The Pentagon has drafted a sweeping new initiative called FORTRESS that would require every major U.S. Military installation to operate independently for at least 90 days without outside support.
Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson who led the FORTRESS effort, said the plan was born from a stark reassessment of homeland defense assumptions. “I realized that a lot of the way we think about homeland defense was built around the antiquated assumption that two oceans would protect us,” he said.
Parnell tied the new strategy directly to the Trump administration’s broader strategic pivot. “President Trump understands that world is gone, and he’s already paved the way for new thinking: Golden Dome, a renewed focus on the Western Hemisphere, Greenland, Panama,” he said.
The initiative’s core concern is the military’s deep dependence on civilian power grids, which currently sustain communications, logistics, weapons manufacturing and basic command structures. “Power is combat now. Without electricity, you lose communications, water, logistics, assembly lines and just basic military command structures,” Parnell said.
To sever that vulnerability, FORTRESS envisions portable nuclear reactors, large-scale battery storage and self-contained microgrids that can disconnect bases entirely from civilian electrical infrastructure during prolonged disruptions.
The plan also anticipates catastrophic fractures in global supply chains that deliver weapons, equipment and critical materials to American forces. “The next conflict will likely be fought on multiple fronts. Look at the geopolitics behind any major war. When that happens, global supply chains will break,” Parnell warned.
FORTRESS mandates strategic stockpiles of munitions, fuel, critical minerals, electronics, spare parts and medical supplies to sustain operations when international routes fail or domestic manufacturers cannot meet wartime demand. For the most critical needs, the plan requires at least two qualified supply or production pathways, ensuring the loss of a single factory or supplier cannot halt operations.
Civilian manufacturing capacity is woven into the blueprint through the Civil Reserve Manufacturing Network, an existing program now absorbed into FORTRESS. The Pentagon will identify commercial factories capable of converting to defense production during crisis, establishing technical specifications, cybersecurity protections, contracting arrangements and conversion procedures in advance.
The initiative further calls for recurring industrial stress tests and mobilization exercises to verify whether manufacturers could maintain production through extended disruptions. Communications, navigation and satellite capabilities would be hardened against interference, with contingency preparations for operations if GPS signals are jammed or space-based assets are compromised.
Parnell emphasized the urgency of settling these arrangements before any conflict erupts. “You don’t want to be making these decisions in the middle of a global multi-front conflict. We have to have a plan,” he said.
The FORTRESS requirement marks a significant departure from decades of military planning that assumed American homeland installations could reliably draw on surrounding civilian infrastructure and global supply networks during emergencies.
Parnell distilled the initiative’s guiding principle in blunt terms: “We don’t want to rely on standard civilian municipal infrastructure to run our national defense. We simply can’t. It’s an intolerable risk,” he said.
The FORTRESS plan continues to be developed within the Defense Department as officials work through implementation timelines for its various components.