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From Particle Physics to the Pentagon
From Particle Physics to the Pentagon
Ashton B. Carter, a theoretical physicist and former deputy defense secretary, is President Obama’s choice to be the next defense secretary.
Video by Natalia V. Osipova on Publish Date December 2, 2014. Photo by Philip Scott Andrews/The New York Times.
WASHINGTON — President Obama on Friday will announce his selection of Ashton B. Carter to lead the Pentagon, White House officials said, embracing a physicist and national security centrist who may advocate a stronger use of American power.
Mr. Carter, 60, is expected to face smooth confirmation hearings from Senate Republicans, who say they foresee no opposition to him.
Assertive and intellectual, Mr. Carter, is a sharp contrast to Chuck Hagel, the current defense secretary who was seen as passive and who submitted his resignation under pressure last week. He is more like Robert M. Gates, the president’s first defense secretary who tangled with the White House. Mr. Carter has remained in close touch with Mr. Gates and reviewed chapters of “Duty,†the former secretary’s critical memoir of working in the Obama White House that was published this year.
Mr. Carter makes no secret of his jaundiced view of life in Washington. While he sought the top Pentagon job — for which he was passed over two years ago — he also once compared working as a senior administration official in Washington to “being a Christian in the Coliseum. You never know when they are going to release the lions and have you torn apart for the amusement of onlookers.â€
Unlike Mr. Hagel, Mr. Carter comes to the job with a deep knowledge of the vast department. He worked in the Pentagon during the Clinton administration, returned as the chief weapons buyer under Mr. Gates, and served as deputy defense secretary, the No. 2 position, under Leon E. Panetta and Mr. Hagel. In that job, he served as the chief operating officer for more than two million uniformed and civilian employees. He would face little learning curve about the Pentagon’s challenges in a time of shrinking budgets.
Less certain is whether Mr. Carter, a Democrat, would bring the political skills necessary to penetrate Mr. Obama’s insular inner circle, a group that includes Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser, and Denis R. McDonough, the White House chief of staff. Like Mr. Gates, a Republican, Mr. Carter is widely viewed as to the right of the president on issues like the administration’s policy in Syria and the pace of the release of prisoners from the military prison at Guantánamo Bay.
Former aides and administration officials say that Mr. Carter — like both Mr. Hagel and Mr. Kerry — was stunned last year when Mr. Obama, after a walk and talk on the South Lawn of the White House with Mr. McDonough, decided at the last moment to call off military strikes against President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who had charged across Mr. Obama’s own “red line†on the use of chemical weapons. Mr. Carter will now inherit a military campaign that has made some progress in reversing the gains of the Islamic State but has made dealing with Mr. Assad a far less important issue.
Mr. Obama’s apparent willingness to wait years for the Syrian civil war to play out may frustrate Mr. Carter, who former colleagues say often pushed for clarity in policy goals — and then moved swiftly to pursue those goals.
“I would not call him a hawk,†said William J. Perry, a defense secretary under President Clinton and one of Mr. Carter’s mentors. “But he is pretty hard-nosed about what can be done with American power, and he is willing to use it when appropriate.â€
Vikram J. Singh, who worked under him when Mr. Carter was deputy secretary to Mr. Hagel, agreed with that assessment. “Ash Carter will probably be very clear-eyed about looking at the risk of a set of options, and accepting a certain amount of risk, and moving forward to implement as efficiently and quickly as possible.â€
Colleagues describe him as not necessarily patient, and at times sharp and direct. At numerous congressional hearings, when Mr. Carter testified alongside military commanders and even his bosses, he at times inserted his own answers to questions not directed to him, to make sure he got his point across.
“He is not somebody who can simply be counted on,†said Anthony H. Cordesman, a national security expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “He will say what he thinks.â€
But whatever Mr. Carter’s current views on Syria, it is unclear how influential he will be. Some former Pentagon officials said that the military campaign against the Islamic State was being effectively managed by the military commanders in the region, and that Mr. Carter would be better served by focusing on budget and resource issues.
“The biggest issue right now is the budget,†said Jeremy B. Bash, a former chief of staff to Mr. Panetta, who is advising Mr. Carter on his nomination. He said Mr. Carter combined Mr. Gates’s vision for the military with the budget expertise of Mr. Panetta. “He’s the new mold of what a secretary is going to be.â€
Born in Philadelphia, Mr. Carter studied medieval history at Yale and earned a doctorate in theoretical physics at Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar. In a 2013 interview, he recalled spending time on “charmed quarks and also the Higgs boson†elementary particle. But then he developed a fascination with defense policy so strong he never pursued a career as a physicist.
“In Ash you have a poster child for the guy who discovers that science and technology are the major drivers for some of the most important events in international affairs, and sometimes are the sources of the solutions,†said Graham Allison, who recruited Mr. Carter in the early 1980s to come to the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “Here was a guy with a physics background who was fascinated by ballistic missile defense."
Mr. Carter spent the better part of the next quarter-century at the Belfer Center, though he took a leave during the Clinton administration to work for Mr. Perry, a like-minded mathematician and engineer who became defense secretary at a critical moment after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It was a time of managing nuclear threats: the dismantlement of much of the Soviet Union’s old arsenal and the rise of new nuclear powers, starting with North Korea and Pakistan. He quickly became a central player in the 1994 nuclear crisis with North Korea, when the country threw out international inspectors and began what turned out to be a long and successful drive to develop a small nuclear arsenal.
“It may have been the closest we came to conflict with North Korea since the end of the Korean War,†Mr. Carter once said. He had been secretly directed by Mr. Perry to come up with a military plan, never put in effect, to take out the North’s nuclear and missile capacities.
Returning to Harvard, Mr. Carter threw himself into a joint program with Stanford called the Preventive Defense Project, which tried to focus on future threats for which he believed the government was insufficiently prepared. At a simulation he organized in April 2007 of how the government would react to the detonation of a small nuclear weapon in Washington, Mr. Carter put his head in his hands as officials seemed unprepared to convey to the public even basic information — like which way the wind was blowing, so that people would not be evacuated through a radioactive cloud.
Mr. Carter became deputy secretary of defense in 2011 and poured more money into technological tactics, but argued for using existing military personnel because recruiting outsiders would take too long. He spent many of his weekends, with his wife, Stephanie, and sometimes with Mr. McDonough, visiting soldiers wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq at local hospitals.
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