America’s Attack on the Enemy Within: Victory for the Dark Quad’s Political Warfare Strategy
President Trump’s 30 September 2025 call to “deploy the military to American cities to fight the enemy within,” together with the Department of War’s institutional steps to teach irregular-warfare methods for homeland application, hands a strategic and symbolic, victory to our authoritarian adversaries. The rising public tolerance for political violence, captured in a new PBS NewsHour / NPR / Marist poll, demonstrates a dangerous domestic trajectory: if Americans convince themselves that violence may be necessary to “set the country on track,” they may be producing the very “enemy within” that political leaders claim to fear. By normalizing domestic militarization and securitization of political conflict, the United States risks validating the “Dark Quad’s” playbook and accelerating the inward turn adversaries hope to cause. This paper offers an alternative path that defends the republic without surrendering democratic and American norms.
The Twin Developments: Rhetoric and Institutional Change
On 30 September 2025, along with the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, President Trump addressed an unprecedented assembly of senior military leaders at Marine Corps Base Quantico and framed part of the national threat as an “enemy within.” Trump advocated that the military use U.S. cities as a “training ground.” While this could be interpreted as hyperbole, reporting and transcript excerpts make clear that the speech urged a closer marriage of domestic security and military resources. This message, when issued from the White House podium, lowers political and bureaucratic barriers that previously separated homeland governance from combat operations. Almost concurrently, the Department of War’s Irregular Warfare Center (IWC) launched a course titled Irregular Warfare Approaches for the Homeland, designed to teach counter-threat-network, counter-threat-finance, and other irregular-warfare practices oriented toward the domestic context. The IWC describes the course as a practical, self-paced curriculum intended to help homeland security professionals and military personnel understand and counter hybrid threats on U.S. soil. The combination of presidential rhetoric and institutional education is consequential: public political signaling can alter norms and expectations, while institutional training converts rhetoric into doctrine and habit.
The PBS poll: A Wake-up Call and Validation for Adversaries
On October 1, 2025 PBS NewsHour (reporting on a PBS News/NPR/Marist poll) found that nearly a third of Americans now say political violence may be necessary to “get the country back on track,” up substantially from 19 percent in April 2024. The poll’s authors and experts warn that rising acceptance of political violence is translating into actual attacks, a trend made more alarming by recent high-profile killings by the extreme left and extreme right. These results should be a wakeup call. Political violence is not the answer. Is the political divide in the U.S. and the heated rhetoric from the extreme left and right creating the “enemy within?” Is the rhetoric of “enemy within” a self-fulfilling prophecy? Will we normalize political violence? These are questions that leaders, the press, and citizens must urgently ask because the data makes the answers urgent. When a substantial minority of the population moves from grievance to toleration of violence, the probability of violent escalation, and the likelihood that political elites will exploit such fear, increases. That creates a fertile environment for adversaries’ political warfare strategies to bear fruit.
Why the “Dark Quad” – China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea – Benefits
The authoritarian quartet, or axis, labeled here as the “Dark Quad” is doctrinally and operationally invested in political warfare. In China, the CCP’s Three Warfares (psychological, legal, and media warfare) and the broader Unrestricted Warfare concept emphasize non-kinetic means to shape adversary perceptions and political will. Russia’s “new generation” warfare doctrines emphasize inner decay, information dominance, and proxy and hybrid operations designed to exacerbate political cleavages. Iran and North Korea have long practiced low-footprint, partner-based forms of political and unconventional warfare to coerce and influence. Each of these actors seeks to convert social division within democratic societies into strategic advantage. Unrestricted Warfare and axis doctrine make the objective explicit: exploit an opponent’s political plurality and legal constraints to achieve strategic goals without conventional battle.
This is not abstract theory, it is the playbook the “Dark Quad” applies daily through disinformation, influence operations, and proxy networks.
Congress Recognized Unconventional Warfare Risk in 2016
Congress in the FY-2016 NDAA directed the then-Secretary of Defense to develop a strategy to counter unconventional warfare threats. Sec. 1097 required the Department of Defense to articulate activities that constitute unconventional warfare, clarify DoD roles for indication and warning, and recommend improvements in authorities and interagency coordination. That congressional mandate reflects a sober judgment: unconventional threats are real and the U.S. must prepare. But Congress also implied the need for careful role definition and civil-military boundaries; the statute’s logic expects a whole-of-government solution, not militarization of ordinary politics.
If only the then-Department of Defense had executed Congress’ intent and developed a strategy to counter the “Dark Quad’s” unconventional warfare.
Does Normalization of Domestic Militarization Become Self-fulfilling?
