US President Barack Obama made one thing clear in choosing his fourth defense secretary: He gives the orders, his military advisers follow them.
Obama has been through three defense secretaries in six years, and they have all complained about micromanagement from the White House. Former US deputy secretary of defense Ashton Carter, whom Obama is nominating to be the next, has watched it happen.
So Carter offered words of deference to Obama at the announcement ceremony on Friday — and capped his remarks with an on-camera bear hug for US National Security Adviser Susan Rice.
Photo: Bloomberg
“I accepted the president’s offer to be nominated for secretary of defense because I respected his leadership,” Carter said.
Current US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, who announced his resignation on Monday last week, has had a frosty relationship with the president’s staff. He did not attend yesterday’s ceremony — even after the White House announced that he would be there.
After skipping the White House ceremony yesterday, Hagel 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 has expressed a philosophical view toward government infighting in the past.
“Public service at senior levels in Washington is a little bit like being a Christian in the Coliseum,” Carter wrote in his autobiography for Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he has been a faculty member. “You never know when they are going to release the lions and have you torn apart for the amusement of onlookers.”
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.
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