The Pentagon’s Pentagon 90-day grid warning is now tied to FORTRESS America, a program formally established on Sept. 30 to stockpile critical minerals, fuel, and munitions on American soil. It also pushes major bases to plan to keep operating for 90 days without the grid.
That plan is built around a supply problem, not a single facility. The Pentagon wants enough material to keep fighting if cyberattacks or sabotage knock out factories and power grids at home, while U.S. companies are still struggling to secure enough rare-earth supply.
FORTRESS America on Sept. 30
FORTRESS America stands for Federal Operations for Resilience, Troop Resources, Energy, Supply, and Survivability. The program is the same effort behind the push for major bases to plan for 90 days without the grid, turning a stockpile concept into an operating requirement for large installations.
Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said the scale of the plan is "on par with what the DoD pursued during the Cold War." Stockpiling is not unusual for the U.S. military, but this effort is defined by its scale and by its move toward domestic reserves instead of overseas storage.
China supply pressure
The supply gap is already visible in the numbers. The U.S. produces less than 1% of the most common type of rare-earth magnet it uses, while domestic sources supplied just 300 metric tons in 2025 against demand of roughly 48,000 metric tons. U.S. companies are on track to have capacity for about 5,000 metric tons by the end of this year.
China dominates the processing of many critical minerals, and U.S. imports in 2025 included about $60 billion worth of critical minerals other than rare earths, including nickel, lithium, cobalt, graphite, and tungsten. Ford idled its Chicago Explorer plant for a week in May 2025 when rare-earth supplies ran short.
Jamieson Greer and He Lifeng
reported on Nov. 6 that American companies were still struggling to secure enough supply. That same day, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer pressed Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng to fully carry out Beijing’s commitments, keeping the pressure on a trade channel that runs through critical minerals, not just finished goods.
The practical question now is how the Pentagon will secure enough domestic supply of critical minerals and rare-earth magnets to meet the 90-day resilience plan. Until that supply base grows, the program reads less like a storage exercise than a test of whether the United States can harden defense production against grid disruption at home.
