents of its current recruits;
Blackouts that were once anomalies now ripple across states every summer;
Natural gas systems creak with winter demand that almost overwhelms them;
& Renewables add capacity but not stability, for intermittent flow cannot anchor an empire built on industrial baseload.
Even the Pentagon, guardian of the arsenal, admits that nearly every installation depends on a civilian grid prone to cascading failures, ad nauseam.3
What is Caesar without electricity on the Modern Battlefield?
What is democracy when the lights flicker out & darkness engulfs all?
Neither democracy nor autocracy nor even technocracy can replace a blown transformer or a ruptured pipeline... all are rendered moot & irrelevant.
For ideology is A posteriori to material-energy realities, not A priori vectors that magically cause & bring about said realities, Ex Nihilo.
Consider the military itself, the supposed fist of ‘Unipolar’ American power:
A Bradley cannot fight without diesel & adequate spare parts;
An F-35 cannot fly without jet fuel refined in increasingly fragile facilities;
Even the humble motor pool depends on a constant flow of electricity to power diagnostics, pumps, & welders.
The grand illusion is that energy shortages can be managed politically, that a declaration of emergency or a stimulus bill will keep the turbines spinning.
But the turbines themselves crack due to wear & tear;
The coal trains stall due to said forces;
& the sun sets.
All Politics & Ideology thus bow before thermodynamics.
This is why the notion of “resilience” rings as hollow as the speeches re: willpower.
To endure requires surplus energy, yet surplus itself has fled...
Consumed by debt, wasted in endless consumption, & finally exported abroad in exchange for fragile supply chains that fail when geopolitics tighten.
The empire’s veins are emptying, & no rhetoric can transfuse them again.
Sovereignty ends not with invasion or impeachment but with a blackout that renders all ideology irrelevant. For Energy & Materials undergird all True Sovereignty.
Mere weeks ago, what rolled down Constitution Avenue wasn’t an army at all but a yard sale dressed up as a parade:
Abrams tanks wheezing like dying cattle, Bradleys patched together from the bones of other Bradleys, & helicopters that should have been hanging in museums instead of dragging themselves across the sky.
The brass called it strength, yet the crowd could see it for what it was:
Rust that was polished just enough to pass inspection for a single afternoon.
No One gasped in awe…
Instead, the people shifted in the heat, sipped plastic cups of water, took photos on their phones, & waited for it all to be over.
This was billed as the rebirth of martial grandeur, the kind of spectacle strongmen love. Instead, it looked like exhaustion in uniform:
Bands missed their cues;
Formations marched out of step;
& the bleachers never filled…
If this was Caesarism, it was Caesarism after hip surgery, limping past with a plastic smile.
The fantasy is that these relics still mean something, that a parade proves vigour. But anyone watching closely could see the truth:
The arsenal of democracy is now a Moribund circus, & circuses don’t win wars.
The deeper problem isn’t the optics, it’s the machines themselves:
Ospreys keep falling from the sky, killing Marines in training accidents before they ever see combat;
Black Hawks regularly crash into seas & mountains;
Apaches crash in deserts where no One bothers to pretend the mission mattered...
& while all this farcical nonsense is happening, China cranks out drones by the thousands while American firms ration them like scarce medicine.4
A military that loses men to its own hardware & can’t mass-produce the cheapest weapon of the age isn’t a military at all; It’s an increasingly pathetic liability.
Yet the cult of reverence lingers:
The Caesarists squint at tanks & imagine strength, the centrists tell themselves that at least the “institutions” endure, & Military nostalgists see helicopters & convince themselves that the arsenal is still the envy of the world.
Yet, None of it is real.
What the world saw that day was an obituary, & not a parade. The kitsch was supposed to hide the weakness… & instead, the weakness drowned the kitsch.
The fatal error of the age is the refusal to see how collapse is never singular:
Analysts, politicians, & pundits carve up the crises into compartments, pretending each can be solved in isolation…
& that somehow, someway…
Humpty Dumpty can be put back together again…
As if debt could be fixed without addressing demographics;
As if climate change could be handled without fuel;
& as if pandemics didn’t intersect with food, soil, & migration.
