File photo: Ashton Carter seen on July 20, 2012. (Photo: REUTERS)
President Obama has named former Pentagon official Ashton Carter to be his next Defense Secretary, White House officials confirmed Friday. The president’s choice of Carter, 60, who was deputy Defense secretary from October 2011 to December 2013, was already widely rumored. However, it was not confirmed by the White House until Friday.
They said Obama would formerly announce the decision to nominate Carter to replace Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel during a Friday morning press conference.
If confirmed by the Senate, Carter would be Obama’s fourth person to head up the Pentagon in Obama’s six-year administration. The new pick comes under two weeks after Chuck Hagel resigned amid White House pressure to take the fall for policy failures, which they saw as a clear cause for Democrats’ midterm defeats. Hagel served less than two years on the job.
Carter has extensive experience in the national security arena. Carter’s former role was essentially that of chief operating officer. Before he served as deputy defense secretary, he was the Pentagon’s technology and weapons-buying chief for more than two years.
During the Clinton administration, Carter was assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, though he holds no education background in security studies. Prior, he was director of the Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School.
Carter has bachelor’s degrees in physics and medieval history from Yale University and earned his doctorate in theoretical physics from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
In security studies, Carter champions the concept he and former Defense Secretary William Perry argued for in the 1990s. They called it “preventive defense,” an eclectic child of defensive realism a basic premise that in the aftermath of the Cold War the U.S. could avoid major war and emerging security threats by using defense diplomacy – forging and strengthening security partnerships with China, Russia and others.
Carter, unlike past defense secretaries, may have a world view and opinion of U.S. defense priorities that fit better with the Obama agenda, save for the fact he argues for better nurturing relationships. However, the general idea that the U.S. needs to strengthen defense alliances and partnerships in Asia and the Pacific has been a key component of the Obama agenda, it is just that Obama is bad at relationships.
The platform also includes paying more attention to cyber-defense and countering the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
In remarks in July 2013 at the Aspen Security Forum, Carter argued that the country was ready to close the book on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that we need to care more about future threats, including cyber attacks. That was one month before Obama announced the recommencing of a bombing campaign against the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq.
Carter’s point was that the Pentagon had entered an era of transition that requires fresh thinking, but also that the U.S. needs to spend fresh money on that thinking. He called on Congress to reverse the budget-cutting law known as sequestration.
“First of all, we need to get back to some issues that we’ve taken our eye off a little bit over the last decade,” he said, adding, “We need to reinvest and get back in the game.”
