If Barack Obama thought he was installing a compliant caretaker as secretary of defence for his remaining two years of office, the confirmation hearing of the Harvard academic and Pentagon veteran Ashton Carter will have made uncomfortable viewing for the American president.
Carter, as Republicans have pointed out, is Obama’s fourth defence secretary in six years. The president, said Senator Ted Cruz when the nomination was announced in December, was looking for someone who would “follow the orders of the political White House, rather than focus on defending the national security interests”.
But Ashton Carter has never been anyone’s yes-man, as his first boss, the owner of a car wash in Philadelphia, discovered in 1965 when he crossed swords with the 11-year-old.
“I was fired for wise-mouthing the owner,” Carter recalled in an autobiographical note he wrote in 2007.
On the day he was nominated, Carter promised the president he would give him “my most candid strategic … and military advice”. And with a series of hawkish responses to pointed questions about key United States defence issues, including ISIL, Syria and Afghanistan, Carter won over a Republican-dominated committee uncomfortable with Obama’s efforts to scale back the US’s military might and ambition.
As a theoretical physicist, Carter is almost certainly the first US defence secretary who actually understands how the country's nuclear deterrent works. He is, as a glowing appraisal in The Boston Globe put it earlier this month, not only "the smartest person in the room", but probably also the entire building. America's unmatched military brawn now has a brain to match.
One of four siblings, Carter was born in Philadelphia in 1954, the son of Anne, an English teacher, and William Stanley Carter, a psychiatrist and US Navy Second World War veteran.
From the outset, it was clear that the young Carter's brain craved more stimulation than his public high school in Philadelphia could provide. "Ash was so smart that he was just bored in high school," his school friend Stephen Kahn told The Boston Globe this month.
Kahn’s introduction to his future friend in junior year had been a painful one, courtesy of the thumbtack Carter had taped to the seat of his chair. “So he pulled these kinds of pranks,” Kahn recalled.
In his Harvard autobiography, Carter put it another way: “High school in Philadelphia had left me hungry intellectually.”
Breezing through his schoolwork, Carter filled his weekday afternoons with sports and his evenings and weekends with work, pumping gas, working as an orderly in a hospital and finding his sea legs on a fishing boat.
Later, he would claim that he had “little time for … the reading and research that I was craving”, but nevertheless he won a place at Yale. There, disdaining “the ‘preppies’ and other privileged students” who preferred fun to study, he buckled down to pursue not one but two majors: physics and medieval history.
The two disciplines could not have been more different, but both fascinated Carter and he saw no reason why he couldn’t tackle them both. Graduating in 1976, he was awarded a Rhodes scholarship. A “man in a hurry”, he invested his time at Oxford in a doctorate in theoretical physics.
In 1979, as his years at Oxford drew to a close, the world seemed to be heading for Cold War Armageddon. Carter joined a team of scientists working with the US government to find a way to protect America’s missile defences from pre-emptive Soviet attack. It was an eye-opening experience that left him with “a vivid sense of how superficial and even dishonest the ‘analysis’ behind important public policies can be”. It also gave him “a deep concern with the problems of international security” and he decided to change careers and enter public service.
It was 1981 and he had his first taste of the Pentagon working as a defence department analyst, weighing the strategic considerations of nuclear attack and defence. He found his lowly position frustrating; after a year, he returned to academia, choosing Harvard’s John F Kennedy School of Government as one of the few places where “I could mix academics, my first career, with international security affairs, my second”.
But a decade later, the Pentagon came knocking again. Although “not … a political animal”, when Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 as the first Democrat president in 12 years, Carter accepted his invitation to become assistant secretary of defence for international security policy.
In this role, he cut his teeth on some of the toughest strategic issues of the day, including the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the security of the arsenal left behind by the collapse of the Soviet Union. “I had never held high office,” he later recalled. “It was a steep learning curve.”
When Carter quit to return to Harvard at the end of Clinton’s first term, it was in the interests of a better work-life balance. “I was at the Pentagon all day and half the night,” he recalled, and “very frequently out of the country”. He worried about the effect on his children, William and Ava, who were 1 and 5 when the family moved to Washington.
Back in academia, Carter at first felt disoriented by the now unfamiliar slow pace. From being “at the centre of world affairs”, he was back to “learning about what was going on in the world from the newspapers”. Nevertheless, he said that he “began to write again [and] I even began to have ideas again”.
Those ideas found form in a series of influential books, such as Preventive Defense: A New Security Strategy for America, a blueprint for America's post-Cold War defence strategy that was co-written with a former Pentagon colleague.
But by now, Carter, who had continued to serve as the only member of both the Defence Science Board and the Defence Policy Board, was linked umbilically to the defence department.
In 2007, he insisted that he and his family had “no desire to return to Washington any time soon”. He had “too many intellectual projects under way, not to mention two child-rearing projects”. But the call came sooner rather than later. In 2009, Carter was appointed undersecretary of defence for acquisition, technology and logistics – the Pentagon’s weapons-buyer-in-chief – and in 2011, Obama elevated him to deputy secretary of defence, responsible for balancing the military’s budget.
Neither of those roles were as disconnected from the realities of military intervention as they sound, as the president made clear in December.
What was frequently overlooked, Obama said, was Carter’s “love for the men and women in uniform … his relentless dedication to their safety and well-being”.
When Carter had cut unneeded systems, he had done so “because he was trying to free up money for our troops to make sure they had the weapons and the gear that they needed”. When US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan were struggling to defend themselves against roadside bombs, “he moved heaven and Earth to rush them new body armour and vehicles”.
There were, added the president, “countless Americans who are alive today in part because of Ash’s efforts”.
Tellingly, Carter’s first foreign foray, on Saturday, was to Afghanistan, where he gave no solid clue as to whether he was rethinking US withdrawal plans, but did offer a foretaste of his scientist’s evidence-based approach to problems. He was there, he told reporters, to find out “how … things stand now, and what’s the best path forward”.
Next stop, on Monday, was Kuwait, where Carter convened a brainstorming meeting of two dozen of the top US military and diplomatic minds in the Middle East, putting down a further marker both for the style of his leadership and his immediate priorities.
There was just one item on the agenda: the threat posed by ISIL. No details leaked from the session, other than Carter’s short but confident statement that “lasting defeat of this brutal group can and will be accomplished”. Coming from a scientist who is not only capable of devising solutions to the most complex problems of nuclear physics but who has also spent the past 30 years studying and shaping the capabilities of America’s military machine, it felt like more of a promise than a threat.
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