Yet, the truth isn’t modular… It is convergent & cascading, each fracture widening the others until the whole structure groans beneath its weight.5
Start with the money:
Real interest rates have trended negative for seven centuries, punctuated by brief spasms of war or reconstruction, & the present inversion of returns & growth leaves the empire structurally insolvent.
Add demographics:
Fertility has collapsed below Replacement across the West, & so the labour pool shrinks, pensions devour treasuries, & the recruiting shortfalls are merely the military’s blunt edge of the same blade… The body politic is literally disappearing.
Add in climate:
Floods, droughts, & firestorms now occur with greater frequency & numbing regularity, each catastrophe demanding rebuilding funds that compound the debt already strangling the treasury.
Add in pandemics:
COVID wasn’t an aberration but a rehearsal, proof of how quickly a disease can unravel both logistics & legitimacy.
Add food & soil:
Once-fertile belts have exhausted, aquifers have drained, & crop yields are plateauing even as mouths multiply.
Add minerals:
Rare earths, copper, nickel, & lithium...
All increasingly constrained, with extraction moving to hostile territories, & supply chains becoming ever more brittle with each passing year.
Each thread pulled makes the fabric weaker, not stronger.
& so the catalogue grows:
Debt amplifies demographics;
Demographics amplify fiscal shortfalls;
Fiscal shortfalls limit adaptation to climate shocks;
Climate shocks trigger migration; migration intensifies political fractures;
& these political fractures make debt repayment impossible.
It is a cycle of amplification, not mitigation, for each crisis isn’t an island, but rather a wave in a storm, crashing together & magnifying into something larger than policy can contain. America, then, is Moribund thanks to said Polycrisis convergence:
The fantasy that any One “fix” can stop the deluge (a carbon tax, a monetary reset, immigration reform, or a new round of tech innovation) is the purest form of denial:
One cannot stitch a patch on a sinking hull when every plank is rotting.
The denialists who insist on compartmental solutions are the last optimists of empire, clinging to the delusion that expertise & coordination can still arrest the spiral.
They will speak of resilience, of “whole-of-government approaches,” of integrated task forces, as if bureaucracy could command entropy to stand still.
But entropy doesn’t negotiate… it compounds ad nauseam.
& so the Polycrisis Convergence (financial, demographic, climatic, epidemiological, agricultural, mineralogical, etc.) is a storm of storms in which no actor, no ideology, & no Caesar has the tools to intervene.
Every empire believes its arteries run forever (steel, silicon, & fuel flowing without pause),until the first blockage proves fatal…
America’s arsenal now runs on fragile pipelines of parts & materials that can be severed by delay, embargo, or simple neglect:
Rare earths arrive from China, semiconductors from Taiwan, & battery metals from the Congo & Chile, & each shipment passes through chokepoints that the Pentagon cannot control.
The illusion is that interdependence equals strength;
Yet, the reality is that every dependency is a noose.
Look closely at the depots & you see the guillotines already lowered:
Vehicles sit immobile, not for lack of manpower but for want of basics…
Steering gears, transparent armour, axles, differentials.
However, the problem extends far beyond parts bins;
It reaches into the arteries of global trade.
Semiconductors essential for targeting & guidance are overwhelmingly fabricated in Taiwan…
A single, tiny island that is but One typhoon or One blockade away from catastrophe.
Lithium & cobalt for batteries must cross oceans vulnerable to disruption at the Strait of Malacca or Bab el-Mandeb.
Ships stop, & fleets go dark.
One severed line, & an entire battalion is reduced to immobile monuments.
Nor is this confined to mere armchair theorizing:
Commerce Department studies admit the U.S. produces only a sliver of advanced semiconductors, leaving critical defence platforms increasingly dependent on TSMC.
Rare earths, essential for magnets, sensors, & precision weapons, are today mined & processed overwhelmingly in China, a rival & Great Power with every incentive to weaponize said trade routes.
In such a world, the strategist’s naive boast that “globalization guaranteed resilience!”sounds like a joke:
It guaranteed merely that the blade was to be put in someone else’s hand.
The technocrats & globalists who built this system insisted that “efficiency” was synonymous with safety, that the invisible hand would consistently deliver, & that “just-in-time” supply was a form of resilience.
