Pete Hegseth wants every major base ready to go it alone for 90 days, and worried voters started calling Congress.
Many wanted to know what the Pentagon isn’t telling them.
And Eli Crane just answered from the front seat of his truck.
One Former SEAL Took the Questions Head-On
Congressman Eli Crane (R-AZ) skipped the podium and the press release.
The former Navy SEAL climbed behind the wheel of his truck, pointed a camera at himself, and spoke directly to the people back home who had been piling questions into his office. “A lot of folks have reached out regarding the Pentagon’s FORTRESS America initiative,” Crane wrote when he posted the clip.
His answer boiled down to a request most politicians never make. Take a breath.
Crane sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, and he told viewers he has talked directly with officials about the program. He called FORTRESS sensible planning that defense circles have discussed for years, not a flare warning of some catastrophe around the corner or a cover for something the government wants hidden.
And war games, he noted, run in Washington, DC on a regular basis, whether or not the public ever hears a word about them.
But then came the line that sums up his whole take. Crane described the program as a “best practices move.”
And he tacked on one more thought almost in passing. In his view, the Pentagon should have done this a long time ago.
What the Pentagon Actually Wants From Its Bases
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth rolled out FORTRESS at the end of September. The name stands for Federal Operations for Resilience, Troop Resources, Energy, Supply, and Survivability, which tells anyone outside the Beltway roughly nothing.
The idea underneath the alphabet soup is plain enough. Every major base in the continental United States should keep running for at least 90 days if the outside world goes dark, whether a grid failure, a cyberattack, or a war knocks out the systems most Americans never think about.
To get there, the Pentagon wants microgrids that let a base cut itself off from the civilian power network, portable nuclear reactors, big battery banks, and supply chains built to take a punch. Fox News reported that the plan also calls for reserves of munitions, fuel, spare parts, and medical supplies, along with at least two qualified suppliers for the military’s most critical needs.
Pentagon chief spokesperson Sean Parnell, who led the initiative, boiled the power question down to one sentence. “Mission-critical power must be independent, hardened, and redundant,” Parnell told Fox News Digital.
Read that again with fresh eyes. It sounds less like a doomsday bunker and more like the checklist a careful rancher runs through before the first big snow.
Washington Got This Exact Warning in 2008
Crane’s offhand comment about timing deserves more attention than anything else in the video.
Back in February 2008, with George W Bush still in the White House, a Defense Science Board task force delivered a report to the Pentagon called More Fight, Less Fuel. The board warned that critical national security and homeland defense missions faced “an unacceptably high risk of extended outage from failure of the grid.”
The details made it worse. The task force found that 99 percent of the electricity at US military installations came off the commercial grid, and the backup plan leaned on diesel generators with limited fuel stored on site.
And the board scolded the department for brushing off a similar panel’s warnings seven years before that.
A Government Accountability Office review piled on in 2009. Of 34 top-priority defense assets the auditors examined, every single one needed electricity around the clock, and 31 drew that power from commercial grids.
So the experts saw the hole. They measured it, wrote it up, and mailed it to the people in charge.
Then Came the $26 Gallon
But the next administration found a flashier way to talk about energy.
A few pilot microgrids did go up during the Obama years, at places like Fort Carson in Colorado and Camp Smith in Hawaii. Washington saved its real showmanship for the high seas, though.
In the summer of 2012, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus sent out what he called the Great Green Fleet. The Navy paid $12 million for 450,000 gallons of biofuel, roughly $26 a gallon when regular fuel ran under $4.
Navy officials acknowledged the whole batch would last about two to three days.
US Senator John McCain (R-AZ), hardly a reliable friend of the America First crowd, couldn’t stomach it. “I don’t believe it’s the job of the Navy to be involved in building . . . new technologies. I don’t believe we can afford it,” McCain told reporters at the time.
When John McCain thinks a Pentagon program costs too much, somebody has really lost the plot.
The Callers Weren’t Crazy to Ask
None of this means the folks who called Crane’s office overreacted.
Plenty of Americans still remember officials promising a couple of weeks to flatten the curve in the spring of 2020, then watching churches, schools, and family businesses stay shuttered for months. Trust broke during those years, and the people who broke it never really apologized.
And when the Pentagon starts talking about bases surviving three months on their own, a raised eyebrow comes with the territory.
But Crane’s read squares with the paper trail. A plan the Pentagon’s own advisers practically begged for 18 years ago looks a lot more like overdue homework than a sign of some fresh emergency.
Folks in farm country already understand the logic. They keep a generator in the barn, a few cords of firewood by the porch, and a freezer full of venison, and nobody calls the sheriff about it.
Special operators like Crane spend entire careers planning for the moment when everything goes sideways. Asking the bases that guard the country to do the same thing hardly counts as radical.
There’s an America First thread running through all of it, too. A military that can’t keep the lights on without help from a civilian utility, or can’t replace a part without a single overseas factory, is a military somebody else can hold hostage.
Nobody Has Posted the Price Tag
But one question still hangs over the whole thing.
None of the public reporting so far has attached a dollar figure or a firm finish line to FORTRESS. Portable reactors and hardened supply chains won’t come cheap, and Congress controls the checkbook.
Crane belongs to the House Freedom Caucus, a group that doesn’t wave spending through without a fight. Whether the money comes from cutting waste somewhere else in the Pentagon budget or simply lands on the national credit card remains anyone’s guess.
And the agency that once spent $26 a gallon to make a point about the environment hasn’t exactly earned a blank check.
In 2012, the Navy spent $12 million on enough green fuel to keep one strike group going for two or three days. FORTRESS asks every major base in the country to last 90.
Sources: Rep Eli Crane, video post and GETTR post on the FORTRESS initiative; Fox News, “Inside the Pentagon’s doomsday plan to keep America fighting if global war erupts”; Defense Science Board Task Force on DoD Energy Strategy, More Fight, Less Fuel (February 2008); Government Accountability Office, GAO-10-147; Government Executive, “High energy demands are compromising military operations, science board finds”; Reuters and NBC News reporting on the Great Green Fleet; Mother Jones, July 2012 reporting on Navy biofuel; Department of Defense SPIDERS microgrid briefing (DTIC).