Civil-defense systems in countries that plan for bombardment assign people a shelter, a radio channel, and a job. The United States does not run that model for the general public. Ready.gov still teaches a kit and a family plan, which is the civilian floor, not a wartime grid.

A shelter, a channel, and a job are the model: a place to go, a way to hear an instruction, and a task that is not waiting for an app. Countries that publish them have decided the public is part of the response, because they expect the lights to be hit. The United States has pieces of that for particular hazards and particular sites. It has not given the general public a wartime grid.

The gap is the story. If infrastructure is now a discussed target in great-power conflict, the public instructions are still written for hurricanes. Hurricanes end. A campaign against transformers can be renewed.

What a household does in the first nights overlaps with a blackout caused on purpose: water, a light, a radio, a place to meet. What does not overlap is the belief that the outage ends when the weather leaves. A campaign against transformers can come back on a night the repair crews thought was finished.

Readers looking for an assigned shelter, an assigned channel, and an assigned job will not find them on the federal page written for the general public. That absence is a fact about the country. It is not an invitation for this paper to draw the agency that is not there.

This paper will not invent a civil-defense bureaucracy. It will keep saying which official page actually exists, and what it does not cover.

The page that does exist is still worth using. A kit and a family plan are the floor under a worse event. They are not the wartime system other countries wrote down. Calling the floor a system is how the gap gets covered with a familiar document.