Servicemember Quality of Life Improvement and National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2025

Floor Speech

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Mr. DAVIDSON. Mr. Chair, my amendment really should be called the define the mission act for Ukraine or the define the mission amendment.

We voted on this last summer as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, and 129 of our colleagues agreed that the administration should define the mission.

Before this, this might have been summarized as the Powell doctrine for years. Before we get into a war, we should decide what we are trying to achieve with the war. The administration has gotten by in Ukraine since the inception by saying as much as it takes, as long as it takes.

We searched for that phrase and found it back in 2004 when the administration at that time decided that we were going to shift from going after the terrorists that bombed the United States on 9/11, or used airplanes to target our citizens, to rebuilding Afghanistan. The phrase they used was ``as much as it takes, as long as it takes.'' That was used to keep the mission going all the way until the Biden administration left in the most disastrous way possible by taking the military out first and leaving civilians behind and getting them out.

That was on August 31, 2021. The very next day, on September 1, 2021, the Biden administration entered into a strategic partnership agreement with Ukraine to support their membership in the European Union and NATO. This led to an escalation, and the Biden administration, rather than using leverage to create a peaceful resolution and prevent a war in Ukraine, fostered that war.

Nothing excuses Putin's invasion of Ukraine. The question is, what are we going to do about it? To this date, apparently, we are just going to keep cutting checks. For the American people, a lot of times people say of course, and what they really mean is to get the Russians out of Ukraine. Why not state that that is the objective? Why not state whether it is to get all the Russians out of Ukraine, including Crimea, or not?

Mr. Chair, you have seen the State Department say variations on that. In fact, you have seen Under Secretary Nuland say that the actual mission is that we get war crimes tribunals for Vladimir Putin and regime change in Russia. Is that the mission?

Recently, Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, said that the mission is actually about rare earth minerals that Ukraine has. In that sense, if it is about minerals, does this really go back to when Yanukovych in November 2013 said that he is going to do a trade deal with Russia instead of a trade deal with the European Union?

Shortly after that, there was a coup, a regime change, and an actual insurrection that resulted in a new government in Ukraine.

None of this excuses what Vladimir Putin has done. We should be rightly rejecting what Putin has done in Ukraine.

So far, the United States has spent more than $170 billion on the war, but we still haven't defined the mission. You can't really hold the administration accountable for success or, in this sense, potentially for failure.

The reality is that if we keep cutting checks, Ukraine does not have the resources, the manpower, the skill to deploy all the weapons it will take to extract all the Russians from Ukraine. They just don't.

We want them to be able to do that, but we have also taken off the table a path to a peaceful resolution.

In the spring of 2022, in the early days of the war, the Biden administration scuttled peace negotiations. Well, presumably, because they had a mission that they were actually trying to achieve in mind.

I have sent questions to them. I finally got a response, and I wanted them to define what it is.

They came up with something, finally, that says the United States' goal is an independent, democratic, and economically stable Ukraine, governed by the rule of law and integrated into Euro-Atlantic institutions. That is an answer, but they could give us a classified answer.

The point of this bill is to say: Tell us exactly what you are trying to do. That is not something you can have that you can hold accountable.

In fact, I asked former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Milley this in the House Foreign Affairs Committee. I said: General, does this qualify as a mission statement in the military? He said: Absolutely not. You would want more precision on that.

All I am asking is the same thing that our military already knows how to do: define the mission. Do it in a classified setting, by all means, but do it in a way where we can hold you accountable for the results.

That is the point of amendment No. 38. I encourage all of our colleagues to support it. I thank the chairman and the committee for their support in this en bloc, and I thank the chairman for this time.

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