A new story

I started a new writing project, which hopefully will become an actual novel.  The setting is the near future, 25-50 years forward or so, although I haven't fully decided.  There will be three main story lines focusing on upper level government intrigues, civilians trying to make ends meet and a military unit.  Each are struggling with a high-tech post-scarcity world.  Here is the first section.  It isn't polished up yet, so just give it a read and let me know what you think so far.

Private Mark Wabash leaned forward along the sun-baked crumbling ruins of a wall that used to be the side of an upper-middle class townhouse.  It seemed odd to him to see the remains of people’s lives scattered about the streets.  It must have been a rather nice little town, just a few short minutes outside a major commercial hub, central Europe’s answer to the suburbs.  He found it hard to not imagine his own hometown torn into large swaths of pre-defined battle zones, the broken backs of buildings roasting, collapsed in heaps, in the summer sun, carefully calculated to block the greatest numbers of unauthorized routes.

It wasn’t like what he had seen in his school’s historical databases of the mass destruction from the Second World War, the first pinpoint strikes in the Greater Middle Eastern conflicts or even the tactical policing actions in major US cities during the Occupy War.  The damage to those structures was clearly collateral, unplanned, and maybe even accidental.  The scene around him was a nearly perfect execution of battle-space sculpting; each desiccated wall served a purpose.