As the world urges citizens to prepare for emergencies, the US focuses on military bases instead

Governments around the world are spearheading new campaigns to encourage the general public to be prepared for a host of emergencies that could disrupt essential services, including cyber-attacks and natural disasters. The United States, however, is taking a different approach: focusing on military preparation, as opposed to the general population.

The United Kingdom's latest 'Be Ready' campaign urges the public to stock up with supplies to last 72 hours, a warning that comes amid growing concern about the impact of the climate crisis, technological dependency and hostile state threats.

Sweden also recently published updated guidance for its population in the case of 'crisis or war', as did Japan. Goshi Hosono, the disaster management minister, said the country would issue an emergency appeal to citizens on 2 November, when the country's new disaster management agency begins operations. The plan will reportedly echo the UK's advice that households should have supplies to remain self-sufficient for at least three days during a disaster.

'The state of the world has worsened drastically in recent years. War is being waged in our vicinity,' writes the Swedish Civil Defense and Resilience Agency. 'Extreme weather events are becoming increasingly common. Terror threats, cyberattacks, and disinformation campaigns are being used to undermine and influence us.'

On 30 September, Pete Hegseth released a memorandum to senior Pentagon leadership establishing 'FORTRESS America', an initiative to prepare US military bases to keep operating for at least 90 days without outside support. The initiative is structured around five pillars, according to the memo: energy independence; supply-chain and defense-industrial base resilience; a strategic defense reserve; installation hardening and cyber resilience; and resilience in space and spectrum.

Lynn Budd, former president of the National Emergency Management Association (Nema) and current director of the Wyoming office of homeland security, believes that there is a growing understanding among leaders that cyber-attacks pose an increasingly powerful threat. 'Our world has gotten very small, and threats are imminent,' she said.

Budd also flagged the compounding threats of natural and human-made disasters, such as a cyber-attack taking place in the midst of a tornado. Everybody's attention is on the tornado, so adversaries take advantage of that time to launch a cyber-attack or other types of attacks that may affect the critical infrastructure of a community, she said.

In contrast, Dr Tom Chandler, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, argued that the Pentagon's plan illustrates the vast differences in needs for individual preparedness versus institutional preparedness. 'This highlights the importance of planning for prolonged disruptions rather than just for short-term emergencies,' he said, noting that military installations have very specific operational responsibilities that are often very different from what ordinary households require.

James Trainor, former assistant director of the FBI's cyber division and senior vice-president at LevelBlue, a global security services provider, said that continued outreach around cybersecurity reflects its growing role in disaster-preparedness initiatives. 'The cyber problem never gets smaller. There's more data, there's more connectivity, there's more innovation by the bad actor,' he said. 'Now with AI, the speed at which these tools can find vulnerabilities and exploit them — the risk is only going to continue to grow.'

While the US focuses on strengthening its military response to emergencies, experts say that individual emergency preparedness is lacking. 'Preparedness levels are not where we would hope they would be for some of our more common hazards,' said Dr DeeDee Bennett Gayle, professor of emergency management at the University at Albany. Fema's 2024 National Preparedness Report indicated that 51 percent of adults believed they were prepared for a disaster.

The US does run a similar program to the UK's campaign, known as Ready.gov, which was launched in 2003 and operated by the Department of Homeland Security. The government website acknowledges 25 types of disasters, including flooding, wildfires, cybersecurity, earthquakes and explosions.

Chandler acknowledged that while other countries may take on a more centralized approach to emergency preparedness, the United States has always relied on a multilevel method. 'The US system is fairly unique in a lot of ways, and it has been structured since the beginning to be locally executed, state-managed and federally supported,' he said. But experts say the Trump administration's sweeping cuts to the federal workforce have placed new pressures on state and local governments. More than 4,300 employees left Fema in fiscal year 2025, about 17 percent of the workforce, according to a recent US government accountability office (GAO) report.