Whose Version of the War on Terror Won? | Flood the Zone with Cheap Drones | Saving Sequoias from Wildfires, and more

But all along, the issue has been not what the 10,000 people who came to Washington D.C. for the rally knew or even what the 2,000 people who made it inside the Capitol building knew. All along the issue has been what did the president know and what did he intend? Was this a rally that simply got out of control? Or was it the first attempt ever by an American president to stage a coup d’etat?

The Criminal Case Against Trump Is Getting Stronger  (David French, The Atlantic)

Trump might clear the bar for incitement on January 6, and that’s far from his only legal risk.

How Donald Trump Contaminated the Secret Service  (Jeffrey Robinson, Daily Beast)
The Secret Service is not a bunch of personal bodyguards. They serve the office of the presidency, and they answer to Congress. Trump, of course, never saw it like that.

Iran’s Nuclear Program ‘Galloping Ahead,’ IAEA Chief Says  (Reuters/ VOA News)
Iran’s nuclear program is “galloping ahead” and the International Atomic Energy Agency has very limited visibility into what is happening, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi told Spain’s El Pais newspaper in an interview published Friday.
In June, Iran began removing essentially all of the agency’s monitoring equipment, which had been installed under its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. Grossi said at the time this could deal a “fatal blow” to the chances of reviving the deal following the pullout by the United States in 2018.

US Takes Emergency Action to Save Sequoias from Wildfires  (Associated Press ? VOA News)
The U.S. Forest Service announced Friday it’s taking emergency action to save California’s giant sequoias by speeding up projects that could start within weeks to clear underbrush to protect the world’s largest trees from the increasing threat of wildfires.
The move to bypass some environmental review could cut years off the normal approval process required to cut smaller trees in national forests and use intentionally lit low-intensity fires to reduce dense brush that has helped fuel raging wildfires that have killed up to 20% of all large sequoias over the past two years.

What Will It Take to Stabilize the Colorado River?  (Kevin G. Wheeler et al., Science)
The Colorado River supplies water to more than 40 million inhabitants in the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico. A basin-wide water supply crisis is occurring because of decreased watershed runoff caused by a warming climate and legal and water management policies that allow systematic overuse. By the end of 2022, combined storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the two largest reservoirs in the United States, will have declined from 95% full in 2000 to approximately 25% full. If this “Millennium Drought” persists, then stabilizing reservoir levels to avoid severe outcomes will require reducing water use to match diminished runoff. With a process underway to renegotiate interstate and international agreements on consumptive uses of the river, we describe a promising new management approach based on combined storage of both reservoirs, rather than just Lake Mead as currently used, to trigger consumptive use reductions to the Lower Basin and Mexico.

Flood the Zone with Cheap Drones  (Nicholas Weaver, Lawfare)
The U.S. government has provided substantial support to the Ukrainian military since the Russian invasion, including supplying Ukraine with sophisticated rocket systems, artillery pieces, surface-to-air missiles, and a host of other items totaling billions of dollars. With the war in Ukraine entering a sustained phase, the U.S. should not only maintain this stream of aid to Ukraine but also develop and provide new systems specifically tailored to the nature of the ongoing conflict.
In particular, the U.S. military can design and manufacture low-cost suicide drones (also known as “loitering munitions”) for transfer to the Ukrainian military. A suicide drone is a small drone that can be remotely controlled to crash into a target, giving a precision-strike capability to anyone who can launch such a drone. This could both support Ukrainian forces and serve as a valuable exercise for the U.S. military’s own innovation capabilities.