Now, billion-dollar systems rot for lack of chips, arsenals stall because One strait closes, & soldiers are left with museum pieces dressed in desert paint.
Interdependence wasn’t security… Rather, it was a guillotine disguised as modernity, & the blade has already begun to fall on America & her allies.6
The delusion of American strategy has always been that wars arrive in sequence, manageable & compartmentalized:
First One front, then another, with Time to breathe, rebuild, & redeploy… & that is the fantasy that sustains the myth of “peace through strength.”
Yet in truth, weakness breeds simultaneity, not order:
Predators strike together because entropy is most efficient when multiplied, & because an empire that cannot even keep its vehicles fueled cannot survive shocks on every front simultaneously.
Weakness doesn’t deter war;
Instead, it summons the Hounds of War en masse.7
So imagine the future as it will actually arrive, & not as the think-tanks assure:
Dawn over the Gulf, where Iranian radars go silent for an hour, then erupt in fire.
Missiles streak across the sky...
Not a handful, but hundreds, saturation volleys aimed at Israeli airfields, U.S. bases in Qatar, Bahrain, & Kuwait, tank farms, runways, & ports.
Patriots & THAADs fire until their magazines are empty, intercepting some but not nearly enough. Aircraft burn in their hangars, fuel depots erupt into black pillars of smoke, & barracks collapse on sleeping soldiers.
What follows is Black Sunday...
A massacre of materiel & men without precedent in U.S. military history.
Tens of billions of dollars vanish in an hour;
Thousands of Americans are dead or wounded before the President can even speak.
As CENTCOM reels, the Caribbean ignites:
Venezuela, having prepared in Silence, unleashes its own blow:
Chinese & Russian anti-ship missiles, quietly delivered & installed, slam into U.S. patrol craft. Drone swarms harass tankers, ports, & offshore rigs. Saboteurs cut cables, mines drift into shipping lanes…
A hemisphere once thought “safe” becomes another bleeding wound.
The Navy, already crippled by mishaps in the Red Sea, is forced to peel away assets from Asia & Europe just to respond to raids in its own backyard.
At the same Time:
Pyongyang chooses its moment, as a long-range missile arcs over Japan & splashes down within striking distance of Hawaii, not as a bluff but as a declaration.
Seoul’s defences strain, Tokyo panics, & the United States is forced to consider nuclear thresholds in the midst of conventional chaos.
Beijing, smiling, then proceeds to close the trap:
Swarms of drones & “fishing fleets” blockade Taiwan’s shipping lanes, daring Washington to split what remains of its attention.
Russia, no longer cautious, presses westward, confident that NATO’s arsenals (already depleted by Ukraine) cannot endure another year of high-intensity supply.
This is the geometry of fragility & weakness:
Every rival pressing at once, not in order, but in chorus.
Each crisis is survivable on its own, but together they are fatal.
A Bradley sidelined for lack of parts is meaningless in peacetime;
In wartime, it is a grave.
A carrier withdrawn after a mishap is embarrassing in drills;
Under missile fire, it is catastrophic.
An overstretched grid is inconvenient in summer;
Under bombardment, it is decisive.
Weakness multiplies its own cost when struck from all sides.
& yet the hawks still mumble about “One war at a Time.” They cling to the illusion that sequence is possible, & that deterrence is still intact.
Yet the reality is simultaneity, & simultaneity means annihilation:
The United States isn’t built for Black Sunday, plus Caracas, plus Pyongyang, plus Beijing, plus Moscow, for it cannot resupply, recruit, or replace losses quickly enough.
The dream of Caesar, of renewed republican vigour, of managerial competence...
All are irrelevant once missiles fall & fleets burn.
The empire doesn’t collapse in a single duel;
It bleeds out through five wounds at once, each made lethal by the others.
Amidst that incoming bleeding, there lingers still the circus & theatre of politics:
Every collapsing order finds a way to keep talking long after its voice no longer matters. In America, the voices are loud, yet the power behind them is gone:
Congress still argues on camera while substations catch fire in the dark;
Candidates shout over each other about futures that will never arrive, while ports fill with idle ships waiting for parts that will never come…
The spectacle continues, but it has the feel of a play rehearsed in ruins.
The MAGA faithful dream of a Caesar in a baseball cap:
They imagine a strong hand will drive the engines forward again, though the engines themselves are rusting in silent yards.
They chant, they wave flags, they point at broken parades & see strength where there is only exhaustion. Their fantasy dies not in the streets but in the motor pool, where no oratory can conjure steel or fuel.
Across the divide, defenders of the Republic cling to parchment:
They believe that process, fidelity to form, & civic ritual can stitch the state back together… Yet a republic without power lines is a republic in name only.
No vote turns the grid back on, no balanced budget delivers a missing bolt.
The law is mute & utterly irrelevant before entropy.
The progressive utopians believe in moral repair, that justice & recognition can outpace material breakdown. Yet no speech restores the soil, no resolution fills the aquifers, no celebration of diversity produces fertilizer or grain.
Their hope is real, but it feeds on nothing.
The centrists repeat their mantras of moderation & stability:
They meet on panels, publish reports, & call for civility… but civility doesn’t move ships off sandbars, & stability is impossible when transformers explode in the heat.
They are polite while the structure falls, & so they mistake courtesy for strength.
Together, these are all actors on a stage that no longer stands:
The curtain has fallen, the rafters have collapsed, but the lines are still delivered & the audience still assumed to exist.
Yet, said audience has already left, & what remains is only the echo of promises that mean nothing to an engine that won’t start or a depot that won’t produce.
Politics is theatre now, & the play is performed for ghosts; It is but a pantomime before the corpse of a state.8
Meanwhile, the techno-lords dream of empires built in the cloud:
They envision AI, crypto, blockchain, & Mars colonies...
Systems of control & abstraction that transcend the complexities of the physical world.
But here’s the fatal flaw:
Every digital kingdom is built on mines, smelters, fabs, & power plants… No ore, no empire. Their faith in code cannot replace kilojoules or cobalt.
Chips don’t run on dreams…
To etch nanometer logic, you need ultra-pure materials, precise chemicals, extreme vacuum systems, & wafer fabs fed by power, cooling, & rare inputs.
However, the U.S. is already deeply dependent on foreign mineral supply chains for many of those critical inputs...
Namely, rare earths, gallium, cobalt, germanium, lithium, & tungsten.
Said dependency is structural & fragile:
As CSIS has warned Time & again, the U.S.’s reliance on China’s dominance in the critical minerals industry creates a vulnerability for its semiconductor supply chains.9
Fabs require energy, which in turn requires fuel or electrons, necessitating infrastructure…
& You can’t magically teleport electrons.
When grids fail, fabs shut down;
When mining is constrained or regulated, the metal stops flowing;
When transport is disrupted, the components stall;
& so when even One link breaks, the whole chain snaps…
Thus, a techno-feudal order built on code collapses if every tier below it is starving for material.
The accelerationists & effective altruists who promise a future ruled by algorithms forget One thing:
Abstraction is parasitic on the concrete.
The “singularity” doesn’t run on hydrogen sprites;
It needs cobalt, silicon, copper, rare metals...
All of them increasingly vulnerable;
For today they are extracted in contested lands;
& increasingly ruled by rival states, corporate cartels, & volatile geopolitics.
Thus, the prophecy of technofeudalism is hollow:
What remains isn’t a networked utopia but a skeleton of control without the bones of production.
The rulers will have charts & dashboards;
The ruled will scramble for power, food, & warmth.
Without ore, without energy, without fabs, & without pipelines, even the most dazzling algorithm is powerless… Thus, the future lay claim to is already dead.
The delusion of sequence has always lulled empires to sleep:
First a recession, then a recovery;
First a war, then a peace;
First a crisis, then a solution.
America’s entire economic theology rests on this staged hallucination...
That history pauses long enough for technocrats to patch the breach.
But collapse doesn’t pause; it cascades.
While missiles rain across the Gulf & militias carve up the homeland…
The ledger itself buckles:
Sovereign debt implodes not at the margins but at the very core.
What the IMF used to whisper only about Argentina or Lebanon now belongs to the language of Europe, Japan, & the United States.
