A resilient nation is built in order.
A Black Sky Event — a grid outage lasting thirty days or more, across a major interconnect or the whole country — is the one catastrophe our national doctrine doesn’t yet plan for. Meeting it is not a survival project. It is a planning project, and it runs top-down: national leadership, military mission assurance, state readiness, and Resilient Communities.
Our posture is simple. Plan against capabilities and effects — not fear of any one adversary. Then do the calm, fundable work, in order, until the nation can stand through a Black Sky Event.
No one is in charge of Black Sky readiness
America’s critical infrastructure is not a list of sixteen sectors — it is a stack. Electric power is the foundation tier, but only that: lifeline sectors — water, communications, transportation, fuel — run directly on power; shared services — food, healthcare, emergency response, finance — run on the lifelines; and the whole built stack stands on two deeper, human foundations that planning usually forgets: the workforce that operates it — and, at bedrock, the lawful governance that every layer above assumes. In an extended outage the stack fails upward, tier by tier, in hours to days. For more than twenty years, commissions and government-sponsored studies have documented the vulnerability; the solutions sit on the shelf. What’s missing isn’t technology, and it isn’t primarily money. It’s governance: no single accountable leader, no synchronized national plan, and no defined role for the states and communities who would carry the work.
Our response doctrine assumes a localized disaster, where help flows in from unaffected regions. In a Black Sky Event there is no unaffected region — every jurisdiction manages its own crisis at the same time. That is why this problem cannot be prepared for from the bottom up, and why planning must begin at the national and state levels — before hardening, so limited resources go to the right priorities. That framework doesn’t exist yet. But the nation doesn’t have to stand still while it’s built — and with FIR’s approach, it doesn’t.
The trap at the bottom of the stack: restoring the grid requires the manufacturing, transport, and fuel that sit above it — and the workforce and lawful order beneath everything. Lose the stack long enough and there is no pathway back, which is why resilience is engineered before the event, not improvised after it.
We plan against capabilities and effects, not any particular adversary. The list of actors who could cause a Black Sky Event is long; the physics of what would fail is the same for all of them. And every community that can keep its water running and its people fed without the national grid is leverage taken off the table — for all of them at once.
National recognition and organizing
FIR has drafted and advocates a proposed Executive Order — Implementing Black Sky Event Resilience — establishing a National Black Sky Resiliency Program. It gives the effort what it has never had: a single accountable national leader, backed by a small dedicated team, empowered to synchronize the federal agencies that each own a piece of the problem. Cabinet duties stay where the law puts them; the team’s job is coordination, standards, and pace. And because it starts with planning, not concrete, the initial cost is modest and the first results come fast.
Force protection and mission assurance
Mission assurance and force protection doctrine already obligates the Department to sustain operations under all conditions — and a Black Sky Event is the condition it has not yet planned for. Roughly two-thirds of military personnel live off installation, depending entirely on civilian infrastructure for housing, water, fuel, and essential services. An installation plan that stops at the fence line fails no matter how good it is inside the wire. FIR works the city–base pair: assessing the interdependency between installations and their surrounding communities, and helping both build resilient countermeasures — so the force can deploy and the mission holds when the grid does not.
State planning and readiness
States hold the statutory responsibility for disaster management within their borders — and in a true Black Sky Event, no help arrives from a neighboring state, because there is no unaffected neighbor. Each state must be able to stand on its own. If every state is resilient, the nation is resilient. The model is already settled federal policy: preparedness owned closest to the people it protects, with a competent federal government in support. The draft EO makes it real for the Black Sky case.
Resilient Communities
A Resilient Community can keep its own infrastructure stack — power at the foundation; water, communications, and fuel above it; food, healthcare, and emergency services above those — functioning for its residents through the event. It is the unit of progress for the whole national effort — and its rapid-deployment option: begin where the stakes are highest, group communities regionally, prove the model, and expand — reinforcing the communities that have already started. Not a retreat from the nation. A working piece of it. This is where FIR’s field work lives, and it is designed to pay for itself rather than depend on permanent subsidy.
Proceed now. Merge later — by design.
The national framework doesn’t exist yet, and waiting for it would waste years the country may not have. So FIR built the community layer to run ahead of Washington without running away from it: a template-able, repeatable Resilient Community framework — the same assessment methodology, the same archetypes, the same standards and certification, everywhere it’s applied.
That repeatability is the point. Every community built on the framework is a standards-conformant building block — common data, common interfaces, common vocabulary — engineered to merge upward into regional, state, and national structures as they stand up. Early communities become the proving ground and the template source, not orphans; nothing gets torn up when the national program arrives. This is how national doctrine has actually formed before: the Incident Command System began as a California regional fire-coordination framework and was proven locally long before the nation adopted it as its standard.
And the template isn’t limited to military towns. The city–base pair generalizes to the city–node pair: a refinery town, a key port city, a chemical-plant community — any critical anchor whose workforce lives in the town around it, and whose output runs through regional and national dependency chains. Lose the town, lose the node.
But one thing communities cannot do for themselves is choose the portfolio. Which refinery, which port, which chemical plant matters most is a coordination decision — the optimal balance of city–node pairs can only be prioritized with state, regional, or national visibility into the dependency chains that run through them. That is the federated model working in both directions: communities supply ready, conformant building blocks; higher echelons supply prioritization, sequencing, and coordination. It is also one more reason the first three lines of effort matter now.
Necessary — never sufficient. Communities proceeding now is the right move, and nothing built to the framework will need to be redone. But no community, however ready, substitutes for a national plan. We’re not waiting — and we’re not pretending waiting rooms don’t need a building.
Join 140+ professionals already building this. FIR Members are the volunteer corps behind the assessments, the training, and the standards — engineers, planners, first responders, veterans, and neighbors who decided a resilient nation is worth working for.
Become a FIR MemberWe don’t live grant-to-grant
FIR is a 501(c)(3). It owns a for-profit subsidiary, FIR Services, LLC, which takes on the everyday commercial work — assessments at cost, development support, advisory engagements — pays its taxes like any business, and returns its profit to the Foundation.
That profit becomes a growing endowment for the public-good work: the threat analysis, the free municipal assessments, the training, the standards. The commercial side keeps the mission funded; the mission keeps the commercial side honest. Strength, by design.
A resilient nation is a decision. Take your line of effort.
Whether you write policy, wear the uniform, run a statehouse, or lead a town — there is a calm, fundable next step on your line of effort, and we’ll help you take it. And if the mission speaks to you, take the closest step of all: join it.