Trump Administration

Floor Speech

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Mr. KELLY. Will the Senator yield for a question?

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Mr. KELLY. Senator Merkley, I appreciate everything you are doing to highlight the many ways that this President has been undermining the Constitution and the rule of law.

We have now experienced about 9\1/2\ months of this Presidency, and I am going to ask you a question about one thing in particular, and it is about the U.S. military and the leadership of the U.S. military.

But I want to kind of set the stage here a little bit. The United States has the most lethal military in the history of the world. The President presiding right now has experienced that as a U.S. Navy SEAL, I myself as a pilot flying off of an aircraft carrier in the first gulf war. No nation--at least today--matches the combat capability, the professionalism, the effectiveness of the U.S. Navy, Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, and now Space Force. And I will include the Coast Guard, too, because we like to count the Coast Guard, especially when they partnered with us on things that really mattered to the United States.

You know, one of those that I would like to discuss, where we should see more involvement from the Coast Guard, is what we are currently seeing in the Caribbean with regards to drug trafficking, which is a problem and presents a clear and present danger to the citizens of this country, and it is something we need to do more about.

I was on one of the cable shows last night, talking about this specific issue. So to date, there have been 6 or 7 strikes in the Caribbean that have killed 32 people, and, you know, some of those were trafficking drugs.

Those routes, by the way, Senator Merkley, are used generally to traffic cocaine and marijuana through the Caribbean, to Caribbean islands and on to Europe. They are not the routes that traffic fentanyl to the United States.

And over the last 6 weeks or so, we have conducted kinetic strikes against these boats without what I recognize as the legal authority to do so. It is not something I have seen in my experience in the U.S. Navy--I spent 25 years in the U.S. Navy--that I have seen during my career. I am now retired. But during my career, I never saw a President command the Department of Defense to do things that I felt were outside the boundaries of what we would consider illegal action against people.

We have traditionally done this with the U.S. Coast Guard, sometimes in conjunction with the U.S. Navy. We are in a partnership. They do what we would call law enforcement. And members of the Coast Guard come aboard Navy ships. We interdict drugs that are coming through the Caribbean or, more often, on the pacific side, on the western side of Mexico, up into California, and we interdict those drugs, and then we prosecute those individuals.

And, in my view, I think the administration has not made a case to the U.S. Congress and to the American people as to why this is a legal action.

A couple of weeks ago, when we were being briefed on this, I felt that they were pretty much tying themselves into a knot in trying to inform us on why this is allowed under the law.

Now, here is one of the things I really worry about. I worry about these young sailors or naval aviators or drone operators that are the trigger pullers, the guys who are dropping the small-diameter bombs from airplanes. It could be an F-18 or an F-35 or some other weapons system or folks that are operating an MQ-9 drone.

If you are the guy that is pulling the trigger in a combat operation, you typically expect that the people above you have done all the due diligence necessary to make sure that you are not going to be in some kind of legal jeopardy. And I really worry about that today.

There might be some young Navy lieutenant out there or Marine Corps captain or Air Force, for all I know, a MQ-9 operator, that might someday find out that they have done something that is not consistent with the law, and they are now in legal jeopardy. And that is a big problem.

I never saw that during my 25 years in the U.S. Navy. The two ships I sunk in the Persian Gulf, not for one second did I feel like I was getting some bad information from the battle group or from anybody above in the chain of command, whether it was General Schwarzkopf or Colin Powell or the President of the United States, George Herbert Walker Bush. It was not a concern of ours. It is a concern today.

And I can tell you, as I watch this from my vantage point on the Intelligence Committee and on the Armed Services Committee, there are members of our military that are now in some sort of potential future legal jeopardy. And it is because we have a President that I believe doesn't do his homework, doesn't follow norms, and possibly is making decisions that are not legal.

(Mr. BANKS assumed the Chair.)

