Fortress America and the People Outside the Gates

A military base keeps its lights on while the neighbouring hospital switches to emergency power. Commanders retain secure communications while families struggle to contact one another. Aircraft remain operational, but the roads carrying food, fuel and medical supplies become unreliable.

This is a scenario against which the Pentagon is preparing. Its FORTRESS America initiative aims to keep military installations functioning when the civilian infrastructure around them fails. The strategic reasoning is understandable. The political question is whether protecting the capacity to fight is being mistaken for protecting the country.

Announced on 30 September, FORTRESS brings together independent energy, stronger defence supply chains, strategic reserves, hardened installations and resilient space and communications capabilities. The official Army account describes an ambition for installations eventually to generate their own power and withstand disruption while continuing to project force abroad.

Despite its defensive name, this is no retreat behind American borders. It is an effort to make overseas military operations less vulnerable to attacks at home.

Developments since the announcement make the programme worth examining beyond its dramatic branding. On 30 October, Breaking Defense reported that Pentagon officials were looking to public-private partnerships to help finance it.

Military services were identifying projects that could attract commercial participation, with officials presenting this as a way to accelerate construction and reduce demands for additional congressional funding.

Private capital does not make public obligations disappear. Investors require returns. Contracts distribute risk, establish payment commitments and determine who controls infrastructure during an emergency. Those arrangements deserve scrutiny before urgency becomes an argument against it.

A secure power system is valuable; a poorly negotiated contract can remain expensive long after the emergency used to justify it has passed.

The programme’s advertised endurance also needs clarification. Reporting on 26 October described an ambition for installations to sustain essential operations independently for at least 90 days, based on documents first reported by Fox News. The War Zone explicitly noted uncertainty over whether the Pentagon spokesperson had confirmed that particular target.

A subsequent government account of infrastructure official Dale Marks’s remarks described installations designed to operate independently of external utilities for 30 days. These may refer to different requirements, but the public record does not establish a single, settled standard.

Neither figure forecasts a nationwide blackout. Planning for a contingency does not establish its imminence. Nor does an announced capability mean it has been funded, built or tested. Readiness has to be demonstrated through performance. A long acronym and an ambitious timetable are cheaper to produce than an independent power system.

There are sound reasons to take the underlying threat seriously. In their joint advisory on Volt Typhoon, American cybersecurity agencies assessed that Chinese state-sponsored actors had penetrated critical infrastructure networks to position themselves for possible disruption. The affected sectors included communications, energy, transport and water. The agencies distinguished this activity from conventional intelligence gathering.

Such operations change the geography of military vulnerability. An adversary need not destroy an aircraft if it can interrupt the systems required to fuel, maintain and dispatch it. A cyber operation against a civilian utility could delay mobilization without resembling a conventional attack on a military target.

A disruption to satellite navigation or communications could affect military operations and civilian services simultaneously.

The oceans still matter. So do distance, terrain and physical access. But they offer little protection against malicious access already established inside a domestic network. The distinction between a distant theatre of war and a secure home front becomes harder to maintain when both depend on connected infrastructure.

Conventional measures of military power conceal much of this dependence. Aircraft carriers and advanced weapons draw attention; substations, water pumps and maintenance contractors rarely do. Yet sophisticated forces cannot function for long without them.

FORTRESS recognizes that dependence and seeks to reduce an adversary’s ability to exploit it.

Independent power and alternative communications could strengthen deterrence by making disruption less effective against military operations. If an attack cannot prevent a force from deploying or communicating, its strategic value falls.

Keeping military systems operational can protect civilians too, including by preserving defence, logistics and emergency assistance. A base generating its own electricity may reduce pressure on a damaged public grid.

Criticism should acknowledge those benefits. What does not follow is that military continuity automatically produces national resilience. A base can sustain essential operations while its surrounding community loses safe water, refrigeration and medical care.

Whether investment in that base strengthens the community depends on its design. Can local hospitals receive emergency power? Are water and transport plans coordinated with civilian authorities? Who decides how scarce resources are allocated?

Without answers, the promise to protect the homeland remains broader than the capability being purchased.

Civilian emergency capacity makes this more than a hypothetical concern. An August 2026 Government Accountability Office report found that more than 4,300 employees had left the Federal Emergency Management Agency during fiscal 2025. The departures cost experience and institutional knowledge.

The report also found that FEMA had rescinded its strategic plan and made workforce decisions without adequately assessing the staffing required to fulfil its mission.

