Accidents and crime happen, all the time in fact, and generally the American public barely takes notice of the number of such events that occur on a monthly basis. The reason for this is because the vast majority of incidents don’t lead to economic and infrastructure damage on a large scale. A disaster has to be pretty extensive to get the attention of the public and usually that attention doesn’t last long because most people are still able to go on with their day without much inconvenience.

But let’s say you are a villain; a terrorist or a social engineer (same thing). Let’s say you are a person or group with malicious intent and you have deliberately set out to destroy a country, or a society or a civilization. Do you try to do this with a single elaborately planned event? Probably not. Instead, you would coordinate and encourage thousands of smaller acts of sabotage that go largely unnoticed by the population until infrastructure breaks down and the country is in ruins.

The concept is actually rather common – We see it in the covert instigation of civil unrest and color revolutions throughout history. We have seen it in the US with groups like the leftist/communist “Weather Underground” in the 1970s. Such plans were executed broadly by western governments in Europe under Operation Gladio, which was exposed in the 1990s.

An interesting fictional example of this idea is the movie ‘Invasion USA’ starring Chuck Norris, about a communist network using America’s open borders to sneak thousands of foreign agents into the country. They then coordinate a series of infrastructure and terror attacks nationwide in order to expedite a civil breakdown and economic crash.