On tornadoes, solar storms, government warnings, and the humble paper map.
There’s something amusing about watching the government discover preparedness. For years, the advice to ordinary citizens has been fairly simple. Keep a little food and water on hand. Have a flashlight. Know where your family is going to meet if the house catches fire or a tornado blows the roof off. Maybe keep a battery-powered radio around. Nothing especially exciting. The sort of advice that gets ignored until the lights go out.
Now we’re hearing about national resilience, strategic reserves, energy independence, and the ability to sustain military installations for extended periods without relying on the usual supply chains. The Department of War’s FORTRESS America initiative, announced in September, fits into that broader effort. Reports have also described a proposed 90-day sustainment target for major domestic military installations, although the precise scope and status of that target deserve a little caution.
Across the Atlantic, the European Union has been encouraging households to maintain enough essential supplies to get through the first 72 hours of a major emergency. Meanwhile, intelligence and security professionals are warning about the fragility of critical infrastructure, the possibility of severe solar storms, cyberattacks, and the uncomfortable fact that modern society has accumulated an impressive number of dependencies.
None of this necessarily means somebody knows something terrible is about to happen. Governments plan for contingencies because they would be negligent not to. A fire department can buy new equipment without expecting the whole town to burn down next Tuesday. Still, it is worth noticing when the people responsible for keeping the lights on start talking seriously about what happens when the lights go out.
Perhaps the rest of us should pay attention.
The trouble with depending on everything working
I remember the tornado outbreak of April 27, 2011, when violent storms tore through North Alabama. I was out of town, watching the disaster unfold on a television station in San Francisco. There’s something unsettling about watching a place you know become a collection of storm footage and emergency reports on a screen a couple thousand miles away. I was watching events unfold back home without being there to see for myself what was happening.
My wife and our children evacuated safely. She was able to get them to her parents’ house, which was less affected and still had cell service. They had a safe place to go and the modern conveniences that helped them manage the situation. I was grateful they were safe. The experience also left me thinking about how much depends on circumstances we ordinarily give little thought to. Having somewhere to go mattered. Being able to get there mattered. Having a working phone mattered.
None of this required a survivalist’s ingenuity or a stockpile worthy of a government bunker. It required a safe destination, a workable plan, and the ability to use the resources available. That seems like a good place to begin thinking about preparedness. Not with an imaginary apocalypse, but with the ordinary question of what we would do if the familiar arrangements of daily life were suddenly disrupted.
We are accustomed to things working. The phone connects. The card reader approves the purchase. The grocery store has what we need. The vehicle starts. The road is open. We can find our way home because a satellite several thousand miles above the Earth tells a device in our pocket where we are. Most of the time, this arrangement works beautifully. It’s one of the quiet triumphs of modern civilization. The trouble begins when we confuse a reliable service with an indispensable law of nature.
Not every catastrophe needs an adversary
Cybersecurity has taught me to look for dependencies. A system can be well designed and still fail because it depends on something outside its control. A perfectly secured application is not much use if the power goes out, the network disappears, or the person who knows how to restore it is unavailable. The same principle applies outside the data center.
Consider the Sun. We have built a civilization that relies on electrical grids, satellites, radio communications, and navigation systems. A sufficiently severe geomagnetic storm can interfere with some of those systems. It can disrupt radio communications and satellite operations, degrade navigation services, and induce currents in long transmission lines that may damage electrical equipment.
This is not science fiction. The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph systems. In March 1989, a geomagnetic storm contributed to a blackout in Quebec.
Neither event proves that a future solar storm would produce a months-long nationwide blackout. Predictions of that sort should be treated carefully. The actual effects would depend on the storm, the condition of the infrastructure, protective measures, and the ability of operators to respond. But the underlying hazard is real, and it has an inconvenient quality: it does not need to hate us.
A solar storm does not care about our politics, our investments, or the quarterly earnings report. It does not need to penetrate a firewall or recruit an insider. It simply presents a physical problem to systems we have built.
This is one reason I find resilience more interesting than catastrophe forecasting. We can argue endlessly about the probability of a particular disaster. We can also acknowledge that some things are outside our control and make sensible arrangements accordingly. There is no need to predict a once-in-a-century event to justify keeping a flashlight in the kitchen drawer.
The Great American Panic-Proofing Project
The military’s reported interest in extended sustainment raises a reasonable question: what does resilience actually look like?
A military installation is a complicated operation. It needs electricity, fuel, water, food, communications, spare parts, medical support, and people who can keep the machinery running. Some of those resources can be stored. Others depend on deliveries, functioning infrastructure, and an industrial base capable of replacing what gets used.
