Pentagon Wants Bases to Run Alone for 90 Days

The Pentagon reportedly wants its major bases ready to run on their own power, water and fuel for 90 days if the outside world goes dark. The idea has stirred up alarm on X and other social media.

The old assumption that two oceans protect the US clearly no longer holds, and the era of complacency is pretty much over since a while now, but the plan comes with no funding and no project list, so it is still a rough sketch.

For now it is a plan to make a plan, and that's it. A senior defense official said the first job is to assess about 500 continental bases to learn what the work will cost. That can take a while and does not suggest officials think doom is imminent.

What the memo says, and what it doesn't

Defense Secretary Hegseth's memo sets up FORTRESS America and names five pillars: energy independence, supply chain and industrial base resilience, a strategic defense reserve, installation hardening and cyber resilience, and space and spectrum resilience.

What the memo leaves out is the most important detail: money. A trade report on it notes no funding total and no list of individual projects, and a contractor guide to the memo says no budget was allocated up front, with future program budgets to follow through the five-year plan, which is to be expected early to mid 2027.

The 90-day standard itself comes from Fox News, which said it reviewed documents. That number is nowhere to be found in the public memo summaries. In his speech, Hegseth said instead that every major base will generate its own power, with no time limit attached. That sounds far less dramatic, because without a number there is nothing tangible to picture. "Ninety days without outside help" is a siege, while "energy independence" is a clean common-sense policy goal.

Why there is no money yet

First, nobody knows the cost. Officials are still checking about 500 bases to see what the work would cost. At best that takes months. Done properly, it takes years.

Second, the timing is bad. The White House sent its fiscal year 2027 budget request to Congress in the spring, months before FORTRESS existed. The new budget year began October 1, and Congress has not passed its regular spending bills. Instead it passed a temporary stopgap bill that keeps the government running through December 11 at last year's spending levels. Stopgap bills generally block new programs, so a new FORTRESS line is hard to start until Congress passes a full-year bill.

Third, Congress is already fighting over money the White House asked for. The White House wants $1.5 trillion for national defense in fiscal year 2027. Of that, $1.15 trillion is the regular budget. The other $350 billion would go through a shortcut called reconciliation, which lets the majority party pass spending in the Senate with 51 votes instead of the usual 60, so it does not need the other party's help. That $350 billion was pitched for the Golden Dome missile shield, munitions and shipbuilding, so FORTRESS would have to compete with them. And the money is far from certain: the House version carries only $60 billion to $73 billion for defense, depending on the report, and Senate appropriators have said another defense reconciliation bill is unlikely.

Where the money could come from

Three sources of money are realistic. The most immediate is money that already exists. The Pentagon has a military construction program, the Energy Resilience and Conservation Investment Program, that pays for base power projects. Its fiscal year 2026 request covered 14 projects costing $684 million. The Army Corps of Engineers also has a $2 billion, 10-year contract pool for energy resilience work. These programs predate FORTRESS and do not need a new budget line, so early work can run on them while the bigger money question stays open. They are small next to the likely bill, though and are not able to cover 500 bases.

The second is the budget the White House proposes for fiscal year 2028, which runs from October 1, 2027 to September 30, 2028. The proposal itself comes out in early 2027. It is the first time the Pentagon can put a price on FORTRESS and spread it across its five-year spending plan, which is what the memo says it intends to do.

The third is private money, which changes how the bill shows up. Under Janus, the Army's program to put small nuclear reactors on its bases, the government pays the builder as it hits milestones, while the company puts in its own capital, owns the reactor and runs it. About $2.2 billion is planned for Janus from fiscal year 2027 through 2031. The cost arrives as contract payments over several years, not as one big line in the budget. That makes it harder to see and easier to start. The Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital, which asked for more than $20 billion in loan money for fiscal year 2027, lends to makers of critical technology. However, this seems a poor fit for supplying base power to military installations.

So here is the most likely path: The FORTRESS program office is due October 30, 2026. Expect an organization chart and a plan at most, not money. Over the winter, the House and Senate will settle the annual defense policy bill. It can add rules and reporting demands for base energy, but it does not hand out money either.

Next comes the White House's budget proposal for fiscal year 2028. By law it is due on February 1, 2027, though recent ones have run late. This is where you may see the first tangible numbers. But that proposal is built from five-year spending plans the military services filed in summer 2026, before FORTRESS existed, so detailed FORTRESS allocations may have to wait. The plans the services file in summer 2027 feed the fiscal year 2029 request, which comes in early 2028, and that is where specific allocations most likely show up.

Another thing to look out for: the law sets a goal that critical missions have power available 99.9 percent of the time by 2030. If the Pentagon expects to miss that goal, it owes Congress a report within 90 days after fiscal year 2027 ends, which falls in late December 2027. That would be the first official look at the gap.

Consider also that even when money eventually arrives, building takes years, and the US is not very good at energy build-outs, as history shows. A senior Pentagon installations official told Senate appropriators that projects can take up to four years to finish after they are funded.

Bottom line: So far, FORTRESS does not suggest in any shape or form that the government believes doom is imminent. Much more likely it turns out to be a bureaucratic monster that takes many years to get US installations ready for a war-like scenario on domestic soil.