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Ashton B. Carter, Defense Secretary Under Obama, Dies at 68 Ashton B. Carter, Defense Secretary Under Obama, Dies at 68
(about 5 hours later)
Ashton B. Carter, a theoretical physicist who later climbed the leadership ranks at the Pentagon, culminating in two years as secretary of defense under President Barack Obama, a position he used to further open the military to women and transgender service members, died on Monday at his home in Boston. He was 68. Ashton B. Carter, who harnessed his training in theoretical physics and knowledge of nuclear weapons to climb the leadership ranks at the Pentagon — culminating in two years as secretary of defense under President Barack Obama, a position he used to further open the military to female and transgender service members — died on Monday at his home in Boston. He was 68.
The cause was a heart attack, his family said in a statement.The cause was a heart attack, his family said in a statement.
Dr. Carter was widely regarded for his prowess in military technology and policy. After teaching at Harvard and directing the Center for Science and International Affairs at its John F. Kennedy School of Government, he joined the Clinton administration in 1993 as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy. In that position, he directed efforts to assist post-Soviet states in securing their stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Mr. Carter was among the few people to have held four of the top posts at the Pentagon, starting as an assistant secretary under Bill Clinton. By the time Mr. Obama nominated him as secretary of defense in 2014, he had worked in almost every corner of the department, including nuclear policy, logistics and weapons development.
Later, in the first Obama administration, he first served as the under secretary responsible for acquisition and logistics, and then deputy secretary of defense under Chuck Hagel. In the first position, he streamlined the purchase of thousands of mine-resistant vehicles; in the second, he helped carry out the president’s shift to Asia, reshuffling defense resources and priorities to the Pacific Rim in an effort to counter China. “Ash was the best-prepared secretary of defense in our history,” Graham Allison, who worked alongside Mr. Carter at Harvard and the Pentagon, said in a phone interview.
As an assistant secretary of defense in the early 1990s, Mr. Carter directed Pentagon efforts to secure nuclear weapons in the former Soviet states, renew the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and reach an agreement with North Korea to freeze its nuclear program. At the same time, he was among the few people to raise concerns about the growing risk of what he called “catastrophic terrorism.”
He is survived by his wife, Stephanie; his daughter, Ava; his son, Will; and his sisters, Corinne Greene and Cynthia DeFelice. He returned to the Pentagon under President Obama, first as under secretary overseeing logistics and procurement — essentially the country’s chief weapons buyer — and then as deputy secretary.
A complete obituary will follow. In the first role, he faced a rapidly shifting security environment in Iraq and Afghanistan and a wave of budget cuts. He solved both problems by cutting programs to develop futuristic weapons and shifted that money to more immediate needs, like drones and mine-resistant vehicles to protect service members from roadside bombs.
“It’s no exaggeration to say there are countless Americans who are alive today in part because of Ash’s efforts,” President Obama said when he nominated Mr. Carter to succeed Chuck Hagel as defense secretary.
Unlike Mr. Hagel, who was often criticized for his passivity, as secretary Mr. Carter was unafraid to speak out. In a 2015 interview with CNN, he all but openly criticized Mr. Obama’s strategy against the Islamic State, and in 2017 he publicly questioned the decision to commute the sentence of Chelsea Manning, who was convicted of leaking classified information.
“He had a certain level of principle, a certain level of logic, and if you didn’t get it, that was it,” John Gans, a vice president at the Rockefeller Foundation who served as Mr. Carter’s chief speechwriter, said in a phone interview. “There was an engine at the top of his head that was totally different than you or me.”
Mr. Carter clashed with other members of the cabinet over the renewed threat posed by Russia, at a time when many experts inside and outside the government still held out hope for better relations. Among his first steps as secretary was to increase America’s military presence across six former Soviet bloc states, including the Baltic countries.
“We do not seek a cold, let alone a hot, war with Russia,” he told reporters in 2015. “But make no mistake, the United States will defend our interests and our allies, the principled international order and the positive future it affords us all.”
He believed in the importance of hard power — America’s ability to use its military prowess to shape global politics — a position that also sometimes put him in tension with others in the Obama White House. In 2015, he announced that in the face of Chinese encroachment into the South China Sea, the United States would “fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows.”
That statement was stronger than some in the administration would have liked, but it has since won bipartisan support and become a cornerstone of America’s new, more hard-edged policy toward China.
Still, Mr. Carter and Mr. Obama agreed on the big things: the need to shift America’s geostrategic focus to Asia, upgrade the American military’s technological prowess and bring equity to the armed services.
In January 2016, after a three-year review, Mr. Carter ordered that all positions within the military, including combat roles, be open to women. Six months later, he ordered that openly transgender people be allowed to serve, a directive that President Donald J. Trump later rescinded.
“As president, I relied on Ash’s strategic counsel as we invested in innovation and a stronger, smarter, more humane and more effective military for the long term,” Mr. Obama said in a statement after Mr. Carter’s death.
Ashton Baldwin Carter was born on Sept. 24, 1954, in Philadelphia and raised in Abington, Pa., a suburb. His father, William Carter Jr., was a neurologist, and his mother, Anne (Baldwin) Carter, was a teacher.
His first marriage, to Clayton Spencer, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Stephanie (DeLeeuw) Carter; his daughter, Ava; his son, Will; and his sisters, Corinne Greene and Cynthia DeFelice.
Ash, as he was known throughout his life, was a self-described grind — a hard-working student whose leisure activities included collecting electrocardiogram readouts and solving calculus problems.
At Yale he double-majored in medieval history and physics, writing one senior thesis on the use of Latin in 12th-century Flanders and another called “Quarks, Charm and the Psi Particle.” One of his professors was so impressed that he hired him as a summer researcher at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.
Mr. Carter won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University, where, through one of his mentors, he first developed an interest in the policy side of physics. After returning to the United States, he held a number of fellowships and short-term posts, including at the Pentagon, before taking a position as a professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1984.
Just before moving to Harvard, he published a paper criticizing the Strategic Defense Initiative, President Ronald Reagan’s antiballistic missile program that was nicknamed “Star Wars.” It was the first thorough debunking of the program, and it helped to effectively shelve the effort.
It also raised Mr. Carter’s profile. From Cambridge, he became a frequent adviser to politicians and policymakers. In the early 1990s he and Dr. Allison helped Senators Richard Lugar of Indiana and Sam Nunn of Georgia develop their Cooperative Threat Reduction initiative, the program aimed at securing post-Soviet nuclear assets that Mr. Carter, as a Defense Department official, later implemented.
After leaving the Pentagon in 2017, he returned to the Kennedy School, where he became the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. In 2019, he summed up the lessons learned over his 35-year career at the Defense Department in a book, “Inside the Five-Sided Box: Lessons From a Lifetime of Leadership in the Pentagon.”
He remained committed to his students, and immensely proud of those who went on to top jobs in foreign policy.
On a trip to Japan during the Obama administration, he was asked by his government hosts to attend one final meeting, at a Tokyo hotel. He griped, but agreed — only to be stopped speechless when, upon entering the meeting room, he was greeted by several of his former Harvard students, then at the top rungs of the Japanese government.