Mission assurance ends at the fence line. Resilience can’t.
Roughly two-thirds of military personnel live off installation — the mission runs on civilian power, water, fuel, and communications the Department does not own, delivered by the city next door. Mission assurance and force protection doctrine already obligates the Department to sustain operations under all conditions; a Black Sky Event is the condition it has not yet planned for. FIR assesses city–base interdependency and helps develop resilient countermeasures, so the force can deploy and the mission holds when the grid does not.
The base and the city succeed or fail together
Off-installation infrastructure failure is one of the quietest threats to readiness — and one of the most addressable, once the dependency is mapped.
Power, water, wastewater, fuel, medical surge capacity, and the workforce itself all cross the fence line — the full infrastructure stack, not just the grid. A 30-day regional grid-down event doesn’t respect the installation boundary: it degrades the base by degrading the community that supports it. And because the workforce’s families live in that community, plans that ignore them lose the workforce early — operators and responders go home when their households are at risk.
FIR treats the installation and its host community as a single unit of analysis: the city–base pair. We map the shared dependencies, identify where a civilian failure becomes a mission failure, and help build joint resilience plans that protect both at once.
shared lifelines
Assess the dependency. Develop the countermeasures.
Interdependency assessment
A structured analysis of what the installation draws from its host community — power first, then the full stack: water, fuel, communications, food, medical, and the workforce — the single points of failure, and the duration the pair can sustain a Black Sky Event.
Resilient countermeasures
Joint resilience plans — on-site and community-side generation, water assurance, the city–base food pair — sequenced by mission impact and funding feasibility.
Funding alignment
Pathways through the Defense Critical Infrastructure Program and related authorities, so countermeasures are not just designed but actually resourced.
Built to fit how the Department already thinks
FIR’s defense work is designed to map cleanly onto existing mission-assurance requirements and funding authorities — not to add a parallel process.
Note on naming: “Department of War” (DoW) is the department’s authorized secondary title under the September 2025 executive order; “Department of Defense” (DoD) remains the statutory name pending congressional action. FIR uses DoW on first reference in line with current departmental usage.
The pair generalizes — and the state chooses the portfolio
The city–base pair is the flagship instance of a general method: the city–node pair — any critical anchor and the community whose workforce keeps it running. Refinery towns, key port cities, chemical-plant communities. Two of these matter to the mission directly: strategic seaports are ports of embarkation, and the defense industrial base runs through civilian supply chains that fail with the towns around them.
Which pairs come first is not a local decision. The state seat ranks its critical nodes by dependency reach, groups them into defensible regional clusters, and rolls them into the governor’s Black Sky plan — with the draft Executive Order putting strategic defense installations at the front of the line. That is the federated model at work: communities and installations supply ready building blocks; the state supplies prioritization and coordination.
Readiness inside the gate depends on resilience outside it.
If you’re responsible for an installation’s mission assurance, let’s map the city–base pair and find the countermeasures that move the needle first.