Ashton B. Carter is the Harvard physicist who first cast cold water on President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” plan to build a missile shield to protect the U.S. from nuclear attack.
He is an outspoken advocate of arms control, who helped draft the legislation to safeguard the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal after the Cold War.
But one thing this scientist and medieval history scholar lacks is a defense industry background, or experience in managing weapons-acquisition programs. And that makes him a controversial choice, at least in some quarters, as the Pentagon’s next acquisitions czar.
If the White House’s nomination of Carter this week for the top procurement job sent a chill through the board rooms of big defense contractors, he is said to have a strong ally in Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has expressed exasperation with the often-unwieldy weapons-acquisition process. Last year, the agency ended up punting on decisions involving more than $65 billion for key programs, such as replacing aerial-refueling tankers and search-and-rescue helicopters because of missteps and runaway development costs, among other things.
Congress has already weighed in with new reform proposals. Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, and John McCain, its senior Republican, introduced legislation that would make it easier to kill weapons programs with unchecked cost overruns.
Carter himself has written about the “daunting” problems of disciplining the acquisition process.
“After six years of rapid defense budget increases, the Pentagon has lost the practice of matching strategy and resources,” he wrote last month in Orbis, the journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Carter - who is chairman of the international and global affairs faculty at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and co-director, with former Defense Secretary William Perry of the Preventive Defense Project, a research collaboration of Harvard and Stanford Universities - has some Pentagon seasoning.
During the Clinton administration, he served as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, and directed military planning during the 1994 crisis over North Korea’s weapons’ program.
He described that experience in his faculty autobiography as “a little bit like 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.”
Carter’s backers say they expect him to bring fresh eyes, as well as a scientist’s insights to the weapons acquisition process.
“The tendency has been to have people in that job who understand the rules and processes, but not the technology,” Loren Thompson, president of the Lexington Institute, a Virginia think tank, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “Carter would ask the kinds of probing questions that a Pentagon bureaucrat would not. He is a scientist, not a lawyer. That makes a lot of difference.”
William Perry, the former Clinton defense secretary who brought Carter to Washington before, told the Boston Globe that he is more than qualified.
“Having held that job [chief weapons buyer] and supervised two different people who had the job, I think I’m pretty qualified to say who is qualified,” Perry told the paper.
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