Interest expense already devours more than defence, more than Medicaid, more than the entire discretionary budget. The treasury issues new paper to pay coupons on the old, a vicious cycle that continues until the blood runs out.
This isn’t mismanagement; it is brute arithmetic:
When servicing costs exceed revenue, sovereignty is finished.
Rome discovered this in debased denarii;
Weimar in worthless marks;
Today’s American empire discovers it in treasuries no longer taken as gospel.
Exeter’s Pyramid, that austere hierarchy of trust, now inverts under stress:
At the top perch, the frothy promises (derivatives, equities, sovereign bonds) each One evaporate faster than the other.
Below lie bank deposits, already menaced by inflation & bail-ins.
& at the base, as always, sit the metals: Inert, unyielding, immune to rhetoric.
Gold & silver don’t pay dividends or yield, but they alone remain when trust dies…
Capital flees downward in panic, abandoning the airy claims of paper for the gravity of metal.
Presently, central banks hoard bullion at a pace unseen since the Bretton Woods system collapsed;
Already, households on every continent scramble for coins, bars, & even junk silver.
Yet the American pundit still chants “the dollar has no rival,” as if faith itself can outweigh math.
But debt isn’t faith, it’s a schedule:
Every coupon has a date, & every bond a maturity.
& those dates now pile up like storm fronts, colliding with deficits that compound even as revenues shrink in recession.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve pivots in circles...
Tighten & the banking system, & it seizes;
Loosen & the dollar bleeds…
There is no third door.
The simultaneity is everything:
As Iranian missiles crater U.S. runways & Venezuelan drones cut shipping lanes, the markets themselves seize up.
Foreign creditors (Beijing, Riyadh, & even Brussels) dump treasuries not as a threat but as a necessity, starving their own economies less by offloading American debt.
The dollar cracks, oil reprices, import shelves go bare.
On main streets, pensions vanish, grocery bills double, mortgages spike, & the middle class (now a phantom) discovers it cannot buy Time, nor safety, nor even tomorrow.
The Keynesians speak of multipliers, the MMT evangelists of infinite issuance, the central bankers of “temporary turbulence.”…
All of them lie without shame!
For when the sovereign defaults, the empire comes to a decisive end.
Not tomorrow, nor in sequence, but in chorus with everything else:
Wars abroad, wars at home, & the dollar collapsing into the metals that bury republics.10
The empire doesn’t fracture politely;
It is torn apart, limb by limb, in brute, screaming agony.
Black Sunday’s scorched runways, maritime strikes, & the debt collapse don’t wait for sequential order…
While missile fire rains across foreign bases & treasuries unravel, the homeland bleeds.
America’s internal fabric turns to ash under simultaneous strain:
Foreign wars, financial collapse, & civil war all wind into One Unified Hell.
Militias don’t obey doctrine... they emerge unwelcome & unannounced:
Local police forces, hollowed out by budget cuts & supply failures, become militias by default:
Self-armed, self-governed, & warlords in uniforms.
National Guard units fracture along state lines or dissolve into local warbands when support is withdrawn.
Sheriffs erect checkpoints, tax food convoys, & enforce curfews by rifle.
In the streets, tribal blocs fight for skylines & neighbourhoods.
One decade’s gridlocked city becomes dozens of fortified enclaves, each with its own warlord, its own dog-eat-dog compact.
Cartels seize highways, sliding east & North into the guts of collapsed states;
Veteran security contractors repurpose their weapons to guard enclaves, not embassies.
Ethnic militias, religious sects, & survivor cults carve zones around dwindling water wells & generator stations.
America becomes a spiderweb of interlocked fiefdoms...
No longer mapped by state lines but by access to fuel, battery, & ammunition.
Foreign powers see the carcass & pick its bones:
China invests in port enclaves on the Gulf, supplying weapons to coastal warlords.
Mexico backs proxy governors in border zones.
Gulf monarchies bankroll fortified agrarian enclaves in the Midwest.
Russia supports militia lords in Arctic territories.
Each fraction behaves like a miniature client state, aligned to foreign sponsors when it suits them, betraying them when it doesn’t.
