Call your senators and tell them to strip these amendments, SA 5890 & 6039 to S. 4784, 202-224-3121:

That's a strange vehicle to choose, and not just because forest policy doesn't belong in a defense bill. Padilla is also using this same NDAA to propose a demonstration program letting the Pentagon and NSF build a mock town on a military test range and ignite it repeatedly to study wildfire behavior, SA 6053. The work's already done. Jack Cohen ran this experiment decades ago, igniting forest blocks next to test structures at measured distances and documenting exactly how homes ignite in wildfire. That research became the home ignition zone concept and the entire basis for Firewise and defensible space standards still in use today. Padilla already has his own bill sitting in committee since January, the Community Protection and Wildfire Resilience Act, S. 3609, that funds the actual answer Cohen's work already gave us: home hardening, defensible space, community-level planning. Instead, Senate energy is going toward building something specifically to destroy it, under Pentagon control, to re-derive a finding that's been settled science since the 1990s. Lets stop barking up the wrong tree already, we need to work from the community-out.