Pentagon eyes ‘public-private partnerships’ to help fund FORTRESS America homeland base plan

TAMPA, Fla. — The Pentagon is planning to pursue “public-private partnerships” to offset the cost of its ambitious FORTRESS America homeland base-hardening initiative, with the services already looking to identify opportunities, a senior Pentagon official told Breaking Defense.

“I think the reality of this one is this is where the public-private partnerships really start to pay,” Assistant Secretary of Defense for Energy, Installations, and Environment Dale Marks said on the sidelines of the Installation Innovation conference here this week. “The model that we’re trying to drive on is not me having to go back up on Capitol Hill with my hand out.” 

Marks said the military services “are working on a prioritization scheme” for portions of the effort that could benefit from “commercial offtake.”

“It’s those partnerships that are going to probably allow us to move this at a little bit more speed and scale,” he said.

Exactly a month ago, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth unveiled FORTRESS to “serve as the nation’s insurance policy.” The idea was to pursue five pillars that would each make individual homeland bases more secure: energy independence, boosting supply chains, better distributing key stockpiles, hardening installations and making sure weapons work if satellite communications go dark.

“Fortress America does not mean we are retreating behind our borders. It means we are securing our launching pad,” Marks said on stage this week. “It means that when the United States decides to project power across the globe, that power will be unyielding, sustained, and unstoppable because the home front cannot be severed.”

Marks said that his work with other senior leaders is focused not mandating a completion date for every existing US installation to be FORTRESS-compliant, but on identifying priorities and ways to drive down costs.

In the interview with Breaking Defense, Marks didn’t specify which areas or projects may be ripe for public-private deals — or if DoD could involve itself in additional high-dollar loans for critical industries as part of the effort as it has previously.

But in the interview and during a public address here he did expand on the thinking behind FORTRESS’s five pillars and why the DoD is trying to take a flexible approach.

‘Sovereign Operational Continuity’

Marks emphasized at the show and when speaking to Breaking Defense that the Pentagon isn’t starting from scratch with FORTRESS, as several initiatives have been underway to help solve some longstanding problems. 

Take the first pillar: energy independence. There has been an ongoing push to make US bases energy self-sustaining, and that is moving forward under FORTRESS with the goal of finding ways to power bases for “30, 60, or even 90 days without a single watt of outside power,” Marks told an audience. 

“Every premier military installation must achieve sovereign operational continuity,” Marks added. “Our priority is straightforward: We are ending the era of base operations, depending on the commercial civilian grid.”

But just what this looks like will vary from location to location, he later told Breaking Defense.

Part of the goal is to build off of the Army’s Janus program that is spending $2.2 billion for five companies to build out and test their nuclear microreactors prototypes on military installations. But, Marks explained, the plan is not to field those microreactors on every installation. 

“There’s going to be other sources of energy that we’re going to use, whether that’s natural gas, geothermal,” he said. 

The second pillar, domestic supply chain resilience, is another area the department has been previously working on.

“We built exquisite fifth-gen aircraft and stealth destroyers, and then quietly allowed the critical components – the rare earth magnets, the titanium sponge, the defense-grade semiconductors, and the solid rocket propellants – to be mined, refined, and manufactured across foreign supply chains,” Marks told the audience. “That dangerous vulnerability ends now.”

Work to shore up the US supply chain is already underway and has included President Donald Trump’s executive order in July that essentially gave companies until the start of 2027 to stop using critical materials and minerals from Russia, Iran, North Korea and China.  The Pentagon also recently provided conditional loans to private firms within the rare earth elements sector.

RELATED: As critical minerals deadline looms, Army expects to feel ‘some impact’

FORTRESS’s third pillar revolves around installation hardening and cyber-physical survivability. On stage, Marks explained that this will mean “moving beyond cosmetic physical security” and will require outfitting installations with “biomimetic and ultra high-performance concrete protective structures, subterranean command and control vaults, layered short-range air defenses, concealed direct energy counter drone systems, and zero trust completely air-gapped operational technology networks.”

While Marks did not publicly tie work on this pillar to the Golden Dome homeland defense plan, he told Breaking Defense his team is currently embedded with the Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager to prioritize coverage areas. 

The fourth FORTRESS pillar centers around shoring up strategic reserves like ammunition and spare parts, and better dispersing them around the country — an area ripe of various public-private opportunities like factories and depots. 

“We’re mandating a 90-day sovereign stockpile of critical parts, fuels, propellants, ammunitions on site, coupled with digital additive manufacturing depots capable of fabricating critical combat spares directly inside the wire under embargo conditions,” Marks explained on stage.

The fifth and final FORTRESS pillar the Pentagon is pursuing revolves around space inspector resilience and making sure the US can still use its weapons if adversaries are using anti-satellite, terrestrial jamming, or electronic warfare weapons.

“Fortress America mandates that our primary operational platforms operate within a contested, by design, electromagnetic environment for deploying ground-based GPS, subterranean inertial reference networks, and direct optical laser trunk lines,” Marks said. “If every commercial communication cell line in low Earth orbit is blinded tomorrow, our commanders will still see the battle space.”