This isn’t merely a matter of “two sides.”…
It is dozens of fronts bleeding the homeland dry.11
Each front is a war in miniature, with crossfire, shifting alliances, betrayals & massacres:
The whole stage collapses at once… For there are no safe zones, & no ceasefires.
Civilians starve in no-man’s lands;
Children vanish in ghost towns; respiration is war.
Infrastructure is contested:
Warlords hold bridges, water lines are cut for leverage, & hospitals are controlled like fortresses.
The hope of Restoration dies in that collapse.
Flags still wave over broken city halls, but they are props...
The real authority is local, violent, ephemeral.
Institutions vanish into memory…
The Republic doesn’t fail; it simply bleeds out.
The United States becomes a patchwork of warlord domains, animated by desperation rather than ideology or principle...
& when power changes hands, the price is death.
Thus, here is how the end actually feels:
Not a countdown, nor stages, nor even “we’ll fix this after we handle that.”
It comes all at once, simultaneously:
The air smells like hot metal & bad fuel…
Screens go black, A siren wails somewhere that never stops…
You keep thinking there will be a pause, some room to breathe, but there isn’t.
Foreign war, money panic, grid failure, & civil fighting...
They crash into each other like cars on black ice & then keep piling up.
Runways still smouldering from the Gulf strikes, while tankers cough out smoke in the Caribbean… all this as diplomatic personnel are likewise hunted down worldwide.
A treasury auction that doesn’t clear. Banks that are “temporarily” closing branches.
At the same hour, militias shut down the interstate & sheriffs decide the bridge is now a toll.
The governor holds a press conference, but no One is there because the power is out.
Food trucks that don’t arrive…
Diesel that never transits…
Ambulances that no longer respond…
Nothing arrives.
This is the simultaneity that kills:
Each wound makes the next One deeper;
Default feeds riots, riots feed foreign predators, foreign predators feed more default.
There’s no sequencing left to manage; there is no “after.”
The center doesn’t hold because the center no longer exists...
Just transmitters hissing into Silence & people pointing guns at fuel tanks.
America doesn’t die in order… rather, it perishes in chorus.12
Call it the New Dark Age if you have to name it:
Not a movie-esque Hollywood apocalypse...
Just a long dirt-brown evening where engines stay cold & the map dissolves into little wars that never finish:
Ports with new flags, Cities with new borders, & Farming counties that are ruled by whoever owns the last generator.
No victory parades, no peace deals, & no second republic, ever.
Only attrition that grinds the living down until tomorrow looks like a rumour.
The ideologies go with it:
Caesar doesn’t show;
The republic doesn’t get restored;
Moderation doesn’t calm anything down;
The crusaders don’t redeem anything;
The preppers don’t outlast it;
& The tech priests don’t compute their way around missing ore & dead grids.
All that talking was for a world that had slack…
There is no slack now.
There is only the bill coming due...
Everywhere, all at once, without parley & without quarter.
🪖 GAME. OVER! 😎
💥 ☠️ 🕳️ The DOOM Cometh…! ⚰️ 🇺🇸 🔥
✍️ Footnotes 🗒
The GAO’s September 2025 audit of ground vehicle sustainment states plainly that not One of the Army’s eleven major fleets achieved mission-capable goals in fiscal year 2024, & that depot overhauls, which had reached 1,278 in 2015, collapsed to just 12 in 2024.
These shortages are structural:
Namely, they denote parts no longer made, vendors who’ve vanished, industrial skills that have atrophied, & capacity that’s been diverted to allies rather than domestic units.
The report’s neutral phrasing conceals what it truly describes… which is the slow extinction of a war machine by entropy, the paralysis of an empire disguised as an accounting exercise
GAO-25-108679, Weapon System Sustainment: Various Challenges Affect Ground Vehicles’ Availability for Missions, September 2025; https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-108679
In 2023, the U.S. Army missed its annual recruitment target by a whopping 15,000 soldiers, with senior officials admitting that over three-quarters of American youth are ineligible to serve due to obesity, drug use, or criminal records.
At Fort Bragg (recently renamed Fort Liberty & then re-renamed again), over a dozen soldiers were found dead from overdoses in a single year, while homicide cases involving active-duty troops mounted alongside cocaine & ketamine smuggling scandals.
