In the News
The Pentagon Wants Major Bases Ready to Run 90 Days Without the Grid. Your House Might Make It to 3.
Military planners put water on the list of what you lose when the power stops. FORTRESS covers the bases. It doesn't cover your kitchen.
MBy the MINIMLS Team
Updated November 2026 · 10 min read
Ask most people what happens when the power goes out, and they'll tell you the lights go off.
The Pentagon is planning for something a lot worse than that.
In September 2026 it launched a program called FORTRESS America, to harden US military bases against disruption and cut how much they lean on the civilian grid.
Fox News, citing Pentagon documents it reviewed, reports that major bases are to keep running for at least 90 days without outside support. Here's how Assistant Secretary of Defense Dale Marks described the goal at a conference in Tampa:
"30, 60, or even 90 days without a single watt of outside power."Dale Marks, as reported by Breaking Defense, October 2026
Read that number again. Then look around your kitchen.
Fox reports the standard covers "electricity, water, fuel and communications." The plan envisions portable nuclear reactors, large battery storage and microgrids that can cut loose from the public grid.
Their own power. Their own fuel. Their own communications.
And their own water.
Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell didn't soften why:
"We don't want to rely on standard civilian municipal infrastructure to run our national defense"Sean Parnell, to Fox News
Standard civilian municipal infrastructure. That's a long way of saying the system your kitchen faucet is hooked up to.
Without electricity, he said, you lose "communications, water, logistics" and more. The people whose whole job is to plan for the worst put water on that list.
And here's the part to sit with.
FORTRESS covers the bases. It doesn't cover your house.
Nobody has told households to plan for 90 days. Officials haven't tied FORTRESS to any specific threat. Snopes rates the reporting Mostly True, and notes a spokesperson hasn't explicitly confirmed the 90-day figure.
So we won't tell you an attack is coming. We'll just ask the question they've left on the table.
If the Pentagon wants bases to run 90 days without outside power, how long can your kitchen?
See What Goes in the Kitchen Drawer★★★★★ 4.8 stars, 2,318 reviews
Why your faucet stops when the power does
Most people think of tap water as something that's just there. It isn't. It's pushed to you.
Your water system moves water out of a river, a reservoir or the ground. It treats it. Then it pumps it on through the pipes with enough pressure to reach your sink. Much of that runs on electricity.
If the power stays off long enough, the whole thing slows down.
Then it stops.
When the pressure drops, the trouble isn't only that the water gets weak. The FBI and EPA said in July 2026 that pressure loss:
"could potentially allow untreated ground water to seep into pipes"FBI and EPA, July 30, 2026
That's a big part of why a boil notice can follow an outage. And if your stove is electric, a boil notice doesn't help you much.
If you're on a well, it's simpler and worse. No power means no pump. Your pipes can be perfect, and your tap still gives you nothing.
A person lasts days without water, not weeks. The bases have a plan for that. Who's got one for your house?
The attacks aren't a theory anymore
In December 2022, someone opened fire on two substations in Moore County, North Carolina. More than 45,000 homes and businesses lost electricity. Repairs took about four days.
It took a few gunshots to do that.
How bad could it get? In 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported on a federal analysis. It found that knocking out just 9 of the country's 55,000 substations on a hot summer day could cause a coast-to-coast blackout. A memo at FERC, the federal grid regulator, said that hitting 9 substations and a transformer maker could leave the grid down for at least 18 months.
FERC officials called the analysis hypothetical, and the Energy Department called its key assumption "highly unlikely." So treat it as a worst case, not a forecast.
It has gotten more serious since.
In an advisory updated July 22, 2026, the FBI, CISA, the EPA and other agencies warned that Iranian-affiliated hackers were going after the control devices used by water and energy providers. In at least one case, they say, the changes "disabled critical shutdown and alarm logic."
Those are the systems that tell a plant something's going wrong. Turn them off, and nobody gets warned.
