Thank you Mr. Chair, members of the committee. I’m Representative Tom Mannion, representing the town of Pelham. I’m also a United State Marine Corps Infantry Veteran, where I deployed with 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines to two combat deployments in Iraq. It was my experiences there that got me paying closer attention to politics, especially foreign policy, and put me on the path that brought me before you today.

My deployment in 2005 overlapped with Hurricane Katrina. A fellow squad mate, and eventual purple heart recipient, was from New Orleans. I couldn’t imagine what he was going through, knowing his family was trapped in rising flood waters, a world away and having to stay focused on patrol. What we didn’t learn until much later is how the war we were fighting contributed to the unnecessary loss of life back home.

During Katrina, 35% of Louisiana’s National Guard was in Iraq. Civil engineering equipment, supplies, and even helicopters from Louisiana and Mississippi Guard units were deployed to Iraq and Kuwait, and were unavailable for rescue operations. The call reached out to other states, whose Guard units were also deployed, prepping for deployment, or just returning from deployment to come aid. The DoD was forced to tap active duty Army and Marine Corps units to fill the gaps in the missing Guardsmen, but their slow deployments had fatal consequences. Former FEMA director Gen. Julius Becton Jr. said “If the 1st Cav. and 82nd Airborne had gotten there on time, I think we would have saved some lives.” But the reality is, the Louisiana Guard should have been available to their State in the first place.

That same missing Guard unit, the 256th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, was on the receiving end of rocket attacks in Syria in 2022. Which brings me Authorizations for Use of Military Force. They were implemented after the Vietnam war as part of the War Powers Act, and are the mechanism by which the United States has conducted combat operations across the globe ever since. The problem is, they lack the formality and the political consequences of a formal declaration war as defined by Art I Section 8 of the US Constitution. It has become a way for Congress to release itself from responsibility for these disastrous conflicts, while granting near limitless power to the Executive without a proper Constitutional amendment to do so.

In 2013, Congress abandoned the idea of issuing a new AUMF for Syria, as they knew how politically unpopular the forever wars in the Middle East have been. However, the Obama administration, and all those to follow, have cited the 2001 AUMF for GWOT and the 2002 AUMF for liberation and protection of Iraq as “good enough” legally to execute our war against ISIS and training of militants for regime change against Bashar al’Assad. Attempts to terminate these AUMFs have failed repeatedly, with Senator Rand Paul’s last bill only garnering 10 votes in the Senate. Asking the Federal Delegation is a failed proposition.

In more recent history, and as further spill-over from the endless Iraq and Syrian conflicts, the Tower 22 base in Jordan was attacked by Iraqi militia In January of this year, killing 3 soldiers and wounding more than 40 others. Among those were several Arizona National Guardsmen. It should come as no surprise then, that the Arizona Senate passed Defend the Guard, with every member of their Military Affairs and Public Safety Committee as a co-sponsor. They believe the guard would be better served securing their southern border instead of forward deployed in harms’ way for no benefit of the United States. I also heard through the Lance Corporal underground, as we used to call it, that our own Guardsmen had been deployed to that exact same base a few years back. When I asked the Deputy Adjutant General to confirm, he could not comment due to operational security reasons.

Finally, I want to address the other fatal consequences these deployments have. The suicide rates among post-9/11 veterans is horrifying, 4x higher than the casualties from combat itself. A lot of platitudes and useless talk is done by politicians in front of cameras, but no one wants to make the bold move necessary to destroy the root cause. The Pentagon is deploying our young men and women into combat zones with no objective, no clear targets, no victory condition, no end in sight. We lost thousands of lives in Iraq, only to pull out and have huge chunks of the country immediately fall to ISIS, requiring us to return and sit around at bases getting shot at, STILL with no exit strategy. We spent twenty years and thousands more lives transferring Afghanistan from the Taliban, back to the Taliban. These abysmal failures weigh on the minds of the men, like me, that watched their squad mates die, ultimately for nothing. We are no better off as a nation, no safer whatsoever from these sacrifices. And Congress will never change course until individuals like us, at the state level, force them to.

Please, as a combat veteran of these pointless conflicts, with invisible scars of my own, I ask that you vote OTP on HB229, and protect our State’s service members from the exploitation of DC. I’m happy to take any questions.