DoD’s Critical Infrastructure Is Dangerously Insecure | A Crucial Barrier Against Hurricanes Risk | Growing Risk of WMD Attacks, and more

A Crucial Barrier Against Hurricanes Is at Risk  (Amanda Leslie, The Atlantic)
As climate change interacts with storms, scientists are trying to determine what happens when dunes have less time to recover.
Dunes are formed when wind deposits sand and shapes it into mounds. Greenwich Beach has a roughly six-kilometer stretch of dunes; vegetation on top holds the sand in place. During storms, rows of dunes act as barriers, protecting inland regions. Only a few of Hurricane Fiona’s high waves topped the crest of the Greenwich Dunes—though if the storm had hit during high tide, it could have been worse. The waves eroded the dunes, but the sand kept the storm surge from flooding in.
But if we want dunes to protect important areas, such as neighborhoods, there may be a point where people need to intervene to keep the sand in place. In some places, people are already shoring up vulnerable dunes by trucking in beach sand; reinforcing the mounds with trees, logs, and other biodegradable materials that slow down the movement of sand; or planting vegetation on top.

New York City Is Not Built for This  (Nancy Walecki, The Atlantic)
New York City’s sewer system is built for the rain of the past—when a notable storm might have meant 1.75 inches of water an hour. It wasn’t built to handle the rainfall from Hurricane Irene, Hurricane Sandy, or, more recently, Hurricane Ida—which dumped 3.15 inches an hour on Central Park. And it wasn’t built to handle the kind of extreme rainfall that is becoming routine: The city flooded last December, last April, and last July—an unusual seasonal span. “We now have in New York something much more like a tropical-rainfall pattern,” Rohit Aggarwala, New York City’s environmental-protection commissioner, said yesterday at The Atlantic Festival. “And it happens over and over again.”
Extreme rainfall isn’t just a New York City problem. A recent analysis found that one in nine residents in the contiguous United States is at significant risk of storms that will bring at least 50 percent more water than their local infrastructure can handle—overwhelming the pipes, channels, and culverts that might have met the rainfall records of the past. Any place trying to fix this mismatch might not have the basic information it needs, either: The periodic update of national rainfall from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for instance, won’t arrive for another three to four years, which could keep climate-resilience efforts lagging behind the speed at which the climate is changing.

The Patriot: How General Mark Milley protected the Constitution from Donald Trump (Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic)
In normal times, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the principal military adviser to the president, is supposed to focus his attention on America’s national-security challenges, and on the readiness and lethality of its armed forces. But the first 16 months of Milley’s term, a period that ended when Joe Biden succeeded Donald Trump as president, were not normal, because Trump was exceptionally unfit to serve. “For more than 200 years, the assumption in this country was that we would have a stable person as president,” one of Milley’s mentors, the retired three-star general James Dubik, told me. That this assumption did not hold true during the Trump administration presented a “unique challenge” for Milley, Dubik said.
Milley was careful to refrain from commenting publicly on Trump’s cognitive unfitness and moral derangement. In interviews, he would say that it is not the place of the nation’s flag officers to discuss the performance of the nation’s civilian leaders.
But his views emerged in a number of books published after Trump left office, written by authors who had spoken with Milley, and many other civilian and military officials, on background. In The Divider, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser write that Milley believed that Trump was “shameful,” and “complicit” in the January 6 attack. They also reported that Milley feared that Trump’s “ ‘Hitler-like’embrace of the big lie about the election would prompt the president to seek out a ‘Reichstag moment.’ ”
These views of Trump align with those of many officials who served in his administration. Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, considered Trump to be a “fucking moron.” John Kelly, the retired Marine general who served as Trump’s chief of staff in 2017 and 2018, has said that Trump is the “most flawed person” he’s ever met. James Mattis, who is also a retired Marine general and served as Trump’s first secretary of defense, has told friends and colleagues that the 45th president was “more dangerous than anyone could ever imagine.” It is widely known that Trump’s second secretary of defense, Mark Esper, believed that the president didn’t understand his own duties, much less the oath that officers swear to the Constitution, or military ethics, or the history of America.

