Advertisement

What The Next Secretary Of Defense Would Mean For America’s Wars

CREDIT: AP
CREDIT: AP

According to reports from several administration officials, Ashton Carter will be nominated to be the next secretary of defense.

“His career has sort of prepared him perfectly for this kind of a moment,” Michael O’Hanlon, a defense industry analyst at the Brookings Institution told CNN.

Carter served as the deputy defense secretary under Leon Panetta as well as Chuck Hagel, who resigned as secretary of defense last week amid pressure from the White House.

His relationship with Hagel was seen as “awkward,” although when he left his Pentagon post last year he gave no specific reason. He wrote in his resignation letter only, “it is time for me to go.”

Advertisement

A theoretical physicist, Carter first joined the Pentagon in 1981 and eventually became its chief arms buyer, a role which gave him an intimate look at weapons policy and control over billions of government dollars.

“I think his particular skill set is the ability to combine a technical intelligence, a knowledge of the technical, esoteric dimensions of defense, with a broad policy perspective that’s informed by history,” said Joseph Nye, who, like Carter, has served as an assistant secretary of defense and faculty member at Harvard University. His policy perspective may be more hawkish, at least as compared to Hagel who has long been a vocal opponent of U.S. intervention in foreign conflicts.

Carter, for example, called to “strike and destroy” a North Korean missile that he said could possibly have had the potential to deliver a nuclear warhead to the United States.

“The Bush administration has unwisely ballyhooed the doctrine of ‘preemption,’ which all previous presidents have sustained as an option rather than a dogma,” he wrote in a 2006 Washington Post op-ed along with former secretary of defense William Perry. “But intervening before mortal threats to U.S. security can develop is surely a prudent policy.”

His belief in preemptive strikes means Carter might be more willing to sign off on more aggressive efforts to root out Islamist militants in Iraq and Syria than his predecessor.

Hagel did not see eye-to-eye with the administration’s shifting plan to combat ISIS.

“They chose Hagel for a job that just turned out to be very different than what was expected with the rise of ISIS,” a former national security aide to Obama told NBC last week.

Advertisement

Carter’s knowledge of security concerns and the Pentagon’s inner workings will help him hit the ground running if he does become the fourth secretary of defense since President Obama took office in 2008, but his policy views may not make all that much difference in dictating U.S. foreign policy.

That’s due, in part, to a rocky relationship between the Pentagon and the National Security Council, which Obama has greatly expanded since he first took office. His increased reliance on the NSC for foreign policy directives has earned the administration a reputation for micromanaging the military.

Former defense secretaries Robert Gates and Leon Panetta both complained of having little influence.

“You go there and by the time you get to the White House, the staff has already decided or tried to influence what the direction should be,” Panetta said at a Reagan National Defense Forum event last month. “And so rather than having a really good give-and-take you begin to get kind of sidetracked.”

But unlike Panetta, Gates, or Hagel, Carter has more than a decade of experience at the Pentagon.

Lawrence Korb, an assistant secretary of defense under President Ronald Reagan said that it’s important to remember that Carter has helped to shape some of the policies that he will help to administer.

Advertisement

“I don’t think you’ll see any substantive changes,” Korb said in a phone interview. “Don’t forget that he was part of the policy process up until last year.”

And, he adds, with only two years left in President Obama’s term in office, there isn’t all that much time to work with it in terms of shifting foreign policy direction or focus before the next election.

Obama is expected for formally announce his appointment of Carter by the end of the week. He will then need to be approved by the Senate, although that process is likely to move quickly.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said that Carter is “Great, very highly qualified.” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) who will replace Levin next month also approved of the nomination, calling Carter a “noncontroversial” choice.