Days later, the FBI and EPA warned of cyberattacks on water utilities in at least seven states, with loss of pressure and flooding. CISA said that activity resulted in "boil water notices and sustained manual operations." Officials said drinking water was largely unaffected, and at last report nobody had publicly said who did it. Those attacks and that advisory are separate things, and we're not tying them together.
In August, the White House declared a national emergency to protect the bulk power system, over grid equipment sourced abroad. That one is about the supply chain, not an attack. But it's the country's top office saying the grid needs protecting, in writing.
And you don't even need a bad guy. Weather and old pipes do it all the time.
Jackson, Mississippi spent more than seven weeks under a boil-water notice in 2022. In the 2021 Texas freeze, more than 14 million people were affected by boil water notices at one point.
Weather, old pipes, a keyboard far away. The cause changes. What happens at your sink doesn't.
Other countries are already telling families to stock water
FORTRESS is about bases. These messages aren't.
- The UK launched Be Ready in October 2026, asking households to plan for 3 days of disruption with 3 litres of drinking water per person per day.
- Japan's Prime Minister's Office says at least 3 days of supplies, with one week preferred for large disasters.
- Sweden printed about 5.2 million copies of a brochure called "In case of crisis or war." It says to be able to manage for at least one week.
Here at home, the CDC advises at least 1 gallon of water per person per day for 3 days, and a 2-week supply if possible. In September 2026, the President's preparedness message urged Americans to maintain an emergency kit.
That sounds easy until you do the math.
Run the Pentagon's number at home
Just to see what it means, take a family of four at the CDC's gallon a day.
| Water You'd Need | What It Weighs | |
|---|---|---|
| 3 days | 12 gallons | About 100 pounds. It fits in a closet |
| 14 days | 56 gallons, about 19 cases | About 470 pounds |
| 90 days | 360 gallons, more than 110 cases | About 3,000 pounds |
| Day 91 | Zero | Nothing left to lift |
Nobody's telling you to stack 110 cases in the garage. Most homes couldn't.
That's the point of the exercise. Stored water is the right place to start, and it can only go down.
The households that stay covered aren't the ones with the most water stacked up. They're the ones with a way to filter more.
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- No batteries, no pump, no expiration when stored dry
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Picture it in your own house
Picture a big storm, the week you have the grandkids.
Day 1. The power goes out. The fridge goes quiet. You light a candle and figure it'll be back tonight.
Day 2. It isn't. The faucet coughs, then runs weak. A text from the county says to boil all water.
Your stove is electric.
Day 3. You open the last case. The store down the road has bare shelves. You start counting what's left, and who needs it. Your husband. The grandkids.
The dog.
Day 5. There's water all around you. The creek behind the school is running high. The rain barrel is full.
You can't drink any of it the way it is.
That's the real emergency. Not no water. Water everywhere, and none you can trust.
Now run the same week again
Same storm. Same dead faucet. Same bare shelves.
Only this time there's a small filter straw in your kitchen drawer for each person in the house. On Day 5 you fill a bottle from the rain barrel, thread the filter on, squeeze it into a clean cup and hand it to your grandson.
That's the only thing that changed.
Why a filter, not more bottles
The MINIMLS Emergency Water Filter Straw is about 8 inches long and weighs 2 ounces. It fits in a kitchen drawer, a glovebox or a go-bag.
You put one end in fresh water and drink through the other. Inside, three stages catch the grit. Then a hollow-fiber membrane with pores of 0.01 micron does the fine work. Bacteria and protozoa are too big to get through. Many hiking straws are rated 0.1 or 0.2 micron.
- Removes 99.99% of bacteria and protozoa, including E. coli, Salmonella, Cholera, Giardia, Cryptosporidium and Legionella. Tested to the rated figures
- In the factory's lab test, about 210,000 E. coli per milliliter went in. None were detected coming out
- Also blocks microplastics, and it's BPA-free
- Rated for 1,800 gallons, more than 550 cases of bottled water. Muddy water will shorten that, as it does with any filter
- No batteries. No pump. No moving parts. No grid.
