Secretaries of defense tend to waver between veteran political types (Melvin Laird, Leon Panetta, Donald Rumsfeld) and well-credentialed products of the military-industrial complex (Robert McNamara, Harold Brown, William Perry). Ashton B. Carter, who died last week of a heart attack, age 68, was manifestly in the latter category.
Born in the Philadelphia suburbs, the son of a neurologist father and schoolteacher mother, Ash Carter double-majored in physics and medieval history at Yale, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford where he earned a doctorate in theoretical physics, and for several years moved between fellowships at prestigious research institutions and senior posts at the Pentagon before switching full-time to public policy.
In 1984, he joined the faculty at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government where, for the next three decades, he advised politicians and policymakers and, during intervals of public service, rose through the managerial ranks of the Department of Defense.
He never served in the armed forces, though that made no difference in his case. For while Carter was unquestionably a politically minded defense intellectual — he attracted attention on Capitol Hill in the late 1980s as a well-informed critic of the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) — he was also a disinterested thinker and sober analyst whose insights and convictions were sometimes at odds with administration colleagues.
In the early 1990s, he was one of the first to address the dangers of the presence of nuclear weaponry in former states of the Soviet Union. As President Bill Clinton’s assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, he negotiated the withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. He also drew early attention to the capacity of terrorist organizations and states, in the Middle East and elsewhere, to obtain or develop nuclear weapons. Carter was the first senior official to promote efforts to persuade North Korea to freeze its nuclear program, an unconventional approach later revived by President Donald Trump.
As President Barack Obama’s undersecretary of defense, he circumvented the traditional processes of defense contracting to create a Strategic Capabilities Office in the Pentagon and enlist Silicon Valley in the search for rapid solutions to intractable battlefield problems. Carter believed that the speed and ingenuity of high-tech enterprise were especially suited to the challenges of terrorism.
He also thought in longer-range terms, which, at times, pulled him into conflict with his Cabinet colleagues and the Obama White House. When, in 2015, he succeeded Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense, Carter made it clear that he regarded Russia as an incipient threat to Western security, fortifying the American military presence in former Soviet-bloc nations. And when China began exercising its naval power in the South China Sea, he vowed that the United States would “fly, sail, and operate wherever international law allows.”
Inheriting a series of uncertain policies in confronting an expanding Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Carter argued within the White House to concentrate American energies on defeating ISIS while he scoured for funds to develop new weaponry and vehicles to protect against mines and roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Still, while Carter prevailed in the face of administration resistance on strategic issues, he fully supported Obama’s determination to open all military roles to women, including combat and membership in elite units such as Navy SEALS and the Green Berets.
In 2013, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that he would rescind all limitations on women after a period of review to allow the services to revise their policies. In 2016, when the review was complete, it fell to Carter to implement its findings. Six months later, he lifted the ban on transgender men and women in service, with certain exceptions.
Marines Commandant Gen. Joseph Dunford was publicly opposed to some of the changes. But while Carter was determined to proceed, his respect for Dunford was such that, as he wrote a few years later, he excused the general from standing at his side during the announcement. “I did not want Joe to be caught in the middle,” he recalled.
Philip Terzian is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.
