The Pentagon is developing a requirement that every major U.S. military installation in the continental United States be able to sustain essential operations on its own for at least 90 days, according to internal planning documents reviewed by Fox News Digital.
The requirement sits under FORTRESS — short for Federal Operations for Resilience, Troop Resources, Energy, Supply, and Survivability — an initiative unveiled by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in his September 30 “State of the Force” address. A follow-up memo laid out a dedicated program office and expanded the goal beyond electricity to water, fuel and communications.
“Power is combat now”
The thinking behind the plan is blunt. Pentagon chief spokesperson Sean Parnell, who leads the initiative, told Fox News Digital: “We don’t want to rely on standard civilian municipal infrastructure to run our national defense. We just simply can’t. It’s an intolerable risk.”
“Power is combat now. Without electricity, you lose communications, water, logistics, assembly lines and just basic military command structures,” Parnell said.
The premise is a break from the post-Cold War assumption that two oceans shield the American homeland during a major war. Planners now assume a major conflict could knock out civilian power grids, break global supply chains and put critical infrastructure on U.S. soil at risk — through cyberattacks, sabotage and other hybrid threats.
What 90 days of independence takes
Meeting the standard means far more than backup generators, which run out of fuel within days. The plan envisions portable nuclear reactors, large-scale battery storage and microgrids that can disconnect installations from the civilian grid and keep running through prolonged outages.
The Army has already moved in this direction, announcing up to $2.2 billion in awards in August to build nuclear microreactors at five bases, including Fort Bragg and Fort Hood.
FORTRESS also calls for strategic reserves of munitions, fuel, critical minerals, electronics, spare parts and medical supplies, set against wartime burn rates. Each critical item would need at least two qualified domestic supply or production routes, so the loss of a single factory cannot halt operations. Through a Civil Reserve Manufacturing Network, the Pentagon plans to identify commercial factories that could shift to defense production in a crisis, with specifications, cybersecurity protections and contracting arrangements worked out in advance.
No price tag, no deadline — yet
The Pentagon has not released a cost estimate or a completion timeline. A senior defense official told the Defense Writers Group on October 20 that officials are still assessing the energy needs of roughly 500 installations in the continental United States. Air & Space Forces Magazine has estimated that fully meeting the goal could take decades and cost tens of billions of dollars, if not hundreds of billions.
Energy resilience is being prioritized first, with solutions tailored to each installation — microgrids and battery storage among them. “This is not a wait-and-see kind of a thing,” the senior official said at the roundtable. “We want to move out pretty quickly.”
The contrast with civilian preparedness is stark: while bases would be expected to last 90 days, Britain’s new Be Ready campaign, launched October 22, advises households to keep just three days of supplies.
Sources: Fox News Digital reporting on internal Pentagon planning documents (Oct. 25, 2026); Defense Writers Group roundtable remarks by a senior defense official (Oct. 20, 2026); Air & Space Forces Magazine cost assessment; Fortune summary of the Fox News Digital report (Oct. 26, 2026).