These findings do not prove that FORTRESS caused civilian retrenchment. They expose competing approaches to preparedness within the same state: An ambitious programme to insulate military operations from disruption, alongside weaknesses in the institution responsible for helping people through disasters.

Experienced emergency personnel and administrative capacity cannot be summoned at the moment a hurricane or cyberattack overwhelms local services.

Britain’s recent experience brings the household side of this debate into focus. Its Be Ready campaign, launched on 22 October, encourages families to prepare for three days of disruption to essential services.

The guidance covers severe weather and interruptions to electricity, water and communications. Much of it updates advice available since 2024. It should not be presented as a newly discovered countdown to war.

The European Commission’s preparedness strategy similarly promotes a minimum of 72 hours of household self-sufficiency, alongside early warnings, public education and stronger civilian and military preparedness. Governments are acknowledging that services normally taken for granted can fail together, whether through hostile action, extreme weather or cascading infrastructure problems.

There is a reasonable public-service argument behind household preparation. If families able to manage a short interruption have essential supplies, emergency workers can concentrate on people who cannot. British guidance includes free measures, such as registering for additional utility support, and explicitly recognizes people in insecure housing and those using food banks. Describing this simply as the state telling everyone to fend for themselves would miss that purpose.

Whether the policy works depends on what happens beyond the checklist. Can an older person living alone obtain water if the lifts stop? Who checks on someone using electrically powered medical equipment?

Can a family already struggling to buy this week’s food afford a reserve for next week’s emergency? A cupboard containing three days of supplies is useful. It cannot replace a functioning local authority or a properly staffed emergency service.

The public response shows how quickly preparedness becomes a commercial event. Reporting citing BBC Newsnight described increased sales of tinned food at Iceland and rises in demand for radios, torches and power banks at other retailers. These are retailers’ figures, not a national measure of readiness. They show that some people went shopping; they do not establish that those most exposed to disruption became safer.

Increased sales are easier to count than the practical ability to survive a prolonged outage. A household may own an emergency radio but have no accessible evacuation route.

Another may have bottled water but no way to keep essential medicines refrigerated. Treating the purchase of equipment as a substitute for public capacity risks making preparedness another privilege distributed by income.

Britain’s household guidance and America’s military programme should therefore not be reduced to a comparison between three days and three months. Families and installations have different responsibilities, and the American endurance targets still require clarification.

The more revealing comparison concerns the support surrounding each: Dedicated power, contracts and technical planning for military installations; public services, community networks and targeted assistance for households. Both require sustained investment.

An adversary seeking to weaken a country need not defeat its armed forces outright. Prolonged disruption can exhaust public services, deepen inequality and erode confidence in government. Civilian infrastructure contributes to deterrence because a population able to withstand disruption is harder to intimidate. Neglecting that infrastructure while hardening military facilities leaves an opening that no perimeter fence can close.

The promise of national self-sufficiency also deserves examination. Reducing dependence on a vulnerable supplier is sensible. Attempting to reproduce every essential input within one country can create new concentrations of risk.

A domestic factory is not automatically resilient to flooding, equipment failure or cyber intrusion. Reliable alternatives matter more than patriotic labels. Allied production, multiple suppliers, repair capacity and stockpiles can offer greater protection than a single national source.

Nor should every infrastructure failure be interpreted as enemy action. Ageing equipment, poor maintenance, corporate negligence and extreme weather can produce disruption without foreign intervention. National-security language must not become a convenient way to avoid responsibility for failures that governments and utilities could have prevented.

A state needs the capacity to investigate sabotage without discovering a foreign conspiracy in every neglected substation.

FORTRESS will remain dependent on the society beyond its gates. Military personnel have families outside the perimeter. Contractors travel on public roads. Manufacturers employ workers whose homes need water and electricity.

A base surrounded by prolonged social breakdown cannot remain an autonomous island indefinitely. Protecting the surrounding community is an operational necessity as well as a public obligation.

Congress should judge the programme through measurable requirements, transparent costs and independent testing. Private financing should come with disclosure of long-term liabilities and emergency responsibilities. Civilian authorities need resources and an explicit role in planning, rather than an assumption that military investment will somehow benefit everyone.

The Pentagon is right to recognize that an army can be disabled through the infrastructure supporting it. The weakness would be to secure the army while neglecting that infrastructure’s other users.

The test of FORTRESS America is not whether commanders can keep operating after everyone else has stopped. It is whether defence planning helps prevent everyone else from stopping in the first place.

Dr Lubna Ferdowsi is an academic, researcher and geopolitical analyst.