President Obama is set to nominate Ashton Carter the new defense secretary Friday morning amid fresh calls on Capitol Hill for a more robust strategy to counter the Islamic State.
There’s no sign, however, that the new Pentagon leader would do anything different in Iraq.
Obama forced outgoing Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel out the door partly in response to criticism that his national security team was failing on several fronts, chief among them on its strategy to foresee and counter the threat from the Islamic State.
But a month after the election, Obama hasn’t suggested that he would shift the strategy in any significant way. The Pentagon and several NATO countries are reportedly weighing whether to establish a very limited no-fly zone along the border of Syria and Turkey to create a safer escape area for refugees fleeing the war-torn country.
But White House spokesman Josh Earnest earlier this week said that while Washington is open to discussing a range of options with Turkish officials, a no-fly zone was not under serious consideration “at this point.”
Carter, a nuclear physicist who served as deputy defense secretary from October 2011 to December 2013 and previously as the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, has the support of some of Obama’s harshest foreign policy critics and over his career has pushed back on a number of administration policies.
He opposed the complete drawdown of troops in Iraq and early in his career, during the Reagan administration, argued that the Star Wars missile defense system wasn’t feasible. More recently, Carter pressed to increase competition in Pentagon contracting, and defense firms are bracing for more stringent oversight.
Still, Carter is widely viewed as a safe choice who will run out the clock in Obama’s presidency and ultimately have little choice but to implement his military policies without continuing his predecessors’ complaints about White House micro-managing — at least not as openly while running the Pentagon.
When asked whether Obama had hashed out any type of agreement with Hagel’s successor against White House meddling, Earnest didn’t flinch.
“I can tell you that whoever that person is, they will be very clear about what the chain of command is, and they’ll understand that the president of the United States is the commander in chief and sits atop the chain of command,” he said. “That means the president bears significant responsibility for what happens at the Pentagon and the Department of Defense.”
Obama held an annual meeting and dinner Thursday night with several members of his national security team and top combat commanders across the armed forces.
The meeting took place the same day Secretary of State John Kerry led a meeting in Brussels of the group of 60 member countries of the anti-Islamic State international coalition.
Afterward, Kerry said the countries agreed that the U.S.-led airstrikes and actions against ISIS had “halted its momentum” and forced it to modify its tactics, hampering its ability to hold onto territory and straining its finances.
ISIS “is still perpetrating terrible crimes, but there was a consensus that the momentum which it had exhibited two and a half months ago has been halted,” he said.
Kerry’s assurances did little to convince the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee and the incoming Republican chairman.
“Halted?”asked Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. “I would say ‘slowed.’ Halted, yes, in some places, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t regain momentum.”
“I can’t even say where the enemy is halted … ” he told the Washington Examiner. “But I believe there are places where they have lost momentum that you can say at least temporarily and hopefully permanently has been halted.”
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., one of the most vocal critics in Congress of Obama’s foreign policy, was predictably harsher.
While he said the airstrikes and the coalition’s anti-ISIS efforts “have certainly done some good,” they have fallen far short of “winning.”
“If that’s their definition of ‘winning,’ then I disagree with it,” he said in a brief interview. “So you halt the enemy’s momentum — that is not winning, and when you’re using the full weight of American air power and you still can’t take Kobani, then that’s not very encouraging.”
McCain was referring to the Syrian town on the border of Turkey, which Kurdish fighters have been unsuccessfully trying to retake with U.S. support from the air. The Kurds have claimed that as many as 10,000 civilians remain trapped inside the town and are running low on fuel and food as winter looms.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, on Thursday also disagreed with Kerry’s characterization and called on Obama to submit to Congress a new constitutional justification for continuing the war against ISIS.
Known as an “authorization for the use of military force,” Boehner said Obama needs to make it a priority in the new year, and if he does, Republicans will be ready to work with him to get it approved.
“The White House needs to show some urgency, because its strategy isn’t reversing the terrorists’ momentum on the ground,” he said. “I’ve got grave concerns that the plan the president has put in place will not accomplish the goal of defeating and destroying” the Islamic State.
Despite the bipartisan uncertainty about the effectiveness of the strategy, the president’s spokesman on Thursday first mentioned the Ebola threat in West Africa as one of the most immediate challenges facing the next defense secretary.
He also said the next defense secretary would “obviously” spend “a significant amount of time working closely with the president and with the coalition of more than 60 nations that are confronting and engaged in a strategy to degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS.