These aren’t isolated incidents but systemic symptoms of collapse: a force unable to reproduce itself, much less project power abroad. Leadership rhetoric cannot reverse demographic decline, cannot erase drug epidemics, & cannot fabricate fitness.
The speeches are made; yet, the engines & the bodies both remain broken.
Department of Defense, Recruiting Challenges Persist for the U.S. Military, 2023; Seth Harp, “Mission Impossible,” Harper’s Magazine, Oct. 2025; https://harpers.org/archive/2025/10/mission-impossible-seth-harp-trump-military-parade/
In 2022, the Department of Defense acknowledged that roughly 99% of its electricity comes from the civilian grid, & that prolonged outages (increasingly common as wildfires, storms, & heat waves stress transmission) pose existential risks to base readiness.
The Department of Energy’s reliability assessments note a rising frequency of “inadequate reserve margins” across multiple regions, with blackouts in California, Texas, & the Midwest showing how fragile the grid has become.
Renewable expansion cannot offset this fragility, since intermittency without storage magnifies the risk.
A Caesar may rise in the Capital, but when the grid fails… he is but a man in the dark.
Department of Defense, Energy Resilience Strategy, 2022; https://climateandsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/2023-Operational-Energy-Strategy.pdf
North American Electric Reliability Corporation [NERC], 2024 Summer Reliability Assessment; https://www.nerc.com/pa/RAPA/ra/Reliability%20Assessments%20DL/NERC_SRA_2024.pdf
From 2022 through 2024, the Department of Defense logged an alarmingly large number of fatal mishaps across nearly every rotorcraft fleet, with the MV-22 Osprey responsible for multiple crashes in Norway, Australia, & the Pacific, leading to repeated fleet stand-downs.
The Army’s own aviation safety reviews recorded a rising rate of helicopter losses even in routine training. At the same Time, GAO reports flagged that modernization programs were failing to deliver replacements on Time or at scale.
Meanwhile, the U.S. drone industry remained a fraction of China’s output, with supply chain bottlenecks leaving US firms unable to meet either military or commercial demand. Together, these figures suggest a force more suitable for museum catalogues than combat.
Ibid., GAO-25-108679, Weapon System Sustainment: Various Challenges Affect Ground Vehicles’ Availability for Missions, September 2025; https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-108679
Paul Schmelzing’s long-run data show real rates in structural decline for over seven centuries, with today’s negative-sum inversion marking the most extreme imbalance yet.
UN demographic projections confirm several waves of fertility collapse across the West, with median ages rising beyond sustainable ratios...
All while climate disaster costs now exceed $300 billion annually in the U.S. alone.
These forces aren’t parallel but convergent:
Fiscal insolvency meets aging populations, climate destruction meets mineral scarcity, & each feedback loop tightens the others.
Policy tinkering is irrelevant in the face of such converging equations.
Paul Schmelzing, Eight centuries of global real interest rates, Bank of England WP 845, 2020; https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/working-paper/2020/eight-centuries-of-global-real-interest-rates-r-g-and-the-suprasecular-decline-1311-2018
United Nations, World Population Prospects, 2024 Revision; https://population.un.org/wpp/
NOAA, Billion-Dollar Weather & Climate Disasters, 2024; https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/
A 2021 Department of Commerce report noted that the U.S. accounted for only 12 percent of global semiconductor production, with advanced chips almost entirely reliant on Taiwan’s TSMC & South Korea’s Samsung.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Geological Survey has repeatedly emphasized that China controls over 70 percent of rare Earth processing capacity, creating a critical vulnerability in defence supply chains.
Shipping chokepoints compound the problem:
The Strait of Malacca carries a third of global trade, & disruptions at Bab el-Mandeb during the Yemen conflict already demonstrated how fragile fuel & component flows can be.
These are structural bottlenecks... not solvable by policy speeches but decisive constraints on overall military readiness & acumen.
U.S. Department of Commerce, Building Resilient Supply Chains, Revitalizing American Manufacturing, June 2021; https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/2021-biden-100-day-supply-chain-review-report/e899e30cb19c764b/full.pdf
U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries, 2024; https://www.usgs.gov/publications/mineral-commodity-summaries-2024
A 2024 strategic assessment warned that U.S. forces are structured for “One major theatre war” & cannot withstand simultaneous, prolonged crises without exhausting stockpiles & personnel.