A 90-day target, if adopted as described, would not mean that every installation could operate indefinitely in complete isolation. Nor would it mean that every imaginable disruption had been solved. It would be a planning benchmark, and the practical meaning would depend on what was included, what counted as sustainment, and which missions had to continue.
That is an important distinction. A target is not a capability, and a capability on paper is not necessarily a capability under stress. Still, the underlying principle makes sense. If an installation cannot function when one commercial supplier misses a delivery, the problem is bigger than the missing delivery.
The same logic applies to households, although our requirements are somewhat less demanding. Most of us don’t need to keep a fighter squadron operational. We’d like to keep the family fed, stay warm, get useful information, and avoid making a bad situation worse.
The European Union’s 72-hour preparedness guidance is a modest version of the same idea. The first few days of an emergency can be difficult because emergency services are dealing with immediate threats, stores may be closed, roads may be blocked, and utilities may not yet be restored.
Three days of supplies are not a magic shield. They are a little breathing room.
That’s the part of preparedness I find sensible. It’s not a contest to see who can build the most elaborate bunker. It’s a recognition that the systems we depend on have limits, and that a little margin can make a considerable difference. We already understand this principle in other areas of life. We keep a spare tire because tires go flat. We save copies of important documents because papers get lost. We make backups because computers fail.
Somehow, when we apply the same reasoning to food, water, communications, and transportation, the discussion gets mixed up with survivalist television and people wearing too much camouflage. I have nothing against camouflage. It simply doesn’t make a particularly good substitute for a plan.
When the GPS goes south
My own preparedness questions tend to be practical, partly because I live in a place where the practical details are hard to ignore. I live in the Bankhead National Forest area of Alabama. My commute includes roughly twenty miles where there’s no reliable cell service. That’s not a theoretical vulnerability or an exercise in imagining the end of the world. It’s just part of the drive. It also makes me think about navigation.
We have grown accustomed to GPS doing the thinking for us. Enter an address, follow the blue line, and turn when instructed. It’s a remarkable convenience. But a navigation app doesn’t know everything. It may not know that a road is washed out, that a bridge is closed, or that the route it has selected is a poor choice after a storm.
And GPS is a service, not the whole of satellite navigation. Other global navigation satellite systems exist, including Galileo, GLONASS, and BeiDou. A disruption to GPS does not automatically make every satellite-navigation receiver useless. The details matter, as they usually do. Even so, there is a difference between having access to a navigation service and knowing how to get somewhere without it.
I’ve begun thinking about the routes around me in a more deliberate way. Where are the alternate crossings? Which roads provide a reasonable detour? What happens if the familiar route is closed? A paper map cannot tell me whether a bridge is safe or open, but it can help me understand the geography without asking a phone to explain it.
There is a certain irony in having access to an extraordinary amount of computing power and still needing to know where the river is.
I’ve also considered whether a folding bicycle belongs in the equation. If the roads were blocked but the terrain and conditions allowed it, a bicycle might extend the distance I could cover on foot. On the other hand, a bicycle is not especially useful if the route involves an impassable river crossing or several miles of unsuitable terrain.
This is where preparedness becomes less glamorous and more interesting. The right answer depends on the actual place, not on a product advertised by someone standing in front of a pile of tactical equipment. I’ve not solved the folding-bicycle problem yet. I may have to settle for a better map in the meantime.
A go bag is not a magic bag
The emergency bag has become a familiar feature of preparedness culture. There are endless lists of what belongs in one, and an equally endless supply of equipment available to fill it. A bag can be useful. It can also become a way to avoid thinking about the problem it is supposed to solve.
What are you preparing to do? Leave the house quickly? Spend a night in a vehicle? Walk a few miles? Shelter in place? Travel through cold weather? Help someone who has been injured? Each situation calls for different supplies.
For my purposes, a vehicle kit makes sense. Water, a basic first-aid kit, a flashlight, a power bank, charging cables, a few simple tools, a warm layer, rain protection, and some food that will survive being stored in a vehicle are all reasonable starting points. Seasonal conditions and the length of the trip matter. So does remembering to check the kit occasionally rather than discovering that the batteries have died and the food has become a science experiment.
The important thing is not to buy every item on somebody else’s list. It’s to identify the likely problems and make sure the equipment addresses them. A flashlight is useful if you can find it in the dark. A power bank is useful if it is charged. A first-aid kit is useful if you know how to use its contents. And a bag full of supplies does not help much if you have no idea where you are going. Preparedness is not the accumulation of objects. It is the ability to make use of them when the ordinary arrangements of life stop cooperating.
When the phones stop working
The next question is communication.