Political leaders and the public should ask” “Do we hate fellow Americans more than we fear the Dark Quad? Who are the real enemies?” These questions highlight the central moral and political crisis we face. The risk is that political and security elites will treat fellow citizens as enemies until they behave like enemies. This is a classic self-fulfilling prophecy: labeling a group as a security threat invites surveillance, exclusion, and coercion. These measures produce resentment, radicalization, and, in some cases, violent reaction, which then validates the original label. Adversaries read and harvest these dynamics. The PBS poll is not only evidence of a domestic trend; it is a strategic datapoint adversaries will cite and amplify. When foreign propagandists observe that a high proportion of Americans say violence may be necessary, they interpret it as confirmation that their political warfare investments are working.
Certainly, Americans have grievances. That is a fundamental political condition. Political leaders must sufficiently address grievances or face rejection on election day. However, what we see in America today are not political grievances requiring compromise to reduce. We see exaggerated grievances. We see those grievances magnified by our adversaries through social media in very effective ways that cause Americans to blame those with different political beliefs for the perceived ills of the nation. In short, we see “exaggerated grievances communicated well,” the effect of which is to create wide political divisions among Americans. This is the essence of irregular, unconventional, political, revolutionary, and insurgent warfare. Our actions are creating success for our enemies.
Defensive Alternatives that Avoid Yielding Strategic Advantage
There are four fundamental steps that political leaders and citizens alike must appreciate. First, we must recognize that the threat is external and that our adversaries are executing a political warfare strategy against us. Second, we must understand that the threat strategy is to exploit normal political grievances by exaggerating them to subvert the American political structure and society writ large. Third, we must expose these strategies to inoculate the American public against them and render them neutered. Finally, we must attack the strategies of the “Dark Quad” with a superior political warfare strategy much as we did during the Cold War.
While critics will say the Cold War strategies and activities are an anachronism, the best evidence on their effectiveness comes from China’s Xinhua Institute. It recently publish a report entitled, “Colonization of the Mind—The Means, Roots, and Global Perils of U.S. Cognitive Warfare.” Although it is written to criticize past U.S. efforts, in reality it is describing how effective US activities have been and these are actually a threat to China in the cognitive or human domain.
Here are specific actions to respond to unconventional threats without conceding victory to the “Dark Quad”:
- Preserve civilian primacy and legal limits. Reaffirm and, if necessary, tighten Posse Comitatus boundaries. Make it explicit that the U.S. military does not, and will not, serve as an instrument of partisan political control. Any support to domestic authorities must be narrowly authorized, temporary, and under civilian oversight. Congress’s Sec. 1097 should be implemented through a civil-centered, interagency structure.
- Treat law enforcement as the lead with DoD only in support. Maintain law enforcement responsibility for domestic crime and political violence, using DoD capabilities only for technical support (forensics, logistics, cyber capabilities) under strict legal and oversight frameworks.
- Invest in civic resilience and strategic communications. Counter political warfare narratives with credible, accurate and truthful nonpartisan information campaigns, support local civic institutions, and fund media-literacy programs. Build rapid, transparent rebuttal capacity that does not censor speech but rather inoculates communities against disinformation.
- Reform training and doctrine. Keep IWC and related education but reorient their content toward legal constraints, civil-military relations, and resilience rather than any perception of “combatting citizens.” Courses must explicitly teach the strategic costs of domestic militarization and how adversary political warfare exploits it. Develop an American way of political warfare.
- Public transparency and de-escalatory political leadership. Political leaders should speak out against political violence, disavow punitive militarized rhetoric, and demonstrate a commitment to democratic contestation. Politicians must ask and answer the central question publicly: who are the real enemies?
All Americans must understand that calling fellow Americans the enemy or participating in political violence against fellow Americans or the U.S. government and its institutions is exactly the effect the “Dark Quad” is trying to achieve. Anyone who does so is complicit in the enemy’s political warfare strategy either wittingly or at the least as a “useful idiot.”
Conclusion: A Strategic and Moral Imperative
The PBS poll is a clarion call. Rising public tolerance for political violence, coupled with political leaders’ calls to use military force at home and the institutionalization of irregular-warfare concepts for the homeland, does more than raise alarms; it delivers a strategic gift to authoritarian adversaries. The “enemy within” frame may rapidly become a self-fulfilling prophecy if policymakers, military leaders, and institutions fail to draw a bright line between defending the homeland and waging war on fellow citizens.
We must respond vigorously to foreign political warfare threats, but we must do so on terms that preserve the character of our federal democratic republic. Doing otherwise will hand the “Dark Quad” a victory earned not by their missiles or money, but by our own erosion of the democratic norms and institutions that make American power legitimate and durable.
Although the Trump administration has not published a new National Security Strategy, we should hope that one paragraph from the 2017 strategy will be reprised. All Americans across the political spectrum should rally around these words and focus on our external enemies versus our internal political divisions:
A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation.
