Ashton Carter, reportedly President Obama’s choice to be the next defense secretary, is no stranger to the Pentagon bureaucracy, having spent much of the past six years trying to tame it.
Carter, 60, a physicist with a bachelor’s degree in medieval history from Yale, was the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer under former Defense Secretary Robert Gates and deputy to former Secretary Leon Panetta. He had earlier served in the Pentagon during the Clinton administration as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy and was an adviser to Goldman Sachs on global affairs.
He left the Pentagon in December 2013 after having been passed over in favor of current Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who is being forced out by Obama, and returned to his post as a professor at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
As undersecretary for acquisitions, technology and logistics, Carter began an overhaul of the Pentagon’s acquisition process, which included a restructuring of the $400 billion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, the largest in U.S. history, and cancellation of billions of dollars in other programs. He also oversaw logistics for the 2010 surge of troops into Afghanistan.
While serving as deputy secretary, Carter led the review of U.S. military strategy that led to the well-known “pivot” to Asia and the Pacific and a new emphasis on cyber warfare.
He had a reputation for being blunt, telling reporters in a January 2012 briefing about choices in the wake of drastic Pentagon budget cuts that cancellation is “the fate of things that become too expensive in a resource-constrained environment.”
After an April 2013 speech, Carter responded to a reporter’s question on Chinese concerns about the pivot to Asia, specifically U.S. actions in Korea by saying “if the Chinese find things they don’t like to see there’s an easy way to address that, which is talk to the North Koreans about stopping these provocations.”
Carter “was the rare leader who understood both the policy and budget sides of the agency,” and would often slip out on weekends to visit wounded soldiers at local military hospitals, Panetta wrote in his memoir, Worthy Fights.
“Ash had been a protege of former Secretary Bill Perry, whom I always admired, and Ash had made strong gains over the past two years — helping Bob Gates rapidly field mine-resistant vehicles in Afghanistan and smashing some old bureaucratic totems,” Panetta wrote.
Carter is expected to have a fairly easy time being confirmed by the Senate, having been confirmed unanimously to his two previous posts.
“I can’t imagine that he’s going to have opposition to his confirmation,” said Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
In his valedictory speech at the Pentagon a year ago, Carter shared his hopes for the future, which are likely to serve as a blueprint for how he would approach challenges such as the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, a newly assertive Russia and the drawdown in Afghanistan:
