Carter nomination now official
Hagel skips ceremony naming ex-Pentagon official as pick
Ashton Carter, President Barack Obama’s nominee for secretary of defense, is flanked Friday by Obama and Vice President Joe Biden during the nomination announcement at the White House. Carter previously served as the Defense Department’s No. 2 civilian leader under Leon Panetta and then Chuck Hagel.
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama has named Ashton Carter, a former Pentagon official who’s an expert in budgeting and weapons systems, as his nominee for defense secretary, putting a loyal, seasoned hand in charge of confronting Islamic State extremists amid spending restraints.
Carter takes over from Chuck Hagel, who resigned Nov. 24 and didn’t attend Friday’s ceremony. While Hagel had frosty relations with the White House, a beaming Carter capped his acceptance remarks with an on-camera bear hug for Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice.
Obama praised Carter as “one of our nation’s foremost national security leaders.” Earlier in his administration, the president said, he “was by my side navigating complex security challenges.”
Carter, 60, spent more than two years as the Defense Department’s No. 2 civilian leader under former Secretary Leon Panetta and then Hagel. Before that, Carter served under Obama’s first Pentagon chief, Robert Gates, as the military’s top weapons buyer.
Gates, a former CIA director and defense secretary under President George W. Bush, and Panetta, a former CIA director and White House chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, complained in memoirs of White House micromanagement. People close to Hagel, a onetime Republican U.S. senator from Nebraska, said he also felt his views were often disregarded.
Hagel said his departure after less than 21 months as U.S. defense chief was “a mutual decision” between him and Obama.
“There were no major differences in any major area,” Hagel said Thursday. “Leadership comes with a responsibility of also knowing when it is probably a good time to let someone else come in,” he said.
Hagel on Friday released a statement praising Carter as “a renowned strategist, scientist, and scholar with expertise spanning from international security and counterterrorism to science, technology, and innovation.”
Carter’s nomination is subject to confirmation by the Senate. Several Republicans on the Armed Services Committee, including James Inhofe of Oklahoma and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, said earlier this week that they didn’t see any hurdles for Carter.
While Carter never served in the military, he has a lengthy resume in civilian defense posts and related academic positions, often working at the intersection of military policy, technology and weapons systems.
A former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he received a doctorate in theoretical physics, Carter’s involvement in defense policy dates back to Cold War-era debates over the MX missile system. He joined a team of scientists analyzing the missile system for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment in 1979, according to his biography.
He went from there to the systems analysis department in the defense secretary’s office, which he described as the successor group to the “whiz kids” that Robert McNamara recruited to help modernize military strategy during the 1960s.
Since then, he has mostly cycled between positions in government and academia, serving as chairman of the Harvard Kennedy School’s International and Global Affairs faculty.
As assistant secretary of defense for international security policy at the end of the Cold War, Carter won praise for his efforts overseeing the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which oversaw the dismantling of thousands of nuclear weapons from the former Soviet Union.
He also was closely involved in a U.S. standoff with North Korea in 1994 over its nuclear weapons program.
“I spent much of that year believing that the odds of a horribly destructive war were not less than 50-50,” Carter wrote in the autobiography.
More recently, Carter worked with Gates to scrap dozens of weapons programs as defense budgets were pared back, including halting the purchase of the F-22 Raptor, a stealth fighter jet made by Lockheed Martin Corp. Carter was credited with speeding up delivery of mine-resistant trucks that were needed to protect U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
Even so, Carter may face questioning in Congress over his management of weapons-procurement programs. As the Pentagon’s acquisitions chief from 2009 to 2011, he cited competition for the Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ship as a model for weapons purchases.
Since then, the program has come under scrutiny in Congress for a host of problems, including development delays and cost increases. Hagel cut the program to 32 ships from 52, saying he had “considerable reservations” about it, and he ordered a study of a new “small surface combatant.”
Since leaving as deputy defense secretary in December 2013, Carter has been a senior executive at the New York-based Markle Foundation, which works on ways to use emerging technology to enhance national security and improve health care, according to its website.