Hegseth’s ‘FORTRESS America’ needs an arsenal, not a silo

An Iranian strike in February destroyed an American missile-defense radar worth about $300 million at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. In the war with Iran, the U.S. military has lost at least 45 MQ-9 Reaper drones. And intercepting relatively cheap Iranian drones can require missiles costing millions of dollars.

That is the arithmetic Pete Hegseth must confront as he builds FORTRESS America, the Department of War initiative to secure the capabilities and supply chains on which the military depends.

FORTRESS America should mean more than stockpiling. It should mean American resilience through American scale.

Hegseth is right to pursue resilience. But without a reality check, the initiative risks becoming another bumper sticker in a $1 trillion defense budget.

FORTRESS America identifies five pillars: energy independence; supply chain and defense industrial base resilience; a strategic defense reserve; installation hardening and cyber resilience; and resilience in space and spectrum. Each serves a genuine need. But resilience should not mean putting everything in a government silo. The Iran war offers a warning about how easily technological overmatch can become economic mismatch.

The Pentagon has long pursued technological overmatch: the most sophisticated aircraft, sensors, missiles, and networks. Yet expensive, highly specialized systems can be difficult to replace, while an adversary can keep sending cheaper weapons into the fight.

The losses in Iran do not erase America’s military superiority. They do expose a costly imbalance: A nation can possess superior technology and still face an economic contest in which its enemies impose disproportionate costs.

Build for scale

The same lesson applies to the broader FORTRESS America agenda. An energy strategy cannot depend on a single vulnerable source. Supply chains cannot hinge on components easily disrupted or cut off. Defense systems cannot be so bespoke, expensive, and difficult to manufacture that the United States struggles to produce them at scale.

Palmer Luckey’s Anduril offers a useful model. Its Arsenal-1 factory in Ohio is designed to manufacture autonomous military systems in volume for the United States and its allies. Commercial manufacturing methods and components help make that scale possible.

Space offers another example. American entrepreneurs have made rockets, satellites, and launches more efficient. The government should create conditions for American companies to compete, invest, and scale — rather than replicate the commercial industrial base inside the Pentagon.

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A spectrum arsenal, not a spectrum hoard

The logic extends to wireless spectrum. Federal agencies retain extensive access to frequencies that commercial providers want for wireless networks. Congress has protected the heavily used 3.1-3.45 GHz band from commercial auction, reflecting the military’s radar and other defense requirements. But treating spectrum chiefly as a resource to hold can also foreclose commercial capacity and innovation.

The goal should not be to privilege one particular frequency, but to strike a balance: federal agencies currently control or share access to substantial portions of the most valuable spectrum, much of which could support commercial wireless networks if policy better balanced national security needs with the public benefits of commercial use.

The military does not necessarily need to control every frequency; it needs reliable access to the capabilities those frequencies enable. In Ukraine, commercial low-Earth-orbit satellite networks have supported the fight against Russia. Such networks can provide military utility at enormous scale without requiring the Pentagon to build all the underlying infrastructure itself.

Even if spectrum were weighted toward commercial use, U.S. law gives the president significant authority over communications in wartime and emergencies. Military-grade satellite services, such as those procured for Ukraine, operate under Pentagon contracts and negotiated terms designed for national security needs. Retail satellite internet, by contrast, operates under commercial licensing and ordinary terms of service.

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The Pentagon already recognizes the value of commercial technology. Its October acquisition guidance makes commercial products and services the default for procurement. Spectrum policy should draw on the same principle: Buy and secure the capability where commercial networks can deliver it.

America needs a spectrum arsenal that draws on the strength of its wireless and technology industries: competing network providers, satellite constellations, sensors, communications systems, and infrastructure built with American investment, technology, and workers. The military can buy or reserve capacity, with priority and assured-access arrangements for crises and war.

The fortress is the industrial base

The best fortress is not one in which the government owns everything behind the walls. It is one in which American companies have already built the networks, factories, and technologies Americans use every day — and the military can draw on that industrial strength when the nation needs it.

FORTRESS America should mean more than stockpiling. It should mean American resilience through American scale.

Iran is giving us the reality check now. We can use it to rethink spectrum policy, defense manufacturing, and military procurement — or discover the same mismatch in the next conflict, when the stakes may be much higher.

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