The War Department embarked this year on new initiatives to strengthen the infrastructure of military installations and to build a new prototype American base, said Dale Marks, assistant secretary of war for energy, installations and environment, earlier this week at a convention in Tampa, Florida.
"The visions for Fortress America and the Next Great American Base are not business-as-usual bureaucratic programs," he said. "They are a national calling."
Getting where the department wants to go with its installation footprint will mean overcoming a variety of hurdles, the biggest of which are time and bureaucratic inertia, Marks told attendees of the Association of Defense Communities convention.
"We must discard the comfortable complacency of a peacetime mindset and execute at a wartime tempo," he said.
Stressing the need for a rapid operations tempo, Marks said those industry partners who move the fastest and have the boldest vision will earn the right to build America's premier military community.
"Let us build installations worthy of the warriors who call them home," he said. "Let us forge the partnerships required to secure our homeland. And let us ensure that whenever the call comes, the United States of America possesses the unshakeable power to prevail."
Three warning signs indicate the importance of succeeding with both Fortress America and the Next Great American Base, Marks said, "flashing red across every dashboard in our national security apparatus."
Those include:
- Hostile actors in the homeland. Marks said these actors have prepositioned malicious access within American energy, water and communications grids, adding that an adversary no longer needs to run an air blockade. They simply need to flip a breaker switch inside the country's domestic infrastructure.
- Modern warfare eliminating the safe rear echelon. Precision cruise missiles and one-way attack drones mean "geography no longer guarantees survival," he said.
- America losing the race for operational speed. In modern conflicts, combatants are writing code, retraining machine-learning target models and deploying modified autonomous systems "in matters of weeks," he said. "Yet inside our defense establishment, algorithm updates take months or years to crawl through red tape and antiquated [information technology] networks. We cannot win the technology race from a starting position 80 years in the past."
American power, Marks said, must emanate from a strong base at home. That's the aim of initiatives related to Fortress America and the Next Great American Base.
"You cannot project decisive power abroad from a brittle foundation at home," he said. "That's why piecemeal adjustments will not suffice."
Fortress America, which along with the Next Great American Base, is one of six emphases Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced in recent months.
These are "our national insurance policy," Marks said. "It's the unbreakable promise that the American home front can never be starved out, shut down, or cut off from the fight."
That promise relies on five core pillars — sovereign energy independence, domestic supply chain resilience, installation hardening and cyber resilience, strategic defense reserves, and space and spectrum resilience.
"Fortress America is the shield that ensures our homeland can never be held hostage," Marks said. "But to deter conflict and guarantee victory, a nation cannot rely on a shield alone. You must also forge the sword."
The Next Great American Base is how Fortress America manifests itself, he said.
"We are no longer building real estate," he said. "We are building sovereign combat weapons systems."
And the benchmark is to "build it once, build it beautifully and build it to endure," he added.
The prototype base translates the pillars of Fortress America into a self-reliant combat installation designed to operate without civilian lifelines. Among other things, the base will generate its own power with microgrids and a small nuclear reactor, operate "air-gapped" computer networks, and secure and recycle closed-loop water supplies.
While Fortress America installations will use a public-private economic model, they will be designed to rely on their own infrastructure for 30 days, completely detached from external utilities in case the surrounding civilian grid collapses.
"The question is no longer 'what mission will this base host?'" he said. "The question is 'what new dimensions of American deterrence and lethal power are now possible because this platform exists?'"
Marks said pragmatists will ask why a clean-sheet proposal is better than retrofitting existing installations, but an upgraded base is "the modern equivalent of riding a horse into a drone storm. You cannot win a software-defined war from an industrial-age saddle."
Once the prototype base is proven, its systems and lessons will be exported to legacy installations, he said. "It gives them the armored chassis they need to survive."
As the two initiatives develop, the human element must not be forgotten, Marks said. That's why living conditions for service members must be improved.
"Our most decisive weapon system has always been, and will always be, the individual American warfighter," he said. "The finest technology in the world is useless if our most gifted minds and dedicated warriors refuse to stay in uniform."
The nation shouldn't expect warfighters to focus on high stakes, multidomain operations when they come home to base housing with black mold, failing plumbing and leaky roofs, he said.
"Substandard living conditions are not minor inconveniences," Marks said. "They are an active drain on morale, combat readiness and our retention of top-tier talent."
The Next Great American Base will include a compact, walkable concept with premier schools, advanced healthcare and town centers that foster community.
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