My family and I are accustomed to being able to reach one another. If plans change, somebody sends a text. If there’s a problem, somebody calls. We don’t ordinarily have to think very hard about how to coordinate. That’s one of the small conveniences that makes modern life run smoothly, right up until it doesn’t.
I learned this on a trip to Chicago. Somewhere along the way, my phone screen went blank and refused to come back on. Fortunately, I had printed paper tickets, so boarding the plane was not a problem. At least I had managed to keep one foot in the twentieth century. Communication was another matter.
My wife was accustomed to getting a text from me when the plane took off and another when it landed. This time, she had no way to know what was happening, and I had no easy way to tell her. My phone was dead, and with it went the normal routine we used to keep each other informed. I did have an iPad with cellular capability. Naturally, I had left it at home. Instead, I’d brought a Wi-Fi-only Kindle Fire tablet. I hadn’t brought a laptop, either. Apparently, I’d packed for the trip on the assumption that the one device I depended on would continue to function.
Once I reached Chicago, I went searching through Amazon’s app store for something that would let me send a text message over Wi-Fi. I eventually found a way to communicate, but until I got home, I was improvising with a device I had never intended to use as my primary communications tool. I could make a call from my hotel, but doing so was expensive enough to make it a last resort.
Nothing catastrophic happened. I made it to Chicago, conducted my business, and returned home. But the trip gave me a practical lesson in the difference between having a communications device and having a communications plan.
I had a primary means of communication. I hadn’t made adequate arrangements for the possibility that it would fail. The printed tickets were a useful backup for boarding, but I had no equivalent backup for keeping in touch with home.
That distinction has stayed with me. Redundancy is not simply owning two devices. It means having a second option that is available, usable, and independent enough to help when the first one fails. A cellular tablet left on the kitchen counter is not much of a backup. Neither is a laptop you decided not to pack.
A sensible family plan does not have to be elaborate. It might identify a meeting place, an out-of-area contact, a couple of alternate destinations, and a way to communicate if the usual method fails. It should also account for the possibility that family members will be in different places when something happens.
A phone is not a communications plan. It is a device that depends on power, functioning hardware, a network, and enough infrastructure to connect one person to another. Sometimes the failure is a regional disaster. Sometimes it is a dead screen and a traveler who has made a few questionable packing decisions. The scale differs. The lesson is much the same.
A battery-powered radio can provide information when internet access is unavailable. Amateur radio offers another communications option for people willing to learn the equipment, procedures, and limitations. Satellite communicators can be useful in remote areas, although they too depend on specific services, devices, and conditions. None of these tools is a universal solution. They serve different purposes and require different levels of preparation.
For now, I’m more interested in a workable family plan than in building a private communications network. If we can agree on where to go, whom to contact, and what to do when the first option fails, that is progress. The more elaborate equipment can come later, if it turns out to be necessary. And I may start by making sure the equipment I already own actually makes it into the suitcase.
The neighbors are part of the plan
There is another resource that tends to get overlooked in discussions of preparedness: other people.
The modern preparedness industry often presents the individual as the central unit of survival. One person, one bag, one collection of equipment, and one determined refusal to depend on anybody else. That’s a curious way to prepare for a world in which almost everything worth preserving depends on cooperation.
During a local emergency, the most useful person may be the neighbor with a chainsaw, the retired nurse down the road, the fellow who owns a tractor, or the person who knows which roads are flooded. Somebody may have a generator. Somebody else may have the skills to repair a pump. Somebody may simply know who is missing and who needs help. None of this requires a formal organization. It does require knowing the people around you.
Rural communities have some advantages here. We are accustomed to distance, imperfect services, and the occasional need to improvise. We also know that help may take longer to arrive. Those facts can encourage a degree of self-reliance, but self-reliance does not mean refusing help or pretending we have every skill ourselves. It means being useful when we can and knowing whom to call when we can’t.
There is a practical case for community resilience, but there is also a more basic one. If things go badly enough, the quality of our relationships may matter more than the quality of our equipment. A person can spend a great deal of money preparing for an emergency and still be poorly prepared if nobody knows where he is or whether he needs help.
The neighborhood is part of the infrastructure, whether we recognize it as such or not.
Panic-proofing the republic
The trouble with talking about preparedness in the current political environment is that almost every warning is quickly turned into evidence for somebody’s preferred theory. A new military initiative becomes proof that a catastrophe is imminent. A solar storm becomes a prediction of the end of the electrical grid. A government preparedness campaign becomes either a conspiracy or an excuse to sell more equipment.
Depending on the source, the same facts can be used to justify panic, dismiss every concern, or move a product. I’d rather separate what is known from what is merely possible.