This Is Your Kid’s Brain on Extreme Heat  (Matt Simon, Wired)
Heat affects the brain in a few key ways. First of all, overheating is just distracting. If a kid is miserably sweating out a heat wave, they’re not focusing properly on the test in front of them. On hot days, students struggle to keep their heads up off their desks, much less focus on a lesson about lab safety.
And physiologically, young people are extra vulnerable to heat stress because their bodies are still developing. To keep from overheating, the body sweats, of course. But it also diverts some blood from the organs toward the skin, releasing heat into the surrounding air. (That’s why skin flushes when it’s hot out.) This can lead to a deficiency in oxygen in certain tissues, which in turn leads to cognitive impairment. This can happen to overheating teachers, too, potentially reducing the quality of their instruction on hot days.
“When we don’t have as much blood—with a lot of hemoglobin and oxygen—going into the brain, we can’t focus, we can’t think, and we can’t learn as efficiently as we should,” says Tarik Benmarhnia, an environmental epidemiologist at UC San Diego. “Concentration is just not a priority, obviously, because the body is working very, very hard to try to cool down the temperature—that’s a priority.”

The DoD’s Critical Infrastructure Is Dangerously Insecure  (Alison King and Michael McLaughlin, National Interest)
As simmering tensions in East Asia rise to a boil, the recent discovery of a Chinese penetration of the U.S. military’s telecommunication systems in Guam should be setting off alarm bells across the executive branch and in the halls of Congress. Though Chinese penetration of U.S. networks for espionage has been well documented for more than two decades, the targeting of critical infrastructure represents a significant escalation by China and highlights critical vulnerabilities the Department of Defense (DoD) needs to immediately address.
Though the United States tends to view warfare as a challenge for the military to confront, our enemies have a vastly different outlook.
America’s adversaries are always eager to deny or degrade our military’s ability to mobilize globally and execute national security objectives at scale. The war in Ukraine, saber-rattling in the South China Sea, and a U.S. presidential election on the horizon further exacerbate geopolitical tensions. Lately, they have succeeded by exploiting vulnerabilities in operational technology (OT) devices that control much of our critical infrastructure. 
The recent discovery of Chinese malicious code embedded in the telecommunications systems used by the U.S. military in Guam, which is home to three strategic U.S. bases, sent waves through the national security community. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) currently uses cyberspace to achieve espionage and intellectual property theft objectives. However, they aspire to use malware hidden in our critical networks to disrupt our response to a future CCP invasion of Taiwan. This cannot be overstated: denying the availability of weapon systems in the garrison is as effective as destroying them on the battlefield.
Now is the time to shore up the DoD’s Control Systems (CS) and OT security and build resiliency across the department’s vast digital landscape. 

Texas Drought Has Deepened Amid This Year’s Brutal Heat  (Kevin Vu, Texas Tribune)
A lingering drought affecting more than 80% of Texas is causing wildfires, hurting agriculture and drying up water supplies throughout the state.
This year’s drought comes less than a year after Texas experienced one of its worst droughts on record in 2022.
After widespread rains in May and June that brought much of the state out of drought, Texas suffered through one of its hottest, driest summers on record. East Texas, Central Texas, South Texas and some parts of West Texas are now affected by some level of drought — areas where 24.1 million people live, according to Drought.gov. Nearly 40% of the state is in an extreme or exceptional drought, the most severe levels, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
Climate change both strengthens and lengthens heat waves, and the hotter temperatures make droughts more intense than they would be otherwise.

Biotechnology and AI Advances, Disinformation Campaigns Compound Increased Risk of WMD Attacks  (Bridget Johnson, HSToday)
Countering the development and potential use of weapons of mass destruction has grown more complex with biotechnology advances that could be exploited by bad actors as well as rampant disinformation campaigns that could hamper the ability to prevent or respond to an attack or other incident.
The unclassified version of the 2023 Department of Defense (DoD) Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (CWMD) Strategy released Thursday says that the risk of the United States or allies and partners “facing a military confrontation that includes chemical, biological, radiological, and/or nuclear (CBRN) weapons has increased since 2014.”
The WMD strategy expands upon the 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) guidance by outlining four CWMD-specific priorities: defending the homeland from WMD attack, deterring WMD use against the United States and its allies and partners, enabling the Joint Force to prevail in a CBRN-contested environment, and preventing new WMD threats.