Carter would give Pentagon new outlook
WASHINGTON — The experiences that Ashton Carter would bring to the job of defense secretary are vastly different from Chuck Hagel’s in several important ways, starting with the fact that Carter is an academic and a policy wonk.
How Carter would pursue President Barack Obama’s defense agenda — or use his influence to bend it in new directions — is less obvious.
Obama was to announce today that he will nominate Carter as Hagel’s successor. Carter would, if confirmed by the Senate, be the fourth Pentagon chief of Obama’s presidency, following Robert Gates, Leon Panetta and Hagel.
Carter has left an extensive paper trail from his many years in Washington, including three stints at the Pentagon, a trail that suggests a sometimes hard-nosed view of policy puzzles like North Korea and Russia.
In 1999 Carter and former Defense Secretary William Perry co-wrote a book, “Preventive Defense,” spelling out dangers that, if mismanaged, could grow into “true A-list-scale threats” to the U.S. First on their list: the risk that “Russia might descend into chaos, isolation and aggression.”
They called this the risk of a “Weimar Russia,” harking back to the failures of the international system in dealing with xenophobic Germany after World War I. They wrote of their fear that Russia “could fall prey to its worst tendencies.”
Russia today is among the biggest policy challenges facing the Obama administration, with its annexation of Crimea in March and subsequent military moves inside eastern Ukraine.
North Korea is on the worry list, too, with its defiance of the West and its ambition to develop a missile capable of hitting the U.S. with a nuclear warhead.
In June 2006, amid worldwide concern that North Korea was preparing to test such a long-range missile, Carter and Perry co-authored an opinion article in The Washington Post that took a hard line against North Korea.
“Should the United States allow a country openly hostile to it and armed with nuclear weapons to perfect an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering nuclear weapons to U.S. soil?” they wrote. “We believe not.”
If North Korea were to persist in its launch preparations the United States should “immediately make clear its intention to strike and destroy” the missile before it could be launched, they wrote. That could be done, Carter and Perry said, by hitting it with a submarine-launched cruise missile armed with a high-explosive warhead.
“The carefully engineered test bed for North Korea’s nascent nuclear missile force would be destroyed, and its attempt to retrogress to Cold War threats thwarted,” they added.
Unlike Hagel and every other man who has led the Pentagon over the past 30-plus years, Carter has served neither in the military nor in Congress.
Hagel did both.