Governments and military organizations are planning for resilience. European officials have encouraged citizens to maintain basic emergency supplies. Severe geomagnetic storms can affect modern infrastructure. Cyberattacks and other disruptions are legitimate concerns. None of those facts establishes that a specific disaster is imminent. There’s no contradiction in acknowledging a risk without pretending to know when, or even whether, it will become a crisis.
Indeed, that’s what good risk management is supposed to do. Identify plausible hazards, understand dependencies, estimate consequences, and take reasonable steps to reduce the damage. We don’t need certainty to justify every precaution. We do need more than a frightening headline to justify every conclusion.
A tornado can tear through a town. A bridge can close. A power line can come down. A cyberattack can disrupt a service. The proper response isn’t to imagine every possible catastrophe and live in a permanent state of alarm. It’s to make sensible preparations for the problems we can reasonably anticipate and retain enough flexibility to respond to the ones we didn’t. This isn’t especially dramatic. It won’t make for a compelling television series. There isn’t a countdown clock, and nobody gets to announce that he was right all along because he bought six months of freeze-dried food. It is, however, a reasonable way to live.
The virtue of having options
I keep coming back to the difference between predicting a disaster and preparing for disruption. Prediction asks us to decide what is going to happen. Preparedness asks what we can do if something happens, even if we can’t know exactly what it will be.
My family didn’t need to predict the course of the April 2011 tornado outbreak to benefit from having somewhere safe to go. My wife was able to get the children to her parents’ house, and they had a place to stay with cell service and the conveniences that helped them manage. That was a successful response, not a failure of modern life.
The lesson isn’t that we should stop depending on the things that make modern life possible. It is that we should understand those dependencies and have some alternatives when circumstances demand them.
For a household, that might mean a few days of supplies, a sensible evacuation plan, a vehicle kit, a paper map, and a conversation with family members about what to do if the phones stop working. For a community, it might mean knowing the neighbors and understanding which resources are available nearby. For a government, it means taking seriously the infrastructure and supply chains that sustain ordinary life. The scale differs. The principle does not.
I don’t expect to become a survivalist. I have no plans to build a bunker in the woods or spend the rest of my life waiting for civilization to collapse. I would much rather see the lights stay on, the roads remain open, and the grocery store continue to stock the things I forgot to buy. But I would also like to know what I would do if those arrangements failed for a while.
That seems less like paranoia than ordinary prudence. We insure our homes without hoping for a fire. We maintain vehicles without wishing for a breakdown. We make backups without wanting to lose our files. Preparedness belongs in the same category. It’s an investment in having choices when circumstances narrow them.
Perhaps that is the real purpose of the Great American Panic-Proofing Project. Not to frighten people into preparing for the end of the world, but to encourage a little thought about the systems that make daily life possible, the things we take for granted, and what we might do when those systems are no longer available.
I don’t expect to have an answer for every contingency. I would simply like to be a little less surprised when something doesn’t work. A paper map, a charged flashlight, a backup means of communication, and a reasonable idea of where to go seem like a good start.
Civilization has given us some remarkable conveniences. It wouldn’t hurt to remember how to get along without a few of them.
In Conversation With
A few of the reports, government documents, and technical resources that informed this essay:
- FORTRESS America: Secretary Hegseth Announces Six Major Initiatives (September 30, 2026). The Department of War announcement outlining the FORTRESS initiative and its emphasis on installation resilience.
- The 90-Day Question: Inside the Pentagon’s Doomsday Plan (Fox News, October 25, 2026). Reporting on the proposed 90-day sustainment objective for military installations.
- European Preparedness: The EU Preparedness Union Strategy (March 2025). A whole-of-society approach to resilience, including the recommendation that households maintain essential supplies for at least 72 hours.
- National Continuity Planning: FEMA Continuity Guidance Circular (2024). Federal guidance on maintaining essential government functions during disruptions.
- The National Threat Picture: 2026 Annual Threat Assessment, Office of the Director of National Intelligence. An overview of the threats and vulnerabilities facing the United States.
- Solar Storms and Infrastructure: Space Weather: Storms from the Sun, NOAA. An accessible explanation of how geomagnetic storms can affect communications, navigation, satellites, and electrical grids.
- The Quebec Blackout: March 1989 Blackout, Hydro-Québec. A firsthand institutional account of the geomagnetic storm that left millions without electricity.
- GPS and Backup Navigation: GPS.gov Frequently Asked Questions. Guidance on GPS vulnerabilities and the importance of alternative positioning, navigation, and timing capabilities.
- The 2011 Tornado Outbreak: Historic Outbreak of April 27, 2011, National Weather Service. Documentation of the devastating tornado outbreak across Alabama.
