Silent Fracture: AI, Cyber War and the Next American Conflict

Define the terms, then test the story. This course teaches, at a strategic level, how a rogue AI agent or a hostile nation-state could use artificial intelligence and cyber operations to push the United States toward at least a low-intensity civil conflict, and how citizens and institutions recognize warning signs and build resilience. Zac Northup’s novel REMNANT: The Boreasby Blueprint is the literary baseline. Students read it as fiction and test it against official reports, indictments, infrastructure records, Soviet-era active measures, and the record of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, including how that conflict ended.

Analysis and defense, not a prediction and not a manual. The work stays at the level of aims, warning signs, precedents, and defenses. It does not teach attack methods, name targets for harm, introduce tools, or include code. Assessments are reasoned judgments that can turn out wrong. Students name trade-offs, steel-man the case that American institutions would hold, and judge every actor by the same standard of evidence.

A defensive capstone. Each student writes a short resilience brief or a warning-signs dashboard with testable indicators, a steel-manned objection, and an explicit trade-off. Chapters 7–10 of REMNANT are required reading in Lesson 10, read as fiction and tested against the Code of Conduct and the official American POW record from Korea and Vietnam.