The report emphasized that adversaries would exploit this by stacking conflicts (missile saturation in the Middle East, naval harassment in the Caribbean, coercion in East Asia, pressure in Europe), forcing the U.S. to collapse under logistical strain rather than battlefield defeat.
War on the Rocks, “America Is Not Prepared for a Protracted War,” Dec. 4, 2024; https://warontherocks.com/2024/12/america-is-not-prepared-for-a-protracted-war/
The Congressional Research Service’s recent report highlights systemic fragility in the defence industrial base, noting “long lead times, sub-tier supplier fragility, procurement instability, & limited domestic production” as core risks to sustainment & readiness.
These aren’t mere marginal issues but existential ones for any power that still imagines politics can substitute for logistics.
CRS; Report R47751, Oct. 12, 2023; https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47751
A recent CSIS analysis underscores that leading-node semiconductors require over 300 materials, many of which the U.S. cannot produce domestically…
& warns that the heavy dependence on China’s control of these inputs converts trade leverage into strategic vulnerability.
CSIS, Mineral Demands for Resilient Semiconductor Supply Chains, May 2024; https://www.csis.org/analysis/mineral-demands-resilient-semiconductor-supply-chains
The Congressional Budget Office’s projected net interest costs exceed defence spending by 2027 & Medicare by 2029, with debt-to-GDP ratios spiralling past wartime highs.
Concurrently, global central banks purchased 1,136 tonnes of gold in 2022–23, the highest two-year total on record, signalling a decisive shift away from USD-denominated reserves.
Exeter’s Pyramid illustrates why:
In systemic crisis, Capital flees from higher, riskier claims (derivatives, equities, sovereign bonds) into the lowest & hardest layer... namely, physical gold & silver. This flight is unprecedented, not at the periphery but in the core.
CBO, Long-Term Budget Outlook, 2025; https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2025-03/61187-Long-Term-Outlook-2025.pdf
World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends 2024; https://www.gold.org/goldhub/research/gold-demand-trends/gold-demand-trends-full-year-2024
Political Science observes that modern civil wars rarely cleave into two monolithic sides;
Instead, they fragment across multiple warring factions, each competing over control, legitimacy, & access to scarce resources (“fractionalized civil war”).
Fragmentation correlates with longer war duration, higher civilian victimization, & fluid alliance patterns that sabotage negotiated settlements.
External sponsorship & cross-border markets intensify splintering by creating independent revenue streams & additional veto players who can spoil ceasefires.
As state capacity collapses, armed groups “govern” through checkpoints, coercive taxation, & protection markets, rather than institutions, producing the shifting fiefdom mosaic described here.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, “Civil Wars,” overview. https://oxfordre.com/politics/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228637-e-337
The core danger of a Polycrisis lies not in the severity of any single disruption, but in the simultaneity of their convergence:
Fiscal collapse, geopolitical conflict, ecological shocks, & infrastructural breakdown strike together, amplifying One another until systems collapse faster than states can respond.
Unlike the sequential crises of earlier eras, where governments could triage, reorganize, & restore stability, the modern world’s dense interconnections mean that a breakdown in One domain metastasizes rapidly:
A financial seizure sparks political unrest, which undermines logistics. Logistics failures then cascade into famine & epidemic, & each new wound deepens the last.
The logic of simultaneity ensures that there is no “after” to plan for...
There’s no recovery period, & no system slack… Only ruthless, compounding attrition.
This is why the New Dark Age isn’t an episodic interruption but a structural condition:
A long twilight where the shocks never end because they cannot be isolated.
World Economic Forum. The Global Risks Report 2025. Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2025. https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-risks-report-2025
Peacetime armies always suck, always fight the last war with the last war’s weapons, always get their asses handed to them at the beginning, until this winnowing brings forth the true men of action. And this is true of peacetime industry as much as the peacetime military.
But yes, also, there are physical constraints without which nothing is possible, you’re right.
Best of the DOOM prose yet.
I agree 100% with every single assertion in this stack.