We have seen the politicalization of the U.S. military over the last 9 months. That really disturbs me--the speech in Quantico where the Secretary of Defense dragged in hundreds of our senior leadership from all over the world, admirals and generals and senior enlisted staff who have very important jobs, who are working every single day to make sure that our Nation and our allies are safe and secure and have to make some really complicated decisions every day about the posture of force, how to equip them, make sure they are ready to fight--and the Secretary of Defense, for some reason, decides that he needed to give a TED talk about gym clothes and PT and other stuff that has no bearing on whether or not we are a capable military.

I don't know why he feels this way. But in my experience, from the time I first put on the uniform in 1986 to the time I took it off in 2011 and then beyond since I have been retired from the U.S. Navy, our effectiveness has never been diminished. Our innovation and our professionalism and our ability to train well is something that really makes us stand out.

I have experience with some of our allies, but I also have a little bit of experience with our adversaries. While I was at NASA flying the Space Shuttle over a decade--first flight in 2001 to my last in 2011-- every one of my missions I had a lot of interactions with Russian cosmonauts. Most of these Russian cosmonauts--not all of them but most--were members of the Russian Air Force, pilots, some of them test pilots.

I flew with these guys. They weren't the best pilots in the world, I have to admit. I was shocked the first time I flew with a guy who I will not share his last name. His first name was Vladimir. But I was really shocked that this guy who was a MiG-25 pilot could not fly formation in an airplane, something so fundamental and basic to a military pilot, that they did not train enough to be capable enough to do something that was so fundamental to be an effective fighter pilot.

And then after--that was early in my NASA career. Later, as I started flying to space with these guys, I realized that Russians and the Russian military, in particular--because that is where my experience was with these military guys--they were motivated by different things. It explains a lot of what I see out of Russia today.

Now, as Americans, whether you are in the U.S. Navy, whether you are a naval aviator or in the Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, Space Force, even in U.S. industry and in organizations in the United States, and I don't think this is unique to us, but everybody doesn't share this value: Americans are usually most motivated by mission success. We care about the mission first. We care about the mission before ourselves. We care about the mission more than anything. I think it is true for American companies, too, that they have a set of goals, and they have a plan and they are going to execute the plan.

It is not true of our Russian adversaries. It took me a while to learn this, but I found that they were motivated primarily by a couple of things: One was the appearance that they were in charge. That mattered to them more than anything else, that I look like I am in charge of whatever this operation is, not mission success. The second thing would be who could I blame? If things go wrong, where to place the blame. And the third thing, which was really interesting, was what can I steal from my employer. That, to me, was three principles I saw in my Russian cosmonaut colleagues.

They talked about the stealing. I wasn't sure they were actually stealing anything from the Russian space agency or not, but they talked about it as something that is fundamental to their system and their economy.

I bring this up because I often feel that we are unique as a service, as a fighting force in the world. Our allies--some of them are really, really good. But there is nothing that I found in my experience in my career--I am 61 years old--that is as professional as U.S. servicemembers and as motivated by mission and doing the right thing and making moral and ethical choices. And that is all at risk.

In Senator Merkley's State, in Portland, they are sending armed uniformed soldiers to do what we traditionally feel is police work-- intimidating the population, using tear gas against U.S. citizens for no reason. By the way, National Guard and Active-Duty servicemembers are not trained for this mission.

In my 25 years in the Navy, I never once did anything that you would consider to be close to police work. I would know. I am the son of two cops, so I would get a sense for what that was. It never happened. And unless you are a military policeman, it doesn't happen for infantrymen, for special ops or submariners, and certainly not for Active-Duty infantry.

So at this time in our history, I am really worried about legal jeopardy that our young servicemembers have been put in. But I am also worried about, does this fundamentally change the nature of the U.S. military, which has been, in my view, a force for good around the world, where we come to the defense of our allies and we do it in a way that garners a tremendous amount of respect, I think, even from our adversaries. I think that is all at risk.

So I wanted to ask Senator Merkley: You have been here 16 years now in the U.S. Senate. You have tremendous experience at this. My understanding is, you have a very close relationship with the people you represent in Oregon. How worried are you about the changes that could happen to the U.S. military?

And also, I am interested in what are you hearing from your constituents about this. They have been the focus and have been highlighted by this administration, not just this year but in Donald Trump's first Presidency as well.

I yield back to the Senator from Oregon.

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