Fortress America: the Pentagon is getting ready to stand alone

What the government announced

On September 30, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood in front of several hundred officers and enlisted troops at Marine Corps Base Quantico and launched a program with a name that reads like a mission statement: FORTRESS America. The letters stand for Federal Operations for Resilience, Troop Resources, Energy, Supply and Survivability. Hegseth called it “the nation’s insurance policy,” and said its purpose was to make sure the country cannot be “starved out, shut down, or cut off.”

A signed memo went out the same day. According to The War Zone, which quoted it, the memo orders the Under Secretary for Acquisition and Sustainment to “stand up the FORTRESS America Program Office within thirty (30) days” and describes a program that “aligns basing and infrastructure projects to ensure they are collectively advancing toward greater independence.” The department’s announcement, as quoted by the law firm Pillsbury in its analysis, set the headline goal plainly: “every major U.S. military installation to generate independent power.” Hegseth’s own summary was just as direct: “our bases stay lit, our aircraft keep flying, our command centers never go dark.”

The five pillars

The program rests on five pillars, which together read like a checklist for surviving a long emergency.

Energy independence comes first. Bases are to make their own electricity with microgrids, large batteries and, eventually, small nuclear reactors. Fortune reported that the Army announced up to $2.2 billion in microreactor awards for five bases in August.

Second is the supply chain. The plan calls for at least two separate ways to get every critical part or material, so that one broken link cannot stop the whole chain. It lines up with a July executive order requiring military components to come from American or allied sources.

Third is a strategic defense reserve. The department’s announcement lists munitions, fuel, medicine and blood. Fortune’s reporting adds minerals, electronics and spare parts.

Fourth is hardening: physical protection for installations, defenses against drones, and cyber security for the control systems that run power and water.

Fifth is space and spectrum, meaning backups for communications and navigation if satellites or GPS signals are jammed or lost.

The 90-day number

The figure that caught the public’s attention came later. Fox News Digital reported that internal planning documents call for every major base in the continental United States to “sustain essential operations independently for at least 90 days,” and that the standard covers not only electricity but water, fuel and communications.

That number deserves an honest asterisk. The War Zone noted it was unclear whether the Pentagon had formally confirmed the 90-day target. A senior defense official told reporters that roughly 500 installations are still being assessed, that some pillars “may take years,” and that the department is still working out what it will cost. Air & Space Forces Magazine estimated the bill could run to “scores of billions of dollars, if not hundreds of billions.” The Center for Strategic and International Studies called some of the goals “extremely ambitious.”

But the same official was clear about the urgency: “This is not a wait-and-see kind of a thing.”

What the Pentagon says it is afraid of

Officials have been careful not to name an enemy, but they have been plain about the danger. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell called relying on the civilian grid “an intolerable risk” and summed up the thinking in four words: “Power is combat now.” He described FORTRESS as “strategic deterrence in action, ensuring our defenses are hardened, proactive, and ready.”

The government’s own documents explain why. In February 2024, CISA, the NSA and the FBI issued a joint advisory warning that a hacking group working for the Chinese state, which the agencies call Volt Typhoon, had broken into American critical infrastructure. The agencies said they “assess with high confidence that Volt Typhoon actors are pre-positioning themselves on IT networks” in order “to enable lateral movement to OT assets to disrupt functions.” In plain English: they were getting into the computer networks that run real equipment, so they could switch it off later. The sectors named were communications, energy, transportation, and water and wastewater.

Reporting by The War Zone adds the rest of the list: aging power lines, long outages from natural disasters, cheap weaponized drones, and the memory of the 2021 Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack that left gas stations dry along the East Coast.

Reading between the lines

Here is the part that should make every family stop and think. The clearest warning about FORTRESS America did not come in the memo. It came from Ravi Chaudhary, a former Air Force assistant secretary for installations, speaking to Air & Space Forces Magazine: “The attack, as we know it, will not look like an attack.” And then: “Our adversaries are going to start with making it hard to get on base, and they’ll go for the softest targets they can, which won’t be military.”

The softest targets are not behind a fence with armed guards. They are the substation down your road, the water plant that serves your town, the pipeline that fills your gas station and the cell tower on the hill. FORTRESS America is the military building a wall around its own power, water, fuel and supplies. Your house is on the other side of that wall.

Now look at what the rest of us are being told. Ready.gov, run by the Department of Homeland Security, asks families to keep supplies for “several days.” FEMA’s latest public reminder was a Halloween-themed post about making an emergency plan. Britain’s new campaign asks for three days. The Pentagon is planning for ninety.

None of this means an attack is scheduled. Officials insist FORTRESS is about deterrence and readiness, and that may be exactly right. But Hegseth chose his words carefully. He called it an insurance policy. Nobody buys insurance after the house catches fire. You buy it because you have looked at the risks and decided you cannot afford to be caught without it. That is the reasoning the government is applying to its bases. It is the same reasoning every household should apply to its own home.

Follow suit: build your own fortress

You do not need a microreactor. You need the same five pillars, sized for a family.

Energy: keep charged power banks for every phone, LED lanterns and spare batteries, and if you can afford it, a portable power station or a generator you know how to run safely outdoors. A medical device that depends on electricity comes first.

Supply chain: have more than one way to get what you need. Keep cash in small bills, know which nearby stores and farms might stay open, and keep a full tank of gas when trouble is in the news.

Strategic reserve: store at least a gallon of water per person per day and food your family will actually eat. Start with three days, build to two weeks, and go beyond that if you can. Keep extra prescription medicine, a first aid kit, and copies of important documents.

Hardening: test your smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, know how to shut off your water and gas, and protect your digital life with strong passwords, two-step sign-in, software updates and backups. Volt Typhoon is a reminder that the next emergency may start on a screen.

Communications: write your important phone numbers on paper, choose a meeting place, pick an out-of-town contact, and keep a battery or hand-crank radio that receives NOAA weather broadcasts.

Our free Field Guide at afterlightnews.com/guides walks through each of these step by step.

The bottom line

The Pentagon has looked at the threats to this country and concluded that its bases must be able to stand alone for months. It is spending what may become hundreds of billions of dollars on that conclusion. You can read that as a technical upgrade, or you can read it the way it deserves to be read: as the clearest signal yet that the people paid to think about the worst case are taking it seriously. Take the hint. Build your household’s fortress now, calmly and steadily, while the shelves are full and the lights are on.