- No expiration date when stored dry
It also threads onto a regular water bottle, so you can squeeze water through it into a cup or pot. That matters for small kids and for anyone who can't pull hard on a straw. It also matters for cooking, dishes or cleaning a scraped knee.
What it won't do
It doesn't remove viruses, chemicals, heavy metals or salt. When viruses are a concern, boil the water or add tablets. The CDC calls boiling the best way to deal with germs in water. Don't drink water you suspect is chemically contaminated.
And it doesn't replace stored water. Keep your cases. This is what you reach for when they run low, and that's the day that counts.
One isn't enough
A single straw covers one person. So here's how households do the math.
- One for each person in the house, so nobody waits their turn.
- One in the car, because you won't always be home when it happens.
- One in the go-bag, in case you have to leave.
- One for the people you'd drive across the state to check on. Your grown kids. The grandkids at college. The neighbor who lives alone.
The Family Pack is 5 straws, 1 free included, for $79.99, about $16 a straw. That covers a family of four, plus one for the go-bag. Five singles would cost $149.95, so you keep $69.96.
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What people ask us
"I've got a generator." Good. Keep it. It needs fuel, and it can't restart the town's water plant or clean what comes out of the tap under a boil notice.
"I can just boil it." Yes, and you should while you can. Re-read Day 2. Boiling takes a working stove, fuel and time.
"Will I manage it?" Yes. The first few draws take some effort, and that's normal. Squeezing it from a bottle takes the pulling out of it.
"Does it really work?" 0.01 micron pores, third-party lab tested for bacteria and protozoa removal, tested to the rated figures, and 4.8 stars across 2,318 reviews. Try it at home inside your 30 days.
"Will it keep?" It has no expiration date when stored dry. Keep it from freezing, and let it dry before you put it away. It's rated for 1,800 gallons, which is years of clean water from a single straw.
"What if I don't like it?" Try it for 30 days. If you're not happy, email us and we'll refund you. Unused or used.
Don't wait for the shelves to clear
When something makes the evening news, the first aisle to go is water. The shelves don't clear the day after. They clear the day of.
Every order ships the next business day, tracked and insured. Still, a filter ordered after the forecast changes may not help with that storm. A package takes days. Order before the news does.
The Pentagon has a whole program working on this for its own people. You can handle your part in about a minute, at your kitchen table.
They're working on 90 days for their bases. Three days is the floor for your kitchen, and two weeks is the goal. Where are you right now?
Same storm. Same dead faucet. This time, you're the one with water to hand out.
Emergency Preparedness Sale: up to 67% off.
Try it for 30 days. If you're not happy, email us and we'll refund you.
Well packed, all there. Haven't needed it yet, hope I don't.
Connie R.Was afraid it'd be an odd gift. My brother-in-law asked where to get more.
Gail M.Ordered Monday, here the next Monday. Works as described.
Lou C.
Try it for 30 days. If you're not happy, email us and we'll refund you.
Get the Family Pack: 5 Straws for $79.9930-day money back.
P.S. You don't need a bunker or 110 cases of water. You need the bare minimum, in a drawer, before you need it. The Pentagon is giving its bases 90 days. Give your family more than 3.
Sources, checked November 1, 2026: Fox News, Oct 25, 2026. Breaking Defense, Oct 30, 2026. Snopes. Pillsbury. Newsweek. FBI, CISA, EPA and others, advisory AA26-097A, updated July 22, 2026. FBI and EPA public notice and CISA alert, July 30, 2026. North Carolina Governor's Office and Duke Energy via WFAE on Moore County. US Department of Energy on the bulk-power emergency, Aug 2026. CDC. WUNC. Fox Weather. Fox 5. President's preparedness message, Sept 2026. UK Be Ready. Japan Prime Minister's Office. The Local on Sweden. Fox News on the 2014 Wall Street Journal report and FERC memo. E&E News on the FERC and DOE responses.