Former Army captain and paratrooper Jessica Killin (CO-05), retired Army Brigadier Gen. Leela Gray (FL-13), former Navy helicopter pilot and Air National Guard Officer Rebecca Bennett (NJ-07), and retired Navy Commander Elaine Luria (VA-02) leaned on decades of military experience to call out their opponents for blindly supporting a war that is causing economic pain for Americans across the country while stretching military capabilities thin.

• “Obviously, gas prices have gone up because of the war in Iran. And I think it's important to note that in my district, which has five military installations, over 100,000 veterans, the war in Iran isn't just about gas prices, it's also about a strategic failure on the part of this president and Jeff Crank.”
• “The threat of Iran is serious […] and in this district, everyone has either served or knows someone who serves, or loves someone who serves, and they know and understand the importance of our allies and our alliances. They know and understand that you don't go into a conflict without having a strategic plan, without having a clear goal, and also without consulting your allies and without consulting Congress.”
• “Jeff Crank has voted five times to allow this war to continue without any check, without any strategic plan. And people in my district – Republicans, Democrats, and unaffiliated alike – are deeply frustrated and concerned about the impact it's having on our own national security.”

• “If you assess where we were before we went into Iran and where we are today, you are going to see a stark contrast that has achieved nothing but a cost of living crisis.”
• “The cost of living crisis is very real here because we are a coastal economy. And the people I’m talking to every single day, boots on the ground, they’re telling me that they feel like they can’t survive, that they feel like they’ve been forgotten. This is exacerbated when we make a choice to go to war without the proper planning and certainty and without a concrete strategic objective.”
• “[And] we’re not tracking every dollar that is being spent out there […] that’s some due diligence that we need to make sure we’re adhering to every single day. When you don’t, it invites corruption. And we’re seeing quite a bit of that every single day in the administration and with my counterpart, Congresswoman Luna. She [Luna] is part of that problem.”

• “Anytime we are going to put American service members in harm’s way, there needs to be a clear motivation, clear objective, and a clear exit strategy. We haven’t seen any of that from this administration.”
• “Donald Trump and my opponent Tom Kean Jr. ran on no more forever wars and lowering the cost of living, and they’ve done the exact opposite – so we have to hold them accountable for what they promised they were going to do and what they’ve actually done in reality.”

• “Republicans today trying to align themselves with Trump is really going to sink their ship.”
• “The lack of sensitivity at the top, the leadership – Donald Trump saying that the USS Lincoln’s deployment isn’t nearly long enough – really shows a lack of care and concern for our military and our military families.”
• “She [Kiggans] is not a moderate.She can’t separate herself from Trump. This time around, what’s different is the fact that she has a voting record: She has voted 100% of the time with Trump.”

###