Brian Mast: “War powers and AUMF, it is a distant impersonal term to talk about the work of the warfighter. And I think for people on…”

“War powers and AUMF, it is a distant impersonal term to talk about the work of the warfighter. And I think for people on both sides of the aisle, it is anything but impersonal. Probably all of us in here know people who have passed in our wars, roads named after them, schools named after them, VFWs, and other buildings named after them. It is not impersonal to those of us in here and to those who have been targeted by snipers, have had ordnance dropped on them, walked across fields of improvised explosive devices, were burned alive in Humvees and other pieces of equipment that they served their time in. It is not impersonal to us. We all know the stories. And I like to believe that we do take that very seriously. And there is broad-based consensus on the fact that these AUMFs need to be changed. But to do that and to have the appropriate responsibility to those who go out there and fight the wars, we have to talk to the people who go out there and command the battles, that sit in the JOC and sit in the TOC, and sit in the Pentagon. But, instead, what we did was we had professors from NYU and Harvard and Yale come in and speak to us for a few minutes about their opinions. But what I can tell you is that a battlefield looks nothing like a lecture hall or a faculty lounge. They are not the same things.…”