Preparedness · Emergency Planning

During the Cold War, America's doomsday planning looked like something out of a movie. The picture most people carried was NORAD's command center inside Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado: blast doors swinging shut, leaders sheltered under a thick layer of granite, the country carrying on from underground.

That vision was dramatic. It was also simple. The goal was to survive the first hour.

The Pentagon's newest plan asks a different question. Not "Can we survive the blast?" but "Can we get through the Tuesday after, and the 89 days after that?" It turns out to be a useful question for a household, too.

Ninety Days, No Outside Help

The plan is called Fortress, short for Federal Operations for Resilience, Troop Resources, Energy Supply, and Survivability. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced it on Sept. 30, saying major military bases should make their own power instead of relying on the civilian grid. A follow-up memo set up a program office to run it.

Then came the number that caught people's attention. On Oct. 25, Fox News Digital reported that, according to internal planning documents, the Pentagon is drafting a requirement for every major base in the continental U.S. to keep essential operations running for at least 90 days. That covers electricity, water, fuel, and communications.

The toolkit sounds like science fiction. It includes portable nuclear reactors, large battery banks, and microgrids that let a base disconnect from civilian power. The plan also calls for reserves of munitions, fuel, critical minerals, spare parts, and medical supplies, along with backup supply routes for anything a base can't do without.

Why now? Pentagon chief spokesperson Sean Parnell put it plainly: "Power is combat now. Without electricity, you lose communications, water, logistics, assembly lines." He called reliance on civilian infrastructure "an intolerable risk" and warned that in a conflict across several fronts, "global supply chains will break."

The worry has a paper trail. In February 2024, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and its partners warned that China-backed hackers known as Volt Typhoon were working their way into U.S. networks. The agency said the goal appeared to be positioning for "disruptive or destructive cyber activity against U.S. critical infrastructure" during a major crisis or conflict.

How Long Should Emergency Supplies Last at Home?

Here is the uncomfortable part. The Pentagon wants its own bases ready for 90 days on their own. Ready.gov, the federal preparedness site, tells households to store "one gallon per person per day for several days" and "at least a several-day supply of non-perishable food."

Several days. Not 90.

This isn't a knock on Ready.gov. A few days is a sensible floor, and it covers many short outages from storms or a failed transformer. Britain's new Be Ready campaign, launched Oct. 22, lands in about the same place: roughly three days of supplies, including three liters of drinking water per person per day. The 90-day figure that showed up near those headlines belongs to the Pentagon, not to British households.

Some local agencies already plan for longer. A home-supply guide shared by Clallam County, Washington, recommends 30 days, because after a major disaster residents "may be on their own for up to 30 days" while responders work to reach everyone. It also budgets a second gallon per person per day for washing, on top of drinking and cooking.

Run the numbers and the gap gets concrete. At Ready.gov's rate of one gallon per person per day, here is what water alone looks like for a household of four:

Nobody needs to read that last row as a personal assignment. But the table shows what each number actually asks of a home, and that is the first step toward choosing one.

Start With the Clock, Not the Gear

Nobody is suggesting a microreactor in the garage. The homeowners association would have opinions.

The real lesson of Fortress isn't the hardware. It's the clock. The Pentagon didn't begin with a shopping list. It began by asking how long each base had to keep running on its own, then worked backward to power, water, fuel, communications, and medical supplies.

Any household can run the same exercise, and it doesn't take an engineering degree. Pick a window, whether three days, two weeks, or a month, and walk through what would actually break first. For most families, the weak points are less about canned food and more about the things that quietly depend on the grid.

Medications deserve a closer look than they usually get. Ready.gov notes that an emergency can make it hard to refill a prescription or find an open pharmacy, so it's worth asking a doctor or pharmacist how much of a cushion makes sense and how a specific medicine should be stored if the power goes out.

The same thinking applies to care at home. Having an emergency kit on hand is a good idea for any time frame, because a delay in outside help turns small problems into bigger ones. A basic first-aid box covers cuts and scrapes; planning beyond the first aid kit means thinking about the illnesses and infections that don't wait for the roads to reopen. And with natural disasters on the rise, a longer outage isn't only a wartime scenario. A hurricane or ice storm can do it, too.

Dr. Peter McCullough, chief scientific officer at The Wellness Company, has put the personal side of this bluntly:

Not everyone will agree with all of that. Still, with Fortress, the government appears to have reached a similar conclusion about its own bases: don't count on the civilian system to arrive on schedule.

Not Fear. Arithmetic.

None of this means a world war is around the corner. The Pentagon hasn't named a target country, released a cost estimate, or set a firm date. Reporting from The War Zone notes that Parnell's comments didn't clearly confirm the 90-day figure, and a senior defense official said roughly 500 bases are still being assessed, with full implementation possibly taking decades. Planning for a bad day isn't the same as predicting one.

Which brings the story back to Cheyenne Mountain. The old plan was about surviving a moment. The new one is about lasting through a stretch of time. That shift, from moment to duration, may be one of the more practical ideas to come out of the Pentagon in years.

The military's answer is 90 days. A household's doesn't have to be. It just has to be a number someone actually thought through.

Frequently Asked Questions About Emergency Supplies

This content is for informational purposes only. It is not medical advice and does not replace a conversation with a qualified health professional. Dr. McCullough's quote appeared in a promoted article published Oct. 10, 2024, which did not name the original interview or date. Program details for the Pentagon's Fortress plan, including the 90-day requirement and its timeline, come from news reports and may change.